Learning About Eye Contact in Different Cultures

Certainly, there are many non-verbal cues that have completely different meanings in different cultures. One of the most important means of nonverbal communication in any culture is eye contact—or lack thereof. Eye contact—which simply denotes one person looking directly at another person’s eyes—seems to have strong implications in almost every culture, although what these implications are vary extensively across the globe!

Eye Contact in the United States

What does eye contact mean in the United States? Here, if you have good eye contact with a person, it generally signifies that you are interested in the person you are looking at and in what that person is saying. If you look down or away from a person rather than meeting his or her gaze, you are considered to be distracted or uninterested in him or her. Also, if you neglect to make eye contact with a person, you may be thought to lack self-confidence. On the other hand, a person who makes eye contact with another person is thought to be confident and bold (and boldness is considered a good trait!) So, in summary, making eye contact is generally considered a good thing in the United States.

Eye Contact in the Middle East

Although all Middle Eastern cultures cannot be grouped into one class, they do have similarities in their rules for the appropriateness of eye culture. Eye contact is much less common and considered less appropriate in many of these cultures than it is considered in the United States. Middle Eastern cultures, largely Muslim, have strict rules regarding eye contact between the sexes; these rules are connected to religious laws about appropriateness. Only a brief moment of eye contact would be permitted between a man and a woman, if at all. However, western women traveling in Muslim areas should not expect that no man will attempt to make eye contact with them. As a matter of fact, their “differentness” may draw attention to them, and men may try to make eye contact with them. They should be aware, however, that returning eye contact will be considered the same as saying, “Yes, I’m interested!” So when in the Middle East, care should be taken in making eye contact with anyone of the opposite gender. On the other hand, in many Middle Eastern cultures, intense eye contact between those of the same gender—especially between men—can mean “I am telling you the truth! I am genuine in what I say!” Try to observe the eye contact between those of the same gender to see if it is important to meet someone’s gaze when you want to tell them, “Trust me! I’m sincere!”

Eye Contact in Asia, Latin America and Africa

In many Asian, African and Latin American cultures, extended eye contact can be taken as an affront or a challenge of authority. It is often considered more polite to have only sporadic or brief eye contact, especially between people of different social registers (like a student and a teacher, or a child and his elder relatives). For example, if a Japanese woman avoids looking someone in the eyes, she is not showing a lack of interest nor is she demonstrating a lack of self-confidence; instead, she is being polite, respectful and appropriate according to her culture. So in many of these cultures, you should take care what kind of eye contact you initiate with those who are your social superiors or who are in authority over you, so that you are not considered disrespectful or overly bold. As you can see, it is vital to know what eye contact communicates before you visit a new culture. Before you travel, you would do well to go to your local public library or bookstore and check out or browse a book about the culture of the country you plan to visit. Learn how to utilize eye contact and other body language wisely so that you are perceived as polite, and so that you can better connect with people in a culture that is foreign to you!

Eye Contact in Western Europe

On the one hand, the European customs of eye contact—especially in such countries as Spain, France and Germany—tends to be similar to that in the United States. It is considered proper and polite to maintain almost constant eye contact with another person during a business exchange or a conversation.

Yet eye contact also has more flirtatious aspects than it does in the U.S. In the U.S., people often avoid eye contact in crowded impersonal public situations—such as while walking through a busy downtown or riding public transportation. In a country like France, however, a stranger may feel quite free to look at someone he is interested in and try to acknowledge his interest by making eye contact. Therefore, it is important for a visitor to understand the full implications of what he or she may be implying by returning the eye contact initiated by someone else.

Bright Hub Education

Parent roles differ from culture to culture in academic settings

1. Explore families' assumptions about schools:

   • Identify and interview cultural informants within various ethnic communities

   • Assemble a cultural library, which includes background material on education in various cultural communities, for teachers in each school

   • Convene parent focus groups to explore beliefs about education

   • Locate community-based organizations and groups in order to facilitate communication and new understanding

2. Initiate contact with families/community members:

   • Talk to parents about their educational experiences

   • Attend community meetings/events

   • Find out the issues/concerns of families

   • Educate families/community about school systems

   • Read/learn more about diverse groups' cultural practices with respect to education

3. Clarify roles:

   • Initiate culturally appropriate parent/teacher conferences

   • Translate materials to explain about parent roles

   • Engage an interpreter to assist with communication

   • Create an appropriate monthly calendar to be sent home detailing homework assignments

   • Open up dialogue between home and school through an appropriately formatted journal (e.g., a photo journal, pages with graphic organizers for checkmarks, and samples of student work) for teachers and families to comment on students' progress

4. Generate ongoing partnerships:

   • Conduct an open house in each classroom to explain programs, policies and regulations to parents in their native language

   • Create a monthly newsletter for parents to explain each program in detail

   • Develop a website/newsletter highlighting special events in class

Brown University: The Education Alliance

A fundamental belief: differences, not deficits

How we view families from cultures different from our own deeply affects how we work with them. All families have had different sets of experiences. We can best help students learn if we believe their family experiences are neither better nor worse than our own, but simply different.

Literacy professor Victoria Purcell-Gates writes about this “difference” versus “deficit” view of family backgrounds. As teachers know, children come to school with widely varying experiences in reading, writing, and other literacy activities at home. Even English speakers come speaking different dialects. But, Purcell-Gates point out, if the family is poor, undereducated, or speaks a “nonstandard” dialect, we’re more likely to interpret a child’s uniqueness as an inherent deficit or flaw rather than a mere difference in experience.

When we do this, Purcell-Gates says, we risk lowering our expectations for the child and writing the child off as less teachable or even unteachable. By contrast, when we truly believe that all children can learn and that they vary only in their experiences, we’re more likely to maintain high expectations of all children and nonjudgmentally build on the experiences they have had to help them learn at their best. (Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, eds., 2002, The Skin That We Speak, New York: The New Press, pp. 121–139).

The “difference” versus “deficit” view also comes into play in areas beyond language and literacy. Early in her career, Bonnie Baer-Simahk, a teacher of K–6 English language learners in Massachusetts, was surprised to learn that many Southeast Asian students didn’t like to take their completed schoolwork home because their parents would throw it away. “I was so upset, thinking that the message the parents gave their children was that their schoolwork was not valued,” she recalls. “Later I saw that I was quite wrong.” The same parents who never displayed schoolwork welcomed Bonnie into their home to talk about their children’s progress in school, came in to help out whenever invited, and urged Bonnie to tell them if their children weren’t doing good work in school. Clearly, these parents valued their children’s school efforts. Why, then, didn’t they display their children’s schoolwork?

“I suspect it was a combination of things,” says Bonnie. Maybe the parents didn’t understand the significance of the papers or the teacher’s comments on them. Maybe they expected their children to work hard and thought that positive efforts didn’t require any special acknowledgment. Whatever the reason, the point is that the parents’ behavior reflects a difference in experience and norms, not a lack of concern for their children.

A further point is that once we recognize differences, we need to respect them. Children from diverse cultures and their families can succeed in American schools without surrendering the customs of their home cultures. For example, Bonnie didn’t try to change the Southeast Asian families’ customs around taking home and displaying school- work. She simply accepted that these families had other ways of showing pride in educational effort.

Whatever we’re trying to understand about students from other cultures, we can teach best when we hold fast to the “difference, not deficit” mentality. In doing so, we’re more likely to see intelligence, talent, and caring, even if these are expressed in ways that we’re not used to. We can then build on these assets to teach the children what they need to learn in school.

For more about working with families, see our book, Parents & Teachers Working Together.

Resources for Learning about Different Cultures

• The children and their parents: Ask parents for help in learning about their culture. Most parents are happy to help if they feel respected.

• Colleagues: Teachers of English language learners, other teachers, home liaisons, instructional assistants, and office or other staff may have ideas or skills to offer.

• Your school: If possible, talk as a whole staff about cultural and language issues in working with families. Staff teams could learn about a particular issue and share the information with the rest of the school community.

• Other schools: See what’s worked for other schools serving the same family populations as you do.

• Community organizations: Libraries, cultural and social service organizations, churches, other religious organizations, civic groups, and local universities may offer books, pamphlets, and other kinds of help.

• The Internet: Here you’ll find a wealth of information and practical strategies for working with families from diverse cultures. You’ll also find misinformation, so rely on credible sources. A few sites to check out:

• Educator’s Reference Desk

• National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition & Language Instruction Educational Programs

• Teaching Tolerance

Responsive Classroom

How Immigrant Students Enrich and Strengthen American Schools

Make bullet points from this article.

The many contributions of immigrant students go largely unnoticed. Our society values schools based on their high average test scores or the predominance of middle-class students (strongly linked together), ignoring the unique benefits of schools rich with immigrant students of every economic level. Many American-born parents with the luxury of choosing a school seek places where there are others with backgrounds like their own child, rather than seeing the value – academic as well as social – in schools with immigrant students.

Only when immigrant students feel truly connected to school will they engage in their learning and share their own wisdom. It takes hard work from the school leadership and the entire school community to create a culture of equity where every student, and every family, feels authentically welcomed and valued.

"How Immigrant Students Strengthen American Schools." Kugler, Eileen.

• Students bring a wide range of perspectives and insights.

• Classroom discussions become more dynamic.

• Students learn to question more, to think more deeply, and to collaborate effectively with those who are different from themselves.

• Students learn that there is more than one "right" perspective.

• Stereotypes can breakdown and evaporate.