Study Abroad and interculturality

Perspectives and discourses

Claudia Borghetti, Ana Beaven, Claudia Borghetti, Ana Beaven

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351386302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Study abroad (SA) as a domain of inquiry in the field of Applied Linguistics has been approached from a variety of different perspectives. Although originally focused on measuring the impact of residence abroad on students' language development, in the last decade the so-called 'social' turn in Second Language Acquisition has brought to the fore the importance of socio-cultural aspects of the students' experiences (such as the amount of contact they have with the local community, their social networks, etc.). This focus on the students' entire lived experiences in the destination country opened the door to an increased interest in analysing their language encounters in terms of intercultural learning.

This new domain of investigation in SA research, focused on the students' opportunities for intercultural development while abroad, is varied in terms of perspectives and discourses, as it catalyses the different interests and viewpoints of the various stakeholders, including educational institutions, international political organisations, teachers or the students themselves. This book gathers some of these voices, with contributions on topics such as the features, dynamics, advantages and shortcomings, preparation needs and pedagogical issues relating to student mobility in terms of the participants' intercultural learning. This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication.

Difference and awareness in cultural travel: negotiating blocks and threads

Adrian Holliday

ABSTRACT

Three university students studying abroad employ a combination of two modes of thinking and talking about cultural difference within a non-essentialist paradigm. At some times they focus on the cultural threads that they bring with them that enable the sharing of cultural experience, the crossing of cultural boundaries and the potential for engaging creatively and critically with new cultural domains. At other times, within a softer non-essentialism, they focus on cultural blocks that, while acknowledging diversity, reinforce the notion of uncrossable cultural boundaries. Both are modes of making sense of and constructing culture; and their mixing demonstrates how we can all employ conflicting discourses of culture at the same time. However, for both cultural travellers and researchers, focusing on cultural threads will be more effective in combating the cultural prejudice and global politics that underpin essentialism. Revealing cultural threads requires a specific methodology in talking to people about culture and recognising the potentials for sharing. This could be a basis for intercultural learning.

Tiga pelajar universiti di luar negara menggunakan gabungan dua cara atau mod berfikir dan berbicara tentang perbezaan budaya menggunakan paradigma ‘non-essentilist’. Pada suatu masa, mereka menekankan tentang hubungan antara budaya yang mereka bawa bagi membolehkan mereka berkongsi pengalaman berkaitan budaya, merentasi sempadan budaya dan potensi untuk melibatkan diri dalam persekitaran budaya baru secara kreatif dan kritis. Manakala, pada masa yang lain, dengan menggunakan paradigma ‘softer non-essentialism’, pelajar-pelajar ini lebih menekankan penggunaan blok budaya atau ‘cultural blocks’ (budaya saya, budaya anda) di mana disamping mereka mengakui dan menerima kepelbagaian budaya, mereka juga turut mengukuhkan tanggapan berkaitan sempadan budaya yang tidak dapat direntasi. Kedua-dua pemikiran adalah cara yang digunakan untuk memahami serta membina atau menggambarkan budaya; dan penggunaan kedua-duanya menunjukkan bagaimana kita dapat menggunakan wacana budaya yang bercanggah dalam satu masa yang sama. Walaubagaimanapun, kedua-dua pengembara dan penyelidik budaya yang menekankan hubungan antara budaya (cultural threads)akan lebih berkesan dalam membanteras prajudis budaya dan politik global yang menyokong essensialisme. Mendedahkan hubungan kebudayaan memerlukan metodologi yang spesifik dan tertentu untuk berbicara dengan orang lain tentang budaya dan mengenalpasti potensi untuk berkongsi pengalaman satu sama lain. Perkara ini boleh menjadi asas kepada pembelajaran antara budaya.

Introduction

This paper explores issues of cultural difference within the context of university students as intercultural travellers studying abroad. To do this, I will employ a creative nonfictional narrative in which three students share their thoughts about cultural difference and the working concepts of cultural blocks, and interweaving cultural threads, that represent different modes of expression within a non-essentialist approach to cultural difference. I will begin by looking at the implications of how paradigm change in intercultural communication studies contributes to the notions of cultural blocks and threads. I will then describe the creative non-fiction methodology and then the perceptions that grow from the creative non-fictional narrative, followed by implications for intercultural awareness and learning.

The broader context of the study is that of interculturality, which I define as the ability to make sense of intercultural experience in terms of one’s own cultural background. I also define cultural travellers as people who move between cultural environments. In many ways we are all cultural travellers throughout our lives as we move through a succession of small cultures – family, schools, jobs, friendship groups, relationships and so on. However, students travelling to study in different countries will encounter the more enhanced concepts of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’. But it will be a major theme in this paper, following Holliday (2013), that the small culture travel within the home society is the major resource for travel abroad.

Cultural blocks

There has been a significant paradigm shift in the last decade regarding the nature of culture within the field of intercultural communication. This has resulted in an overthrowing of a more established view of the nation state, or national culture as the ‘default signifier’ of who we are (MacDonald & O’Regan, 2011, p. 553) and ‘from overarching templates to engagements with local knowledge and practice’ (p. 563). There do however seem to be softer and more radical versions of this movement, which, I will argue, emerge as two very different types of thinking that are characterised by the concepts of cultural blocks and threads, respectively.

The softer version of non-essentialism has become the dominant, convenient outcome of the concerted pressure to break from essentialism. Thinking about cultural difference in terms of blocks maintains the notion of national cultures as separate experiences and as the prime units of cultural identity. This conceptualisation nevertheless speaks to non-essentialism by acknowledging huge diversity within these separate cultures that make intercultural similarities and flows possible. This softer version has been problematised elsewhere as neo-essentialist, or perhaps soft essentialism, because the boundaries between national cultures remain uncrossable and confine interculturality to observing and comparing the practices and values of one’s own and the other’s national cultures, and to finding commonalities to enhance toleration of the other culture (Holliday, 2011, p. 164). The notion of a third space is common here as an intermediary place where the two cultures can meet, but limits us by not allowing us to be totally ourselves in another cultural domain, resulting in some loss of this identity through assimilation with the Other, and inhibiting the possibility that we can ‘live in several cultural domains at the same time’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2012, p. 5).

There is a postpositivist research approach implicit in the concept of cultural blocks that is relevant not only for academic researchers but also for intercultural travellers who are investigating their surroundings. It is postpositivist in that national cultures are perceived to be real with a content that can be described, albeit with caution, sensitivity and tolerance. This adds to the popularity of soft non-essentialism because it provides a convenient and perhaps reassuring viewpoint that cultural realities are objective, observable and describable – that the map is actually the same as the territory. Talking explicitly about cultural blocks allows researchers and cultural travellers to ask questions and get answers in a literal, factual manner, collecting information about different cultures. This could be something like this:

How do people in your culture behave at mealtimes?

The whole family arrives on time and eats together; and show their appreciation of the person who has prepared the meal, who is normally the mother.

Oh, interesting. That’s a bit different to my culture and others I have been to, where the whole thing is less formal and organised. But we can certainly learn from each other in this respect. (Holliday, 2015b)

I am not suggesting that the answers received in this type of exchange would necessarily just be taken at face value. We are all, I think, aware of the personal politics behind the way in which we and others talk about personal identities. It is instead the sorts of questions that are asked that indicate some sort of expectation that a certain type of information about culture is both available and likely to be forthcoming – as though this is somehow set aside from the complexity that we see elsewhere in social life. In other words, if politicians or advertisers tell us things about the world, we are naturally critical; but when people speak about culture, we are somehow less so.

Cultural threads

Talking instead about threads of cultural experience focuses our attention on diverse aspects of our past that mingle with the experiences that we find and the threads of the people that we meet. Cultural threads have the power to extend and carry us across the boundaries that are encouraged by cultural blocks, and beyond the boundaries of the third space. Looking for cultural threads rather than blocks represents the more radical version of non-essentialism. It is less straightforward and perhaps more difficult to conceptualise, in that it recognises from the beginning that there are complex shades, layers, personal positioning and contradictions at play when people talk about cultural identity.

Cultural threads can be associated with the connections between different parts of Holliday’s grammar of culture represented in Figure 1 (adapted from Holliday, 2013, p. 2). They are carried by the personal cultural trajectories (centre left), where we develop different senses of culture as we encounter different small culture environments through changing life events and pull threads of experience out from the cultural resources provided by the particular structures, that form our upbringing (on the left), and are coloured by the global position and politics that these also provide. The underlying universal processes (centre right) process these threads; and it is because these processes are common to all of us that we are able to make sense of each other’s threads, which in turn help us make sense of our own, thus creating a common ground for sharing and enabling interculturality. It is this commonality that provides us with the basis to engage creatively with culture wherever we find it, and with each other, wherever we find ourselves.

The concept of cultural threads also represents the critical cosmopolitan discourse of culture that perceives the boundaries between national cultures to be political and ideological constructions (Delanty, 2012; Delanty, Wodak, & Jones, 2008) and where cultural travellers can be resilient and activist global adventurers (Caruana, 2014). This constructivism recognises that the researcher and participants in interviews co-construct what is being said and that the researcher is therefore implicated in the subjective power relations of the event (Block, 2000; Miller, 2011). The same would therefore apply to conversations between cultural travellers and others.

It would however be a mistake to suggest that cultural blocks and threads are focused on by different types of people depending on whether they are positivist or constructivist in orientation. In reality individuals can switch from one mode to the other within the same short statement, as observed in interviews with Algerian postgraduate students about their cultural experiences coming to Britain (Holliday, 2015a). This fits with examples in Holliday (2013, p. 108) of individuals switching between conflicting discourses of culture – ‘West versus the rest’, and essentialist culture and language discourses, which, I would argue, the block mode represents, and the critical cosmopolitan discourse, which the thread mode represents. I believe that the cultural block format provides the language that many of us use when we talk about culture.

However, I will argue that cultural threads are actively employed to cross boundaries, while cultural blocks build boundaries and restrict cultural travel. For people who have been used to the cultural block mode as the most conscious, dominant mode of exchanging facts about different ‘cultures’, shifting to a cultural thread mode might require considerable discipline to think about people as potentially like oneself, with threads to share, rather than as mysterious members of another culture. I can see this struggle in my own recent experience:

Figure 1. Grammar of culture.

When I find myself talking to two people sitting at the next table in a café in Algiers, I have to work on this by looking for cultural threads that might bring us together. Perhaps they are interested in talking to me, and make the first move, because I look foreign, might have rather clumsily looked for a table and been generally uncertain about how to come and sit down in a café like this one in Algiers. However, instead of looking at them as essentially foreign, which would be easy, I have to focus on how they are café sitters like me. So I talk to them about cafés, about how good it is to sit and relax, about the sorts of work that we have, leisure activities, where we have travelled to, what it is like to be away from home, this part of the city and its history, and so on.

On another occasion I am with a young Chinese man who is taking me in his car to a conference. (It’s his job to look after me for the day as a visiting speaker.) Imagining his age and perhaps noticing some young children things on the back seat, I use my recent experience with my daughter and grandchildren to talk to him about childcare, how being a parent impacts on his career and so on. (Holliday, 2015b)

Of course, in these cases there is interest in cultural differences that flavour the conversations. However, instead of looking for blocks, we follow the threads from who we are as people who have something to share to the implications of our circumstances, how we are brought up, where we live and then perhaps to comparisons of politics, economy, city life and so on. And we may in this way begin to see that we can have something to offer, to contribute in the foreign place where we find ourselves, and perhaps find understandings there that we can apply back to where we come from.

In these incidents, the underlying universal cultural processes that we share are fed by personal cultural trajectories (left centre of Figure 1) – my recent history with grandchildren and my daughter managing childcare while working comes into play. The outcome is a conversation made up of a rich intertwining tapestry, with different threads that run between the interactants, some shared, some specific to a particular cultural domain, coming together or pulling apart at different stages of the conversation, with both parties, and perhaps those listening, noticing new threads and pulling in their own to help make sense.

Social action vs. structure

The ability of individuals to be creative in the way in which they construct and manage threads of cultural experience supports the social action theory of society (Weber, 1964) that is implicit in the grammar of culture and that recognises that individuals have the potential to dialogue with social structure given political circumstances. The concept of small culture formation on the run, or on the go (Holliday, 2013, p. 56), has individuals constructing the manner in which they interact with, make sense of and stay with or leave cultural interactions as they encounter them.

Social action can relate to struc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Interculturality in study abroad
• 1. Difference and awareness in cultural travel: negotiating blocks and threads
• 2. ‘Breathing the smells of native-styled English’: a narrativized account of an L2 sojourn
• 3. Cultural adaptation in different facets of life and the impact of language: a case study of personal adjustment patterns during study abroad
• 4. ‘I am Italian in the world’: a mobile student’s story of language learning and ideological becoming
• 5. Mobile students’ appraisals of keys to a successful stay abroad experience: hints from the IEREST project
• 6. Englishisation at a global space: students and staff making sense of language choices
• 7. Student mobility and internationalisation in higher education: perspectives from practitioners
• 8. English as an academic lingua franca and intercultural awareness: student mobility in the transcultural university
• 9. Interculturality and the study abroad experience: students’ learning from the IEREST materials
• 10. Enhancing student experiences abroad: the potential of dynamic assessment to develop student interculturality
• 11. Intercultural preparation for future mobile students: a pedagogical experience
• 12. Intercultural education in practice: two pedagogical experiences with mobile students
• Index