• Negotiating Cultures and Subcultures introduces the concepts of subcultures and cultural identities and invites learners to develop skills for identifying and interpreting social norms in new contexts. Here, we suggest tactics for helping you recognize and articulate moments of negotiation in a creative work and in your own interactions with others as they engage with the work.

• Violence and Perspective highlights the role of violence in helping us understand and develop empathy. We will consider violent scenes in a variety of media texts through the points of view of multiple characters.

2. Let’s further elaborate on the skill of negotiation.

Networked computing has allowed young people to move between cultural communities, trying on different identities and inhabiting multiple worlds. The fluid communication in the new media environment brings into contact groups who otherwise would have lived segregated lives. Culture flows easily from one part of the world or from one cultural community to another. People online encounter conflicting values and assumptions; they come to grips with competing claims about the meanings of their shared artifacts and experiences. 

Everything about this process ensures we will be constantly provoked by cultural differences. Little about the process ensures we will develop an understanding of the contexts within which different cultural communities operate. When white suburban kids consume hip hop or western youth consume Japanese manga, the potential for new kinds of cultural understandings may arise. Just as often, the new experiences are read through existing prejudices and assumptions. Culture travels easily; the people who initially produced and consumed such culture are not always welcome everywhere it circulates (Everett 2007).

In such a world, it becomes more important than ever to help students acquire skills in understanding multiple perspectives, respecting and embracing diversity of inputs, understanding multiple sets of social norms, and negotiating between conflicting opinions. Therefore, what we are calling negotiation may require a number of closely related skills:

• The ability to move into a new space and identify the prevailing cultural dynamics, and to recognize the norms and practices that define a particular subcultural community.

• The ability to listen actively and respectfully to the perspectives of those who come from different cultural backgrounds and who may act upon different sets of norms and values.

• The ability to code switch, to adopt language and style appropriate to different communications contexts, and thus to be more effective at bridging different worlds.

• A commitment to ethical principles that respect and acknowledge cultural differences.

The study of literary and media texts may have a particularly important role to play in fostering the skill of negotiation. First, fictional texts have a unique power to put us inside the heads of their protagonists and their authors, allowing us to read the world from perspectives that may be very different from our own. Here, the value is not in recognizing ourselves in what we read, a core concern of multiculturalism within an era of identity politics, but in recognizing people who are different from ourselves and learning to value their perspectives and insights. As we saw in Motives for Reading, different readers approach texts with their own priorities and goals, reading them in relation to their own traditions and backgrounds. We have much to learn from each other by reading and discussing common works across diverse cultural communities. 

Amulya Gopalakrishnan (2006) has studied an online community, The Wandering Minstrels, which shares and discusses poems everyday. The community originated in South Asia but has spread across the world, though participation is still most dominant in countries that were once part of the British empire. While some poems reflect local cultural traditions, many are derived from the western literary canon that was once part of the British curriculum imposed on all schools within the empire. The influence of the British curriculum has faded, although the community may share the poems in common. A member from India and from South Africa may have very different relationships to the poems. Discussing the poems, however has provided them with a context for learning about both commonalities and about the differences between their countries.

3. To understand the concept of social norm, let's examine how Erin Reilly distinguishes it from guidelines.

Everywhere we go—whether hanging out at the park, being a lab partner in a science class, or meeting new friends through playing the latest MMORPG (Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game; see below image) we negotiate the implicit and sometimes explicit norms of social communities. These spaces typically don’t have signposts or labels that state every guideline that we must abide by to be part of the group—but most people learn what’s inappropriate to do and what to do to fit in. Through observation, talking to others in the group, and actively engaging in the group discussion or activity, you can learn about the expectations for appropriate conduct, and what it means to be a responsible player or citizen of the community.

When discussing sensitive issues such as identity, privacy, trust, ownership and authorship, group norms can prove difficult. It may take considerable work to establish and maintain a culture that enables all learners to feel safe and comfortable enough to discuss these issues. They must discuss the fact that, in many online and offline spaces, different participants have motives and goals for participating that are at odds with one another. In these cases, norms and expectations may not be clear-cut. Conduct that feels comfortable and appropriate to one person may not feel so to others. 

This set of activities is designed to help teachers / facilitators and students create a safe space—and a shared set of norms and guidelines–for participating in discussions about the issues that matter to the community. It’s important to realize that norms and guidelines work together.

• Norms are defined through implicit understandings, representing shared assumptions about desirable and appropriate ways of interacting. Norms help to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable behavior with any given community.
• Guidelines are defined as indicators or outlines of policy or conduct. Those policies may be expressed top-down, as in many of the rules that teachers and students have to follow in the school context, or emerge bottom-up.