Teaching Intercultural Rhetoric and Technical Communication

Theories, Curriculum, Pedagogies and Practice

Barry Thatcher, Kirk St. Amant, Charles Sides, Charles H Sides

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780895033772
• eBook ISBN: 9781351841382
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In today's integrated global economy, technical communicators often collaborate in international production teams, work with experts in overseas subject matter, or coordinate documentation for the international release of products. Working effectively in such situations requires technical communicators to acquire a specialized knowledge of culture and communication. This book provides readers with the information needed to integrate aspects of intercultural communication into different educational settings.

SECTION II

Curricular Perspectives: Designing and Developing Courses and Programs in Intercultural Communication

CHAPTER 5

In memory of our friend and colleague Victoria Mikelonis

Incorporating “Shock and Aha!” into Curriculum Design: Internationalizing Technical Communication Courses

Shelley L. Smith and Victoria M. Mikelonis

As Friedmann (2005) so aptly put it, the world is rapidly becoming flat. By making the access to, and the exchange and communication of, information a global concern, technology has become the driving engine behind this rapid change from cultural and economic isolation to integration. The Internet has made it as easy and as cheap for someone in New Delhi to access information at Harvard as it is for a student in Boston. As a result, interculturally competent technical communication professionals will be increasingly in demand as people struggle to cope with the communication concerns that result from this global intersection of cultures.

How do we prepare our students for this challenge? Preparation for life in this globalized world can take multiple forms. Participating in study abroad programs is one way of preparing them to enter the global workplace. But, as constructivist psychologist George Kelly (1963) observed in his groundbreaking book, A Theory of Personality, experiences are a matter of how we understand events. As Kelly suggests, we cannot merely thrust students into the intercultural milieu hoping that this will result in their becoming “global citizens.” We also need to provide them with educational contexts and opportunities that help them make sense of those events and ultimately to integrate these intercultural experiences into their own cultural identities. We need to prepare them for intercultural interactions before they go, give them tools and strategies for construing these experiences while they are there, and assist them in debriefing and integrating what they have learned upon their return. One of the ways we can do this is by providing them with internationalized courses on their home campuses. Such courses can prepare students for more intense intercultural experiences in living and working abroad, help them to understand how those experiences will change them, and provide ways for them to use international perspectives and experiences within their own cultural contexts.

By making a distinction between experience and perception, Kelly’s idea draws attention to the heart of what it means to internationalize on-campus courses/curriculum (IOCC). It explains why IOCC is not merely the addition of a unit on international perspectives or adding a new book introducing intercultural material or case studies, because students are likely to construe or make sense of those materials from their own cultural perspectives and often miss the logic and complexity of the cultural perspective presented.

Further, “ghettoizing” international content to individual units within a given course, or a single course within a larger curriculum continues to set it apart as an “extra” that is not significant enough to be integrated into the students’ worldview. As a result, students come to see intercultural communication issues as isolated from, rather than a necessary part of the technical communication tasks they will perform after graduation. Instead, the authors believe that internationalizing is an integrative approach in which intercultural information permeates the entire course, not just a part of it. It requires reconceptualizing the course in a way that includes not just new material, but clear goals, new strategies, and other cultural perspectives. For this reason, the authors believe that successful training programs for internationalizing curriculum are those that seek to shift the objectives of both courses and faculty to be more international in nature.

Ultimately, internationalizing departmental and/or university curriculum in a critical mass of courses is ideal. Research has repeatedly shown that teaching diversity issues in isolated courses does not have a significant impact on the students’ attitudes and beliefs (Colville-Hall, MacDonald, & Smolen, 1995; Weisman & Garza, 2002). Students need to see issues of culture and diversity as an integral part of knowing and understanding any body of knowledge and their world.

Kelly’s ideas also highlight the rationale for internationalizing courses in technical communication by first internationalizing the faculty. It is the faculty who must ask the hard questions and encourage their students to look beyond their own cultural assumptions and explore other cultural perspectives. For this reason, training programs for IOCC that work with faculty, like the undergraduate and graduate courses these faculty will design, need to be deliberately planned to facilitate transformational change.

This chapter shares the lessons learned about training faculty to teach internationalized courses. It stems from the 3-year Internationalizing the On-Campus Curriculum project at the University of Minnesota¹ and proposes both a conceptual framework for internationalizing technical communication courses and specific examples of readings and exercises designed to provide the conditions that can help faculty and students progress systematically through the learning process. Readers are free to adopt these ideas in their own attempts at internationalizing their individual courses or the overall curriculum in which they teach.

UNDERSTANDING TRANSFORMATIONAL LEARNING

The kind of learning that results from internationalizing a course tends to be transformational. This idea is true for both the faculty undergoing training and the students who will ultimately take courses these faculty teach. According to Mezirow (1991), transformational learning

involves an enhanced level of awareness of one’s beliefs and feelings, a critique of their assumptions, an assessment of alternative perspectives, a decision to negate an old perspective in favor of a new one, an ability to take action based on the new one, and a desire to fit the new perspective into the context of one’s life. (p. 161)

If one accepts Mezirow’s definition, then the participants in an internationalized curriculum, to some degree, need to be “transformed” for the process to be truly effective. This transformation is not a temporary condition. True transformation requires that the participants be changed in ways that significantly affect their worldview and that those changes persist after the transformational experience is over. For example, once one learns how to read (has been transformed from illiterate to literate), it is virtually impossible to not read written postings such as a STOP sign. An apt metaphor would be to imagine a network in which new knowledge interacts and integrates with existing networks of knowledge, organizing, and ultimately transforming it in sometimes surprising and unanticipated ways.

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEARNING AND THE INTERNATIONALIZED COURSE

O’Donovan and Mikelonis (2005) identified four basic assumptions to keep in mind when internationalizing a course:

Assumption 1: Internationalizing is an intentional approach to constructing new knowledge and designing courses.

Assumption 2: The process of international/intercultural education is provocative by its very nature because it challenges deep-seated attitudes, beliefs, and values.

Assumption 3: Pedagogical practices in international courses promote self-discovery, self-reflection, and personal transformation.

Assumption 4: Typical obstacles to internationalizing curriculum include resistance to change, lack of tolerance for ambiguity, and the inability to reflect critically.

These assumptions raise important ethical concerns as well. When we put students into situations in which they will confront their tacit assumptions and strongly held cultural beliefs, values, and behaviors, we are pulling the “cultural rug from under their feet,” and need to be sure we are able to catch them before they “fall.” Since the essential ethical message here is: Do no harm (Smith, 1993), this is a task that should not be undertaken lightly. Intercultural educators need to assume responsibility for helping students to coherently reconstruct the cultural realities that they may be dismantling (Smith, 1998). In so doing, the instructor needs to safely and effectively guide students through the all-important transformational learning experiences needed for effective learning related to culture and communication.

Because it is not enough for instructors to challenges students’ cultural realities, we have added three additional principles to the previous four. Faculty must also be responsible for

Assumption 5: Assisting their students in their struggle with reorienting their assumptions about issues of rightness and wrongness.

Assumption 6: Helping guide students in understanding that context and cultural realities must be considered before information and behaviors can be evaluated. (Bennett, 1993)

Assumption 7: Helping students to develop an awareness of, and be mindful about, their ability to make choices in their development of an overriding ethical structure that can guide them in their own journey toward intercultural awareness, i.e., a view in which “ethnorelativism and a strong ethical principles coexist. (Bennett, 1993, p. 30)

Because the authors believe that global interdependence is a reality with which our technical communication students will need to deal both professionally and personally (Friedman, 2005), these ethical concerns become risks worth taking as we prepare students to function effectively and compassionately on a multicultural playing field.

The following sections of this chapter detail the authors’ own experiences in taking such an approach to teaching students about intercultural technical communication.

SELECTING MODELS FOR INTERNATIONALIZING COURSES

The challenges for instructors of internationalized courses are multiple and involve five key questions:

1.How can we induce these changes in learners?

2.How can we plan the change?

3.How can we sequence activities and readings designed to lead students toward this transformation?

4.How will we know if the transformation has taken place?

5.How can we measure that change?

Finding the answers to these questions is at the heart of an internationalized curriculum. During a 3-year project to internationalize the curriculum at the University of Minnesota,² two important theoretical models guided the sequencing and presentation of information and tasks, and the strategies employed. First was Bennett’s (1993) Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS), which presents a framework for understanding the stages a person goes through when encountering cultural differences (see Figure 1, Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity). The underlying assumption of the model is that, as one is able to think in more complex ways about intercultural interactions and experiences, one moves through stages of ethnocentrism and ultimately experiences a paradigm shift into stages of ethnorelativism, leading to increasingly sophisticated understandings and behaviors around the issue of cultural difference.

The second theory was a transformational model for internationalizing courses (see O’Donovan, Mikelonis, & Smith, 2005) and consists of three stages:

1.Generating Consciousness

2.Transforming Consciousness

3.Expanding Consciousness

Ethnocentric Stages

I.Denial: No consideration that difference exists

A.Isolation: No exposure to cultural differences; parochial or stereotypical categories

B.Separation: Physical or social barriers keep “others” at a distance

II.Defense: Difference is threatening; the defense is psychological

A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction Thinking Globally, Teaching Locally: Understanding the Changing Nature of Technical Communication in an Age of Globalization
• Section I Teaching Approaches: Introducing Intercultural Communication into Classroom Situations
• Section II Curricular Perspectives: Designing and Developing Courses and Programs in Intercultural Communication
• Section III Connecting Instruction to Professional Practices: Merging the Workplace with the Classroom
• Contributors
• Index