hoodooencoding

Rev. Boogaloo's Blog Roundup

Since I'll be on hiatus for the next two weeks, I've gotta make this quick...'cause I gotta pack my bags tonight!

The following are highlights from some of my favorite blogs; do check out these peeps when you get a chance!

   The Mad Bull has posted up the pics of Usain Bolt’s win here in Berlin this past week @

http://www.madbull4.net/wordpress/2009/08/im-so-excited/

Since I’m leaving town tomorrow morning, I’ll miss both victory parties this weekend with Bruva Bolt and the whole Jamaican team (dang!) at both Barbara’s restaurant AND at Dennis’s restaurant! Oh well...can’t make ‘em all...

   Rob Fields @ Bold as Love turned me on to Stew wayyy before this movie...so happy to see this happen & I can’t wait to see the film. http://www.boldaslove.us/2009/08/passing-strange-film-trailer-a-spi.html

   My heart goes out to my brother, the brilliant Prof. Mark Anthony Neal: he lost both his parents within a little over a year. He reviews the brilliant new doc “Say My Name” @

http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2009/08/say-my-name-women-in-hip-hop.html

   Pink Tentacle has a link to the mysterious Junsui Project @

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2009/08/the-junsui-project/ 

The cool thing about the link to the website is that it appears you can only view the website once! Marketing ploy or video art project? You decide.

   Afro-Punk posted these cool posters by Jermanine Rogers @

http://afropunk.ning.com/profiles/blogs/own-a-piece-of-the-2009

I want the Malcolm X one on a t-shirt :-)

   Steven Barnes weighs in on the brilliant film “District 9” and the Universal Health Care Debate @ http://darkush.blogspot.com/2009/08/district-9-and-uhc.html

   My friend DeWayne Wickham must have said something to awaken the testy trolls again :-) Although considered by many to be one of the more moderate voices in journalism, it seems he can’t help but raise a ruckus whenever he posts @ http://dewaynewickham.blogspot.com/ 

   And Ta-Nehsi Coates interesting series on Virginia history is worth reading @

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/08/virginia_1.php Since I’m headed there this weekend, I’ll get to see it all up-close-and-personal once again.

While I'm away, may the Stankitity stick to you until we meet again!

Rev. Boogaloo Approved // A Playful Bookerman Book Review of: “52 Activities for Improving Cross-Cultural Communication” by Donna M. Stringer and Patricia A. Cassiday

    As I’m sure you all know, Shakespeare once wrote “The play’s the thing”, The Spinners once sang “Games People Play” and Stanley Clarke once played “Life is Just a Game”.

    

    Well if you don't know, now you know.

    It seems that since time immemorial, mankind has consistently developed and enjoyed game play.

    Over the centuries, thinkers, philosophers and scientists have thought a great deal about game theory. In modern times, social scientists and technology creators have theorized about the impact of game play and knowledge transfer, the difference between strong games and weak games and why we play games at all.

    Just between you and me, I think we like playful activities because they are just plain fun.

    But I think also that playful activities, exercises and role playing games can be used to teach us about ourselves and one another. 

    If Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is correct, playful activities can help us to develop the capacity to solve problems and create products and solutions that are valued in more than one cultural setting. Garder lists seven aspects of cognitive skill required for learning and problem solving:

Linguistic intelligence - sensitivity to spoken and written language

Logical-mathematical intelligence - the ability to detect patterns, reason deductively and think logically

Musical intelligence - the capacity to recognize and organize pitch, rhythm and tone

Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence - the mental ability to coordinate bodily movement

Spacial intelligence - the potential to recognize and use patterns of wide space and more confined areas.

Interpersonal intelligence - the ability to understand intentions, motivations and desires of others.

Intrapersonal intelligence - the capacity to understand oneself and appreciate one’s fears, feelings and motivations.

   

    It is easy to see how playful activities, exercises and games help us to practice and develop multiple intelligences. Dr. Stuart Brown at the National Institute for Play goes even further to describe how playful exercises, activities and games provide opportunities to unlock human potential and problem solving abilities.

    Brown describes patterns of playful activity as attunement play, movement play, object play, social play, imaginative play, storytelling play and transformative-integrative play. Understanding these kinds of behavior help us to make sense of the world, transcend our everyday experiences, understand body language symbols, develop our curiosity of others and create new ideas in teams.

    Thankfully, Donna M. Stringer and Patricia A. Cassiday really explain how all this works in their excellent new book “52 Activities for Improving Cross-Cultural Communication” (Intercultural Press 2009, ISBN: 978-1-931930-83-3). 

   They describe cross cultural communication as what takes place when we try to communicate with someone whose cultural perspective is different from our own. Sometimes the difference is age or gender, language history, profession or educational background, nationality or regional orientation. Trying to communicate effectively across these cultural barriers often requires extra effort and practice. In an increasingly networked, global society, this is a timely reality: in businesses, organizations and institutions, the ability to navigate communication styles affects productivity, employee satisfaction, teamwork and ultimately, the bottom line.

    Stringer and Cassiday have succeeded in creating a fun, easy to use, common sense guide to cross-cultural and intercultural activity play which can be used by teachers, human resource educators, institution administrators and students of culture to understand, identify, recognize, experience and describe:

- how we can use different communication styles, patterns and approaches

- how communication patterns can change when cultural differences are introduced into a group

- how status influences the way we communicate 

- how communication styles can affect workplace productivity 

- how nonverbal communication affects the way we understand what we are saying and what others are saying to us

- how communicative vocabularies can be expanded and developed

- how cultural values influence the way we perceive others

- how creating more effective dialog in diverse groups is possible 

- how to leverage diversity for creative and effective problem solving

   

    To overcome these challenges to communication and practice the skills to understand them, Stringer and Cassiday explain some of the core reasons for most cross-cultural misunderstanding; for example:

- the tendency to judge or evaluate messages we receive as good or bad, right or wrong

- the inability to cope with ambiguity and the anxiety it creates in us

- the projection of oversimplified stereotypes onto groups of people or individuals we associate with those groups

- making judgements based on assumptions that others are similar to us when they are not

   

    In this visionary new volume, Stringer and Cassiday offer 52 in-depth descriptions of activities and exercises that can be used to practice verbal and nonverbal communication, conflict resolution, decision making, negotiation and team building processes. Each exercise presented describes the activity goal, the activity process and the materials necessary along with guides for follow-up discussion and de-briefing, sample handouts and narratives.

    One of the keys to effective intercultural and cross-cultural training is flexibility. Stringer and Cassiday have chosen activities that are adaptable and in most cases can be used in any country or culture. They have paid precise detail to designing activities geared towards different audiences; some of the exercises are experiential in nature, others are more hands on and others take a more reflective approach. In other words, there are a variety of learning approaches presented in this book which can be used effectively to meet learning style needs across cultures.

    In addition, an ample appendix and bibliography are included which makes this volume a valuable asset for human resource specialists, social scientists and training professionals who develop lesson plans and training programs in industry and academia.

    The manual’s forte is that it was developed by Stringer and Cassiday in collaboration with education professionals, social scientists and human resource specialists who have accumulated decades of practical experience around the world.

    Dr. Donna M. Stringer’s pioneering work as a social psychologist, researcher, educator, writer and president of Executive Diversity Services, Inc. has raised the bar for diversity training, organization development, multicultural training and gender differences in universities, corporations and institutions for almost three decades. She continues to develop training curricula and provide mentorship for diversity trainers and facilitators across the globe.

    Dr. Patricia A. Cassiday is an educator and consultant on topics such as expatriate leadership development, third culture kids, conflict resolution and education reform. Dr. Cassiday’s counseling experience around the world for the past two decades has been documented in her published works on expatriate leadership and as president of Collaborative Connection, a consultancy specializing in transition counseling services for expatriates, their families and their organizations.

    Stringer and Cassiday’s passion and enthusiasm clearly soak through the pages of this book; although it is designed as a serious training manual for human resource educators, one cannot mistake the glee and delight with which they present each exercise description: they successfully encourage and emphasize a spirit of play throughout each chapter.

    Their enthusiasm for cross-cultural communication is apparent also in the caliber of their collaborators; their contributors are a Who’s Who in the community of international, intercultural communication experts : Sivasailam Thiagarajan (aka Thiagi), Dianne Hofner Saphiere, Andy Reynolds, Elmer Dixon, Peter Isackson, Basma Ibrahim DeVries, Barbara Kappler Mikk, Karen Rolston and many, many others.

     This excellent volume of activities will be extremely useful to facilitators, educators, trainers, coaches and teachers interested in serving institutions of higher learning, multinational business corporations, the communications and marketing industry, government agencies, health care facilities, the technological research and development industry and public safety officials.

     Act like you know: you can pre-order the book here!

   

     (Editors note*) As a matter of fact, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention that as I was reading this book, this mess was going down. I couldn’t help thinking that if Barack, Joe, Henry and James had called Donna and Patricia (and Elmer and Andy and them) over to the People's Crib for a cup of coffee, something actually useful might have happened instead of a bunch of Alpha males lollygagging over half-drunk beer in a yard. If they had had this book, they would have at least been able to play the “toothpicks” game in Chapter 11.

    It would have taken less than an hour for Skippy and Jimmy to learn how non-verbal communication impacts the message received and the importance of learning the non-verbal rules of another culture. 

    Wishful thinking on my part I guess.

+++

  

“Putting Skin in the Game”: Why Investing in People Makes Sense (Part 2)

(cue theme music)

Voice of Announcer: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen; I am K. Maurice Bookerman, CEO of the Emergency Hoodoo Broadcasting Corporation and this is a special live broadcast from the Stanknasity Leadership Conference, where the Honorable Reverend Dr. Boogaloo is preaching!

Let's listen in as he continues to bring us the Funky Word!"

Rev. Boogaloo: "They say that social capital begins at home and spreads abroad. Aman and Aman-ed!

Since this might be my last time to spread something on you, I ask you: when was the last time you went to a music recital just to encourage-by-your-presence a young boy or young girl who is beginning to play piano, or trumpet or cello? They didn’t have to be your child by the way...they could have been your neighbor’s child...

Or when was the last time you went out of your way to volunteer at a summer camp to help some young kid stay out of trouble? 

Or when was the last time you simply stopped in to say hi and well done to a group of young people putting together a community theatre project in your neighborhood?

You say those kinds of things don’t happen where you live? Oh Really now? How can that be? Because if you’re able to understand what I’m saying right now, that means somebody helped you to learn english somewhere.  

Had it not been for somebody who provided you with a book or subtitles on a movie screen - the information to understand english -  you would not have been able to understand my last sentence. 

Had somebody not taken the time to teach you how to read, count for yourself and tie your shoes, you would be stumbling around today, lost, broke and trippin’ over your own two feet!  Say Aman somebody!

Everything we know we start learning from the time we are born.

From birth until around the age of 12, we gather information quickly and unconsciously, absorbing information from our social group environment. We learn to give meaning to the information we take in through symbols (such as language), our heroes & sheroes (such as our parents), and rituals (such as toilet training). This learning we do is largely unconscious or unreflected. Also, we learn to tell the difference between evil & good, dirty & clean, forbidden & permitted, ugly vs beautiful, normal & abnormal. We call this information cultural values and it is our first level of mental programming.

But from our teens on, we begin to switch from unconscious to conscious learning based on new patterns of thinking, feeling and acting:  at school and at work we learn about gender, ethnicity, social class, generational difference, regional difference and national difference. This is our second level of mental programming. Because we carry these mental programs - a set of common cultural values - with us, most of us belong to a number of different groups at the same time. 

And wouldn’t you know it, the mental programs from these various values sometimes conflict: religious values vs generational values or gender values vs organizational values, zum beispiel. These conflicting mental programs/cultural values challenge us to anticipate or understand our behavior and the behavior of others in each new situation. 

Trying to make some sense of these conflicting cultural values is what is known as understanding cultural difference.

I can see you scratching your head now trying to figure out what the hell I’m talking about.

Well, this is a micro-mini version of a long explanation why investing in people not only makes sense, but creates social capital...and no, I’m not talking about Chocolate City, I’m talking about the human resources that reside in social networks.

If you think about the value of what you know - your knowledge, skills and experience - then access to social capital depends on who you are connected to: who you know. In other words, the bigger and more diverse your social and work networks are, the more resources - knowledge, skills and experiences - you can have access to. These resources include all the information, new ideas, opportunities, influence and emotional support that you don’t have by yourself. And of course it stands to reason that understanding cultural differences goes a long way to ensure anyone’s expansion of social capital anywhere in the world.

This is why I’m so glad I don’t know everything. Happy-loo-yah to the Stank! And I’m even happier that there are people I know who know things that I don’t have a clue about. Aman-ed! For verily, verily, this is why we know the funk as a collaborative process: it capitalizes on the things we don’t know while at the same time creating something new from the things that someone else we’re connected to knows everything about!  Good-googly-woogly! I’m on fire today...

I know for sure that some of the best mental programming anybody can get is learning to play music with other people at a young age, because learning to play an actual musical instrument (nothin’ wrong with two turntables and a microphone but...) requires the mind and body to do particular things. If you learn to play the drums, or a guitar, or a clarinet, or a trombone, or a bassoon, or an oboe, or a saxophone, or a flute, or an upright bass, you learn a skill I like to call developing musical imagery - the ability to imagine sound without a direct sound source.

And if you do this with other people, say in a band or group or orchestra, you get to learn other things like concentration, coordination, patience, communication, cooperation, teamwork, self-expression, conquering fear, solving problems and taking risks.

WOOOOOO!! Look at whoever is sitting with you right now and say to them “TAKE A RISK!”  

One of the best examples of how this works I saw awhile back...a friend of mine had some tickets to a concert and they couldn’t go, and so they called me and Mrs. Boogaloo and invited us to use their tickets...

As it so happened, it was a concert by a group of singers from Venezuela...what they call a Chamber Chorus.

Now I’m ignorant about Spanish, and I never had the chance to go to Venezuela, but the tickets were free and we had time, so we decided to go...and GOOD-GAWD-IN-PEAS, them folk SANG!  I mean they really sang their hind-parts off!  In fact, after the concert, I got to talk to some of them (through a translator) and they began to tell me about the music education schools in their country.  This is how I found out about El Sistema.

See, for you to understand El Sistema, you gotta understand that they started this music education program for young people more that 35 years ago in one of the roughest, toughest places on earth.  In fact today, they say that Caracas is one of the most dangerous cities on the planet: grinding poverty, hyper-violent gang murders, drugs, name it...Caracas today makes Detroit, New Orleans or Miami-Dade look like Disneyworld.

But yet, in spite of their hardship, the people of Caracas have provided a model of success that other people all over the world - including North Americans - are using to help themselves. In fact, the El Sistema model for community participation in the arts is also a model for participative democracy. 

How did they do that there Rev. Boogaloo, I hear you ask?

By putting skin in the game: building a community based music education network.

I’m not gonna get into all the facts: how most of the families live on less than 100 dollars a month, how the kids learn to play violins on paper mache instruments for the first couple of years, learning ear training first by singing the notes - while learning finger positions and bowing - BEFORE they get a real instrument, how students learn 6 days a week 4 hours a day in 130 music centers (Núcleos) around the country, how musical perfection is not the goal but changing community life by changing the lives of families is, or how Venezuela is now producing some of the best symphonies in the world at the moment.

What I will titillate you with is this: governments will fail you.

It doesn’t matter who’s in office; administrations come and go.

Without building a community, you wont be able to sustain anything worthwhile.

How can I say this? Look at the El Sistema model: for 39 years, this program has been sustained by people power...volunteers...ordinary people not born with silver spoons in their mouths, working, sacrificing and giving past the pain, indignity, frustration, fear and anxiety of living in poverty to ensure this program’s survival, to secure their own humanity.

I wonder how much skin you are gonna put in the game today, in spite of whatever challenge you are currently up against.

Let me help you: whenever I need to do something that I don't particularly feel like doing, I start singing an old negroid spiritual and it picks me up right away! Why don't you try it??

Oh the world is funny,

have you never heard,

I have seen 'bout ev'rything to see...

But if I, if I could lift you up above the earth,

I could see your drawers over me!

Lift it up, Lift it up

Yes it seeps through eternity;

And if I, if I could lift it up, above the earth,

I could see your drawers over me!!!!"

more on the web

El Sistema wiki

tocar y luchar documentary film trailer

el sistema in nyc

to play and to fight

A model for community participation in the arts

Rafael Elster