Cultivating a Cross-Cultural Disposition

The U.S. Army has taken cues from those within and outside of the military profession to focus more effort toward understanding culture and its impacts on operations. The institutional Army has consequently committed resources toward incorporating knowledge of specific cultures and toward enhancing language skills into its professional military education (PME) curricula. While this knowledge and these skills are clearly needed, possessing them does little to shape dispositions of military students. Developing patience and inclination to work with dramatically different cultures requires PME to shift focus from the primarily cognitive domain of educational objectives to the affective domain. PME must examine the foundations of its educational philosophy and seek more creative approaches possessing the emotive impact to change dispositions, such as self-directed learning and transformative learning. Such approaches generate "buy-in" of the student and allow critical reflection upon one's cultural assumptions and biases. This, in turn, enables military students to become more effective in understanding all cultures rather than only those of current operational importance.