Practical applications of naturalistic inquiry in intercultural education

In recent years, the field of intercultural communication has seen a remarkable shift characterized by a growth in publications that distance themselves from the traditional, essentialist understanding of culture. In research, this shift is reflected in approaches that appreciate culture-in-action instead of taking culture for granted as a stable entity that pre-exists social interaction and predicts as well as explains human behavior. However, despite attempts to introduce differentiated views on culture and interculturality in education, concrete options for critical intercultural training are scarce and often remain abstract, which makes their application challenging. This article argues for the use of naturalistic inquiry in intercultural education. This pedagogical choice may provide students with access to authentic data and allow them to observe and analyze facets of interculturality by themselves while working out practical solutions collaboratively. Advantages of naturalistic inquiry include independence from theoretical presuppositions, approachability for facilitators and students alike, and applicability to a wide variety of naturally occurring social interactions. The article proposes that naturalistic inquiry enables students to identify and analyze practices that may be problematic with respect to cultural attributions or categorizations and encourages them to notice and discuss the meaning of culture as it dynamically surfaces in interaction.

From ‘intercultural-washing’ to meaningful intercultural education: Revisiting higher education practice

This is the first special issue that JPHE hosts—and could there be a more suitable forum for an issue dedicated to exploring and encouraging a critical dialogue around transformative intercultural communication teaching practices in higher education (HE)? What has led us to engage with the theme of making intercultural education meaningful is a shared observation that there seems to be an increasing disconnect between recent developments in intercultural communication theory and practice. With so much critique published over the years, we are perplexed as to why traditional notions of culture still prevail not only in mainstream intercultural communication research but also in institutional discourses in HE and in popular discourses as articulated by the people who sit—or have once sat—in our classrooms. In this editorial and Special Issue, we approach intercultural communication from a critical angle, akin to the theorization of interculturality as a discursive and contingent, unstable and contradictory, political and ideological construct. We are thrilled to see this approach gain ground in the field of intercultural communication. However, at the same time, we are worried that the terrain of intercultural communication teaching across HE settings has become quite unruly and is characterized by pedagogical solutions that do not have a stable connection to state-of-the-art theory, and that might lead to naive, simplistic, and essentialist understandings of ‘culture’ and ‘the other’.......

Educating critically about language and intercultural communication: What and who is at stake?

This paper reflects on the literature on Critical Language and Intercultural Communication Education in light of learnings gained from designing and delivering a course titled ‘Intercultural Communication’ over four years to large cohorts of first-year tertiary students in Australia. It is based on a qualitative research project which involves the analysis of two sets of data: a) ethnographic notes from teaching staff meetings, tutors’ interviews, and tutorial observation, and b) student formal and informal feedback surveys as well as focus group discussions. The paper explores what and who is at stake when teaching and learning about language and intercultural communication from a critical perspective. It unveils from a praxis perspective (theory informed by practice and vice versa) the deeply political and ethical level of engagement that is required of teachers, the kind of metalinguistic and metacultural knowledge, as well as the kind of disposition towards critical thinking and reflexivity, that are called for when teaching and learning in this domain in an Australian tertiary environment.

Fostering complex understandings of international business collaborations in the higher education classroom

This article gives an account of how an intercultural business project was used as a case study in class without providing learners with theoretical information about national or work cultures prior to the session. By removing the focus from the essentialist view that misunderstandings on intercultural collaborations must be due to cultural differences, we provided the learners with a space in which to consider other interpretations, making more explicit the various communities to which an individual belongs. The extent to which the classroom session delivered on its aim of fostering a more complex understanding of international business collaborations is assessed based on learners’ reflection notes and classroom discussions.

Encounters with strangeness: Intercultural learning in an engineering course

This paper reports on an intervention whereby a critical approach to intercultural communication is implemented in a module for undergraduate students of engineering technology. The module centers on an encounter in which small teams engage with people and practices that represent cultural strangeness to them. A qualitative, exploratory study was carried out on how participating students perceive strangeness, on their motives for selecting their encounter, and on the insights as they reported and demonstrated them in their project reports. Students confirmed the primacy of first-hand experience in intercultural learning, and pointed at an open mind, a non-essentialist view of culture, and an awareness of stereotyping as key takeaways from the project. Providing additional teacher guidance could further support students in their acquisition of critical understanding, for instance through the development of validated (self-)assessment tools. The authors conclude that the described project can help to fill the observed lack of intercultural communication practices from a critical, non-essentialist perspective in engineering education. More generally, this study contributes to a wider pedagogy of encounter by elucidating the concept of strangeness as a linking concept for examining underlying dynamics in intercultural interaction.

Bringing the critical into doctoral supervision: What can we learn from debates about epistemic justice and the languaging of research?

In this article, we discuss how, as supervisors in largely Anglophone university contexts in England, we are trying to develop supervisory practices informed by the discussions of epistemic (in)justice and the languaging of research. Having rehearsed these discussions, and considered the opportunities provided by research integrity policy formulations in our context, we conceptualise doctoral supervision critically, interculturally, and ecologically. We then report our efforts to shape the supervisory agenda so that, in the local spaces available to us, the shaping influences of the epistemic and linguistic in the wider research environment are problematised. In particular, we focus on two strands of our thinking, namely: a) the implications of epistemic hierarchies and the value of an intercultural ethic for the transknowledging at the heart of doctoral research; and b) the role of language(s) in research and the value of a translingual researcher mindset. In both strands, our thinking has moved from a more instrumental to a more critical stance regarding research, researcher thinking, and supervision. This development highlights some of the complexities involved in developing critical intercultural praxis for doctoral supervision. We conclude with recommendations—aimed at all those involved in doctoral supervision—to facilitate a critical intercultural supervisory culture.

Reflections and focal points for critical intercultural communication

Invited paper

Challenges and possibilities for creating genuinely intercultural higher education learning communities

This article synthesises and analyses the existing research and literature that has discussed the challenges and possibilities of providing intercultural learning environments for diverse students in the context of higher education. A genuinely intercultural learning community provides equitable learning possibilities for all, is characterised by social justice, and allows all participants to feel a strong sense of belonging. Based on this review, the main challenges in creating equitable learning communities in higher education relate to institutional barriers, such as institutional racism and discrimination, monolingual higher education policies, and neoliberal educational agendas that contradict the principles of social justice. Interpersonal challenges (such as lack of intercultural competence) also exist, as do challenges related to acknowledging intercultural perspectives in curricula and pedagogy. The conditions that the existing literature suggests will create genuinely intercultural learning communities include rethinking the strategies, policies, and curricula of higher education institutions; supporting students’ and staff’s intercultural competences; and developing pedagogical approaches for acknowledging social justice and diverse learners. Based on the literature reviewed for this article, it is obvious that there are no easy tricks that can ‘fix’ the situation and create genuinely intercultural learning communities, but intercultural approaches and aspects ......

Navigating complexities, exploiting shortcuts: Talking about culture as researchers and university educators

Simplistic understandings of culture as ‘national culture’ and of the relation between language, identity, and culture, have been criticized for quite some time. Today, many teachers in higher education have developed a critical awareness of the complexities of culture and interculturality, and many would no longer subscribe to a simplistic understanding of culture as ‘national culture’. Yet despite this awareness, ‘national cultural’ parlance has not disappeared. Drawing on videotaped interactions among researchers and university educators of German as a Foreign Language during a workshop in West Africa, I demonstrate how we as researchers and university educators navigate complexities when discussing ‘culture’ and when, how, and why we, then and again, revert to simplistic concepts of culture in our talk. Analyzing the practices and ‘common sense resources’ we deploy and the discourses we thereby mediate provides insights into how we configure understandings of culture in action and points at problems in the ways we talk.

Institutional management praxis and the logic of capital: Accumulated labor and the exploitation of teaching in teaching intensive fields

Exploitation is possible because of rules and social arrangements that have an asymmetric impact on groups who hold different relative positions within the nexus of cultural, political, economic and social power and advantage. Based on a synthesis of critical ethnographic research, the present article provides an analysis of exploitation in one specific higher education field; Initial Teacher Education and Research (EDITE). Exploitation is not usually associated with higher education. However, the article describes a structure of decision-making for exploiting the accumulated labor of teacher educators and their students, in the interests of other groups of academics. Distinct social class and gender are identified, and the article concludes that there is little wonder that teaching intensive fields are often strongly criticised for the scientific quality of their content. The level of research investment in them is so low that they are in serious difficulty in maintaining adequate scientific research connections for programs and career opportunities for research-qualified staff.