Professor Stoner's Lecture

Professor Stoner’s lecture was about adjusting to living in a new place.  This could be a trip to a foreign country or even just going up state for your first semester of college.  She told us that one of her key interests that she focuses on while conducting studies is finding two different elements of a subject, idea, or problem, and finding the relationship between the two.  With this said, she discussed studying abroad and asked the class what we thought some of the benefits of studying abroad were.  We offered answers such as “It teaches valuable lessons about other people and the cultures they are a part of,” and “It looks good on a resume.”  Then she introduced the term “new media” and asked if we knew what it meant.  I raised my hand and answered that new media are new technologies like cell phones and the internet, as the name implied.  After this, she explored the relationship between studying abroad and new media.  She said that she thinks that new media makes the study abroad experience less meaningful in a way, because new media is keeping people constantly in touch with their family and friends from back home which is taking away from their learning of the new culture they are a part of.  The last part of her lecture that I took notes on was the cultural adjustment curve.  The cultural adjustment curve is a representation of how much comfort a person experiences after entering a new culture over time.  The first part of the curve is the honeymoon, where enjoyment is pretty high for the first couple of months, but over time, the curve dips extremely low.  This part of the curve is known as culture shock.  Then, the curve begins to go back up, through the adjustment stage, and eventually to the mastery stage, which takes a year or two to reach. 

Studying abroad, or even visiting a city that you’ve never been to for a few days can produce this same curve, sometimes at a smaller scale though.  Some of the things that connect Professor Stoner’s guest lecture to the other concepts we’ve learned in class are our discussion of language and dialect.  As you travel to different places, the common languages, accents, and dialects change, which can take some getting used to.  Also, we discussed non-verbal cues.  Non-verbal cues can also vary quite significantly from culture to culture.  What might mean “nice job” (thumbs up) here, can mean something totally offensive in other cultures, for example.  Also, stereotypes and controlled prejudice can come into play when entering new cultures.  It is ok to have your own opinion about certain people, but when you overgeneralize too much, or let these generalizations cause you to treat someone negatively, that is where problems can occur.  Also, the cultural adjustment curve can relate closely to cognitive load and cognitive dissonance.  Upon entering a new place, people experience the honeymoon stage.  This stage can be a result of all of the new things they are seeing, without actually knowing much about them.  Simply seeing a new city can be a wonderful experience, but over time, it becomes necessary to learn how to act in these cultures.  If the new culture is very different from the one you’re used to, this can cause a lot of cognitive dissonance, which can be very stressful, and can lead to culture shock.