Cross-Cultural Collaboration

Not long after starting in O&P education, I overheard a colleague from a Western country relating his experience teaching prosthetics at a school in Asia.

He was accustomed to fielding questions from students as he demonstrated specific techniques and using question and answer time as a way of clarifying content and understanding the level of comprehension. He was surprised by the lack of questions from the students and assumed that in that culture questioning the instructor was considered disrespectful. On another occasion a colleague from the United States described his experience working for a central European company. When working with an American clinician, a German engineer told the customer that the problems he was encountering were because he was doing something wrong. The American prosthetist explained to the engineer that in the US it is common to say something like “Why don’t you try this method?” rather than addressing the customer’s mistake directly. The engineer insisted that the customer was doing it wrong and should do it correctly to achieve the desired result.