Overcoming Essentialism? Students’ Reflections on Learning Intercultural Communication Online

Comment

Response / correction

Providing more information on the teaching that preceded these student reflections might further help other teachers in devising their own curriculum and avoiding essentialism. 

We have added more detailed description of the teaching that went on in order to provide more information. We added an Appendix A to provide more detailed information on this. 

Table 1, giving three different approaches to interculturality, is a useful instrument in assessing student progress along the essentialist-non-essentialist continuum. A more logical ordering would have the categories in reverse order: starting from essentialist and moving towards non-essentialist approaches. 

We have changed the order of the categories as suggested. Consequently, we have also reorganized the chapter discussing the findings on different approaches. 

What would be logically expected is that students progress towards and ultimately arrive at the non-essentialist approach, so I found the discussion somewhat confusing, in that it seemed to justify and even extol the Janussian approach. It seems more appropriate to regard the Janussian as a step towards developing a non-essentialist perspective. [---] I would suggest that this particular position is reconsidered. 

We have rephrased the last section of the results to clarify our thoughts and conclusions on the matter. 

We have added/ changed the text as follows:

“We believe that being able to see different perspectives is important, but this is not the same as confusing them. Macro- and micro-levels need to be clearly identified and distinguished. The data analysed for this study suggests that many students do not have deep enough knowledge about the different paradigms and that the non-essentialist approach is still novel to many. Learning the non-essentialist approach seems to be a process where most of the students juggle between the different approaches. Here janusian discourse is still very much a result of not really internalising many of the phenomenological and epistemological foundations of the critical and non-essentialist approaches to interculturality. However, the janusian approach could be considered as a step to the right direction. Yet, since the aim of the course was to enhance the non-essentialist approach, is it enough for us as teachers to consider this as a ‘successful’ course in IC? “

We have also added a short Conclusions to highlight the main results and conclusions. This part also contains text related to the learning of the non-essentialist approach. 

We have added the following: 

“Conclusions

Since the aim of the course was to enhance the critical, non-essentialist approach on culture and IC it was interesting to see that the students themselves did not refer to the ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ differences within their own groups so much as the course progressed. What become more relevant within their groups was the multilingual aspects of the course. The fact that the students were able to distance themselves from stereotypical expectations and explanations within their interpersonal relationships and focus on other things (such as developing their multilingual competence) is a promising finding. Yet, what the learning logs reveal is that the non-essentialist approach is not always consistent, but the janusian approach was still the dominant one after six weeks learning experience.

What we think is the outtake is that regardless that we have aimed at providing a possibility for our students to enhance their non-essentialist approach, many still need more time to embrace this novel approach. Despite the fact that essentialist approach on culture and IC has been discussed for some time now and multiple projects have criticized essentialism in intercultural communication courses for at least twenty years, the non-essentialist approach is still novel to many. Our data shows that many of the students had not viewed ‘culture’ and IC critically prior to this course. 

As a pedagogical outtake from the study, we would like to highlight three things. First, we believe that the interpersonal relationship development needs to be enhanced among the learners as well as the teachers, especially if the learning environment is virtual. This not only enhance the trust within the learning community, but also seem to help students to overcome the stereotypical ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ expectations about each other. Secondly, according to the learning logs, addressing multilingual communication and language helps student to become aware of issues of language and power and enables them to work in multilingual and multicultural environments. The third outtake is that learning the non-essentialist perspective (since being a new approach for many) seems to be a process where most of the students juggle between the different approaches. This janusian approach could be considered as a step to the right direction. Yet, we must ask ourselves how to provide students with tools and possibilities to develop further? Is it even our job and responsibility as teachers to ‘worry’ about students’ learning after they complete our course? We believe that is so, but the questions still remain of how to do this? Online environments certainly intertwine to both learning and working internationally, so these online courses during studies could be more explicitly harnessed as learning, reflecting, and developing students’ communication competence in intercultural encounters. “

Comment

Response / correction

I appreciate you categorizing IC texts.  In fact, as I started the manuscript, I thought to myself that it would be very useful to analyze IC texts as I would assume most are quite essentialist. I am a bit confused, however, because I think the examples you give for the categories are from the students’ responses—not excerpt from the texts that demonstrate a particular viewpoint. If you intend to demonstrate that the students notice texts in different ways, you should clarify this and then use their excerpts to highlight their perceptions.  However, I thought you intended to argue that the texts themselves are generally written in three ways.  If this is the case, excerpts from the texts would be more useful.

There seems to be some confusion about the aim of the study. We realize that the use of the word ‘text’ is not used in the best possible manner in our manuscript. Thus, creating a confusion about the aim that is to analyzing learners' responses submitted through learning logs. The texts that we refer to are those students’ learning logs that are in a text-format. 

Thus, in a way, yes we did intended argue that the texts themselves are written in three ways, but here we refer to the texts produced by the students. Consequently, the quotes offered in the manuscript are from these texts (i.e. learning logs). 

To clarify our aims and data we have rephrased the manuscript and replaced the word ‘text’ with ‘learning log’ and / or ‘student’s reflection’ in places where it can be done. 

Since our aim was to enhance the non-essentialist approach on culture and intercultural communication, most of the ‘texts’ meaning academic articles, videos, and other materials were selected to be representing the non-essential and critical approach on IC. This is something that we tried to explain more carefully now. 

• We have also included the following sentence to the manuscript: “Since the aim of the course was to enhance the critical approach to culture and IC, most of the readings, videos and other materials provided for the students could be considered as representing the critical and/or non-essentialist approach. Some clearly essentialist materials like Hofstede’s theory were used to analyze and reflect existing literature and theories in the field of IC. All provided materials were discussed during the lectures in order to develop a more critical perspective on given concepts and phenomena.”

• We have added an Appendix A to the manuscript to explicitly illustrate the pedagogical approach / solutions during the course aiming at enhancing the critical approach on IC. 

In case the reviewer thought that we would be analyzing existing academic texts provided by different scholars at the field, this is not what we aimed at. However, it would be a great idea for a new study to explore different kinds of texts (articles, handbooks, internet sites, etc.) provided for the students to see what kinds of approaches they (really) represent. 

It seems to me that the most interesting aspect of this study is the multi-national/multi-cultural context in which you delivered the class.  However, none of your findings directly relate to this aspect of the course. What are the outcomes you found related to this mixed-team dynamic and interpersonal exposure to learning IC?

What we found interesting that the students themselves did not refer to the ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ differences so much as the course progressed. We have tried to address this in the manuscript when we discuss the emotions and feelings that were evident in the learning logs. What become more relevant was the multilingual aspects of the course. 

To highlight these issues, we have added a Conclusion to the manuscript hoping that this would highlight the main findings.

“Conclusions

Since the aim of the course was to enhance the critical, non-essentialist approach on culture and IC it was interesting to see that the students themselves did not refer to the ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ differences within their own groups so much as the course progressed. What become more relevant within their groups was the multilingual aspects of the course. The fact that the students were able to distance themselves from stereotypical expectations and explanations within their interpersonal relationships and focus on other things (such as developing their multilingual competence) is a promising finding. Yet, what the learning logs reveal is that the non-essentialist approach is not always consistent, but the janusian approach was still the dominant one after six weeks learning experience.

What we think is the outtake is that regardless that we have aimed at providing a possibility for our students to enhance their non-essentialist approach, many still need more time to embrace this novel approach. Despite the fact that essentialist approach on culture and IC has been discussed for some time now and multiple projects have criticized essentialism in intercultural communication courses for at least twenty years, the non-essentialist approach is still novel to many. Our data shows that many of the students had not viewed ‘culture’ and IC critically prior to this course. 

As a pedagogical outtake from the study, we would like to highlight three things. First, we believe that the interpersonal relationship development needs to be enhanced among the learners as well as the teachers, especially if the learning environment is virtual. This not only enhance the trust within the learning community, but also seem to help students to overcome the stereotypical ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ expectations about each other. Secondly, according to the learning logs, addressing multilingual communication and language helps student to become aware of issues of language and power and enables them to work in multilingual and multicultural environments. The third outtake is that learning the non-essentialist perspective (since being a new approach for many) seems to be a process where most of the students juggle between the different approaches. This janusian approach could be considered as a step to the right direction. Yet, we must ask ourselves how to provide students with tools and possibilities to develop further? Is it even our job and responsibility as teachers to ‘worry’ about students’ learning after they complete our course? We believe that is so, but the questions still remain of how to do this? Online environments certainly intertwine to both learning and working internationally, so these online courses during studies could be more explicitly harnessed as learning, reflecting, and developing students’ communication competence in intercultural encounters. “

Ultimately, I think you have created a delivered a very interesting class.  However, I don’t quite see the “aha” moment in the paper.  Multiple projects have criticized essentialism in intercultural communication courses for at least twenty years.  What is the new contribution we should take from your work?  If you can frame and clearly articulate the contribution, it would be very helpful for the reader. I believe you have a strong contribution somewhere in your data—the class is really interesting and I’m sure there are findings that would make a strong contribution to IC education.

We have added a short conclusion to the manuscript to address and highlight the comments on the main findings of the study.  Please, see above. 

Are the arguments and discussion of findings coherent, balanced and compelling? (Must be improved)

Please, see our response to the first point (above)

For empirical research, are the results clearly presented? 

(Must be improved)

Please, see above (the aim of the study being clarified now)

Is the article adequately referenced? (Can be improved)

We have carefully gone through the references and hope that there are no mistakes anymore. Since there were no examples of the more appropriate/up-to-date references and we consider that the relevant literature is already included, we rely on the other reviewer that wrote: “The references well selected and apparently adequately quoted. A quarter are from the last five years.”

Are the conclusions thoroughly supported by the results presented in the article or referenced in secondary literature? (Can be improved)

We have hoped to make our aims, data and conclusions more clear by making the changes described above. Please, see above for the details.