PSU Magazine Spring 1993

member of the family spoke about an incident or behavior he or she had found upsetting during the week. The family strategized potential solutions. "My most common complaint," Lieberman says, "was that my brothers wouldn't put down the toilet seat ..." Lieberman's parents were surprised when, a year out of high school, she told them she was going to leave college to live on a kibbutz in Israel. Perhaps they shouldn't have been. The childhood training they provided Lieberman was the beginning of an almost insatiable curiosity about other countries and cultures. Lieberman spent 11/2 years in Israel and Europe before returning to complete her B.A. in speech at Humboldt State in 1975. After earning an M.A. in interpersonal communica– tion from San Diego State University in 1977, she spent six years in Europe before returning to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. from the University of Florida. "I called the Swiss embassy and sent resumes to every school that taught in English," Lieberman says. Although friends told her it would be impossible to find a position, Lieberman was even– tually hired to teach first through sixth grades in a single classroom at Le Chaperon Rouge in Crans, Switzer– land. After a year in Switzerland, she moved to Greece, teaching first in Athens' Decree College and then at the University of Maryland's Athens campus. Initially, Lieberman's assign– ment at the University of Maryland campus was to teach English as a second language to Greek students. But it seemed ironic to her that a university located in Greece had no speech pro– gram, no courses in Aristotelian logic. Lieberman established a speech depart– ment at the university to fill that gap. But the most exciting aspect of her stay in Greece, Lieberman says, was when she was asked to analyze the ar– chitecture and floor plans of Greek nursing homes. The traditional Greek social structure was organized around neighborhoods where people spent their entire lives, Lieberman says. But as elderly people began relocating to nursing homes, they became isolated and withdrawn. Lieberman altered the arrangement of rooms in the nursing homes to allow spontaneous conversa– tion, and, thus, the formation of new "neighborhoods." Lieberman would carry her interest in nursing homes and the elderly into the Ph.D. program she entered at the University of Florida. Concurrently with a Ph.D. in speech communica– tion, she received a certification of gerontology from the university. By the time Lieberman received her 1987 appointment as an associate professor at Portland State University, the themes of gerontology, cross– cultural communication and-in general-the variables that affect one person's ability to communicate with another, had become the foundation of her work. And in Portland, in addition to teaching, she began to offer the benefits of her expertise to the com– munity through corporate consulting, work with schools and volunteer activities. "Portland State, because of its urban setting, offers a unique opportunity to interact with the community," Lieber– man says. "And that fits with my defini– tion of the role of a university: we're here not just to train students, but to affect as many people as we can." Last November, Lieberman gave a workshop called "How Can I like You When You're So Unlike Me?" to nearly 80 people during PSU Weekend 1992. And in workshops for organizations like Kaiser Permanente, Tektronix Inc., Made in Oregon and Fred Meyer Corporation, Lieberman offers consulting on a variety of communica– tion-related issues, from individualized public-speaking training to strategies for managing diversity. Sometimes community interaction may take a more personal form. Each student in Lieberman's winter term 1993 gerontology class was required to interview an elderly person throughout the term, then write that person's biog– raphy. In early March, students brought their "gerontology projects" to class for formal introductions. One student, Lieberman says, hired a limousine to bring his elderly new friend to class in style. But it was in 1991, when she was asked to make a presentation to the Oregon Council for Hispanic Advance– ment (OCHA), that Lieberman felt she had found a way to help with inter– cultural communications problems on a grass-roots level. Her topic for the organization's annual conference, which draws nearly 700 Oregon Hispanics and non-Hispanics together annually to examine Hispanic issues, was the interaction of Hispanics and non-Hispanics in the corporate world, or specific strategies that anyone can use when interacting with people from a different culture. What Lieberman talked about that day was a slogan, slightly borrowed from a local corporate shoe and sports apparel giant, that she'd developed to help people remember how to deal with situations where the lack of under– standing about cultural differences might be getting in the way. The slogan: Just D.U.E. it! The acronym stands for describe; understand; encourage. Describe the difference you see, understand what causes the difference, and encourage yourself to use the difference to make an interaction or situation better. "For example," Lieberman says, "Someone in a work situation might do something we feel uncomfortable with. We might be tempted to use stereo– typical words to evaluate that person. They're lazy; they're cheap; they're shifty ..." Instead, Lieberman says, the behavior that bothers us should be described. What is the person doing? Coming late to work? Interrupting? Not getting assignments done? The next step, says Lieberman, is to ask oneself if the behavior is a personality difference or a cultural difference. If the answer is, "This must be a cultural difference," Lieberman says the challenge is to try to use that difference to make the work or personal interaction stronger. "We evaluate people every day, based on our cultural backgrounds," Lieberman says. "But value-the root word of 'evaluate'-is based on what an individual's culture has taught him or her is right or wrong." Individual cultures have individual definitions for that. So the 'encourage' in Lieberman's formula also means, she says, "How can PSU 17