Diversity and L&D Across Cultures

This book offers an in-depth discussion of five cultural dimensions that affect cross-cultural training (and trainers). The five dimensions covered are cognitive, worldview, social, media, and environment. The cognitive dimension covers both the distinctions between concrete vs. abstract cognition and holistic vs. analytic cognition and also offers tips in how to adapt material and instructional methods to best suit the tendencies often found in non-Western contexts (concrete and holistic). This book is suitable as a textbook.

This book is split into two parts. The first half addresses some important issues around teaching cross-culturally: different cultural values, gender, cross-cultural communication, etc. (This is done in a lot less detail than you will find in Ott 2021.)  The second half is a collection of advice given to cross-cultural teachers coming to specific countries/regions, from the perspective of cultural insiders. This collection of 31 local voices (from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, and Europe) are this book's main distinction from other similar books published recently.

This book's main contribution may be Plueddemann's teaching model, the "pilgrim's way", which contrasts with both the production model and the gardening model of education and instructional design model. He envisions the teacher's role as being a fellow pilgrim on the road with learners...a pilgrim who may have more experience (or not) and who may have traveled this part of the road before. His instructional design module involves a fence metaphor with two rails (the top rail is the learning content, and the bottom rail is the learners' context) and fence posts that connect the two rails....making the content relevant to the learners' felt needs and context.

This book offers some guidelines on how to approach learning and teaching cross-culturally, with the authors' own experience of living among the Yap community functioning as a case study.