Constructing interculturality through intercultural dialogues and autoethnography: building relations, nurturing preparedness and rejecting boundaries

Introduction

In keeping with internationalisation, universities around the globe are experiencing unprecedented cultural diversity. This phenomenon has brought about considerable challenges in terms of ‘forging inclusive multicultural spaces’ for all members of the academic communities (Komisarof & Zhu, Citation2016, p. 1). Critical voices in academic mobility research have signalled, among others, two focal points for attention when it comes to enhancing intercultural learning and engagement for the success of international education. First, there is a persistent tendency to equate cultural diversity with diversity of different nations, which stems from the essentialist idea of culture linked to national territories and boundaries (e.g. Jackson, Citation2018; Montalbán et al., Citation2020). The danger of relying on such frameworks of cultural variation based on national categories is that stereotypes and prejudices will only ensue and exacerbate, which is the very opposite of the goal of accommodating diversity with an open attitude. In contrast, greater recognition of diversity and variation within groups or ‘small cultures’ (Holliday, Citation1999) is better attuned to the aim of fostering intercultural understanding. Second, many members of the academic community still hold a naïve assumption that mobility or study abroad experience itself will result in an increase in intercultural competence and global-mindedness (e.g. Aba, Citation2016; Guilherme, Citation2012). In fact, without an awareness of the importance of a ‘reflective, exploratory, dialogic and active stance towards cultural knowledge and life’, and without any form of intercultural mediation, the mobility experience is less likely to produce the desired outcome in intercultural learning (Guilherme, Citation2002, p. 219).

Endorsing these critical perspectives to intercultural education, a growing number of study abroad scholars have made a case for the necessity of implementing research-based and theory-driven intercultural interventions as pedagogy to provide guidance and support in promoting meaningful intercultural dialogues between different groups of students on international campuses (e.g. Jackson & Oguro, Citation2018; Vande Berg, Citation2009). This paper presents a case of such interventions, involving two Chinese international students and five Belgian undergraduates minoring in Chinese in a key university in Brussels. We draw on a constructivist approach to intercultural communication and interculturality and employ ethnographic methods, including autoethnography and semi-structured interviews, to discuss some emergent, albeit contextualised, characteristics of the intercultural encounter through a series of intercultural dialogues held between the students over ten weeks. We will suggest that those dialogues serve as the site at which and the medium through which the individuals fundamentally seek to connect and construct meanings collaboratively. The sense of relation building plays a pivotal role in mediating the process of developing the knowledge of cultural practices and that of becoming willing and prepared to challenge the self and familiar tropes; it thus attests to the dynamic dialogic nature and process of intercultural engagement. We will also cast light on the role of reflexivity that is afforded by the method of autoethnography in assisting the Chinese students particularly to develop critical cultural awareness, a process formulated by them as being transformative. In this paper, we will first provide a theoretical background to the notion of interculturality in intercultural communication (IC) research and review recent advances in intercultural pedagogy in student mobility research. Then we will introduce the research questions, followed by a detailed description of the context, the rationale and the procedures of our intercultural intervention. In the next section, we present the findings before discussing the implications and drawing some conclusions.

Interculturality in IC

Researchers in the field of IC have increasingly problematised the uncritical application of terms such as cultural differences, boundaries, divide, and clashes that are typically identified based on monolithic entities, including nations and ethnicities. These concepts continue to have wide currency in competence-oriented literature and have largely reduced earlier intercultural training and education to pursuing the primary goal of increasing the individual’s ability to understand and overcome the differences or bridge the divide (cf. Deardorff, Citation2009). As many scholars have contested, the attribution of misunderstandings to the mismatches between separate a priori sets of cultural behaviours, values and attitudes is detrimental and only reinforces the dichotomy of self/other; it will lead to further separating individuals and groups whose subjectivity and interactions are, in fact, the driving forces in constructing the meanings of our social lives and fabricating our knowledge (e.g. Burr, Citation1996; Shi-xu, Citation2001).

The problem associated with treating cultural meanings as relatively stable and fixed variables emanates from the underlying ontological and epistemological stances referred to as structural-functionalism and positivism, which, when translated into IC research, are coterminous with cultural essentialism (e.g. Holliday, Citation2012; H. Zhu, Citation2016). It represents a normative thinking to explain and predict cultural behaviour and values on the principle of the natural sciences that suggest a society as a solid subject existing separately from the researcher (Holliday, Citation2012). Instead, in social action theory and interpretative and constructivist paradigms, scholars try to understand the world as enacted through meaningful social activity in taking account of the larger social and historical forces as well as the power relations, with the individual as the knowing mind and as the agent contributing to the constitution of knowledge (e.g. Hall, Citation1992; Martin et al., Citation2012; Weber, Citation1968). In following this line of thought, culture is neither fixed nor static and is socially constructed and operated at global and local levels, from and within smaller communities and groups to larger entities and whole nations (Holliday, Citation2012; Martin & Nakayama, Citation1999). This conception is a direct critique of cultural essentialism that overemphasises the representation of individuals through national or ethnic cultural characteristics, ignoring the subjectivity and complexity of the individual.

In IC research, radical shifts have taken place over the past two decades regarding the understanding of interactions between people. Culture is no longer taken as people ‘being’ and is inextricably bound up with people ‘doing’ it, which posits that the interaction is context- and discourse-dependent, as the interactants draw upon their senses of self and negotiating all symbolic resources surrounding them (Zhu, Citation2020). Consequently, people’s abilities to participate in interactions can hardly be represented by and equated to lists of attributes and a set of behavioural skills or patterns that are touted and accordingly measured. According to the constructivist view, IC is the site of social construction and action at which understanding of culture cannot be prescribed nor specifically located, but discursively constructed and negotiated with an ineluctable relational perspective between the participants in interactions (H. Zhu, Citation2016). IC, thus, ultimately becomes intercultural engagement embedded in a dialogic and dynamic process where the cultural constellation is flexible and is symbolised within ‘small culture’ diversity (cf. Holliday, Citation1999). This intrinsic quality of fluidity and complexity is further complicated when transnational mobility and cosmopolitan and multicultural existences have forced geographical boundaries to be less relevant (MacDonald & O’Regan, Citation2012; Warren, Citation2012). The complication is partly due to technological developments that have enabled ‘geographically dispersed interactants to form and maintain communities’ and to connect (Jenks et al., Citation2013, p. 121). Culture and identity then become ever complex and constantly evolve, as people will resort to differing cultural constructs and enact diverse social categories across ‘transnational spaces’ in interactions (Dooly & Rubinstein, Citation2018; Jenks et al., Citation2013; Ladegaard & Jenks, Citation2015).

Amidst these trends of evolution in the field of IC, critical scholars have been using the term ‘interculturality’ to describe an emergent, interactional and co-constructed phenomenon in interactions. In this paper, we come to a working definition derived from the insights gained from several contemporary critical interculturalists. Interculturality is concerned with advocating a critical understanding of cultural discourses by engaging the individuals in ‘questioning their views and opinions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’’ with the purpose of ‘constructing a space of diversity, social justice and more ‘transparent’ encounters’ (e.g. Holliday, Citation2012; Jin & Dervin, Citation2017, p. 3). Clearly, part of this concept implies the tendency and the ability of the individuals to critically evaluate and understand relevant cultural values and practices, and in literature, this ability is regularly linked to the central idea of the notion of critical cultural awareness (Byram, Citation1997). Whilst we mainly rely on the term of ‘interculturality’ to expound the dynamic process of negotiating and constructing intercultural relations through the interaction, we occasionally draw on ‘critical cultural awareness’ to refer to the elements of criticality.

Intercultural pedagogy and intercultural learning

In study abroad research, the critical and reflexive stance towards the notion of interculturality has proffered new advances in intercultural pedagogy. Jackson (Citation2018) notes that, in accordance with the shifts in understanding the core concepts in IC, current intercultural pedagogy begins to assume the vital role that learners play in constructing meaning through real-world intercultural experience. Instructors and educators, in turn, adopt the role of mentor and facilitator, concentrating on providing students with the analytical tools to hone criticality or critical cultural awareness in a guided and structured manner. This kind of guided critical approach is understood as theory-driven cultural mentoring or contemporary intercultural intervention to which reflective experiential learning is integral (Jackson & Oguro, Citation2018; Paige & Goode, Citation2009). The basic tenet of experiential learning is that learners should learn to engage in critical reflection and reflexivity about their intercultural experiences, which will lead to transformational learning (Passarelli & Kolb, Citation2012). However, intercultural education researchers have also cautioned against potential positive bias towards reflexivity and experiential learning, in that empirical evidence for the effectiveness of the method is still lacking and that reflexivity might risk becoming a placebo, leading us to ‘feel we have ‘dealt with’ complexities’ that are not duly exemplified in carefully controlled settings of intercultural encounters (Blasco, Citation2012; Zhou & Pilcher, Citation2018, p. 128).

Some major empirical initiatives to support intercultural learning in student mobility in Europe have been undertaken under the banner of the IEREST project (Citation2015), which produced a set of teaching modules guiding teachers and students to explore intercultural experiences in different stages of study abroad (Beaven & Borghetti, Citation2016). Within this broad context, Van Maele et al. (Citation2016) studied the criteria considered by mobile students as essential for a successful study abroad stay and they found that high priority was ascribed to establishing social contacts and cultivating aspects of personal development. Beyond the Erasmus student context, Van Maele and associates (Citation2021) conducted an intervention project in Belgium on encouraging engineering students to encounter and probe strangeness. While the students learnt about the importance of first-hand experiences and the role of open-mindedness and of avoidance of an essentialist view, the members of the research team discovered the value of team cultural diversity for engaging in reflexive dialogues and examining different perspectives.

As to intercultural learning of Chinese study abroadFootnote¹ students, much empirical research has traditionally focused upon the intercultural experiences of student sojourners, typically involving issues of confrontation and intercultural adaptation, psychological wellbeing as well as struggles with academic studies (see e.g. J. Zhu, Citation2016 for an exhaustive review of research on international Chinese students). Gu (Citation2011) comments that, although those studies offer deep insights into identifying the major issues in intercultural education, they fall short of explaining the influence of the cultural backgrounds of the individuals in intercultural interactions; some may be overly replete with the deterministic role of culture in students’ experiences. Drawing on the educational experiences of Chinese returnees sojourning in the UK, Gu (Citation2011) and Gu and Schweisfurth (Citation2015) show that the challenges, changes and achievements of students result from the interaction of the learners with their particular living and studying environments. In this process of interaction, students’ agency is a key driver of achieving personal growth as regards a broadened outlook and a reflexive understanding of themselves in the wider world. In relation to institutional and pedagogical support Chinese sojourners receive, Jackson (Citation2010) has developed the most extensive study abroad support and research programme that consists of presojourn, sojourn and postsojourn elements at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The insights gained have allowed her to lay the groundwork for theorising the vital part intercultural educators can play in helping students optimise their intercultural learning in various stages of their sojourn (see our review earlier in this section). It is also this strand of intercultural pedagogy that has inspired us to carry out the intervention project on which the current paper is based.

Research questions

In this paper, we attempt to emulate critical interculturalists in addressing interculturality as an emergent process of negotiating and constructing cultural meanings and intercultural relations in intercultural engagement. We examine the role of a series of intercultural dialogues, which are contextualised in an intercultural intervention and through self reflections, in scaffolding the development of interculturality. Two broad questions are formulated:

• (1) What do students’ reflections on the intercultural dialogues reveal about the process of developing interculturality? What characteristics emerge as being prominent in intercultural engagement?

• (2) How do the Chinese international students perceive the outcomes of these intercultural dialogues for their intercultural learning? What is the role of autoethnography in cultivating their interculturality?

The intercultural intervention project

Findings

While our project was premised on the idea that the dialogues had the potential to bring the two groups of students together and engage them in discussion of greater depth than they would otherwise have had without facilitation, we were devoid of any expectation of how the participants would experience the dialogues and if they would perceive the encounters to be interculturally insightful. Analysis of data confirmed that firstly, notions such as relational and connecting, negotiating and co-constructing meanings did emerge as being prominent in students’ intercultural engagement; secondly, the two Chinese interns perceived significant gains in developing critical cultural awareness, notably thanks to the method of autoethnography.

To answer the two research questions, we group these predominant emergent findings under three themes, with the first two themes addressing our research question (1) and the third theme answering research question (2). The findings build on the relevant extracts from the Belgian undergraduates with the pseudonyms of Ari, Carine, Gina, Nora and Sander and the two interns whom we name Mei and Ran. Occasionally, the names mentioned in the extracts are obscured with a simple symbol of ‘X’. Following Zhou and Pilcher (Citation2018), we indicate the source of each extract using codes such as ‘R-PH’ or ‘C-IS-2’ or ‘M-IS-29/04’, referring to the initial of student’s pseudonym, the in situ (oral or written reflections as part of the activity) or post hoc status of their reflection and the number of the reflection or the date of the dialogue on which it was based.

Discussion and conclusion

In this paper, we have explored the role of a series of intercultural dialogues deployed as an intercultural intervention in scaffolding the students’ development of interculturality. The findings above provide a glimpse of the ten-week-long experiential learning experiences gained through the form of autoethnography. The intervention setting was solely conceived as a catalyst and a medium for initiating a series of continual dialogues that might otherwise have been fragmented. Through those dialogues and the reflective approach, we sought to explore a learner-centred pedagogy that focuses on combining meaningful personalised intercultural engagement with the exploitation of potential critical reflections.

Our data offer a small window into the individuals’ meaning-making process where relation-building, collaboration, empathy, and mutual understanding are given precedence in intercultural engagement. This serves as a reminder that ‘IC is an intimate, ‘intersubjective’ activity, in that it generally requires people and language for it to be enacted’ (MacDonald & O’Regan, Citation2012, p. 563). Above all, the dialogic nature of the engagement and the attention paid to negotiating both similarities and differences affirm the idea of ‘doing interculturality’ in which any predetermined ‘cultural differences are salient only if participants make them relevant during interaction’ (Zhu, Citation2010, p. 192, italics ours). In our study, the individuals have been observed to view themselves and their positioning in the world through the eyes of each other, and that level of self-awareness is contingent upon the situation and context in which solid cultural categories are not made salient, whereas the personal and relational aspects bear true meanings. Hence, the relationship between culture and identity is fluid and multifarious, subject to unpredictability and discursiveness of the nature of social interaction (Dervin & Jackson, Citation2018). We have also detected that the students negotiate a sense of belonging to what they call a circle of generational reality. This projects the tendency to reject being ‘subsumed beneath any established cultural descriptions’ (Holliday, Citation2010, p. 175). It underpins the direct relevance of the diversity of cultural tendencies shaped through globalisation and transnational mobility, resulting in a process of ‘transculturing self’ where the individual perspective changes ‘through infinite and reiterative interactions with both internal and external diversity’ (Monceri, Citation2009, p. 49).

The insightful reflections of Mei and Ran witness how ‘autoethnography has been a vehicle of emancipation from cultural and familial identity scripts’ (Spry, Citation2001, p. 708). This reflective approach facilitates them to have a conversation with themselves about their experiences, thus producing satisfactory outcomes for them. The insights into the role of autoethnography coincide with Borghetti’s (Citation2017, online access, italics ours) advocate of ‘adopting a general substantial shift from assessment-of-learning to assessment-as-learning’ in discussing various assessment methods available in studying intercultural competence. From a critical perspective, the outcome of intercultural experiences is not to be assessed with fully quantifiable forms of assessment, but ‘to be measured in terms of the quality of the experience and of the skills acquired, particularly of transferable skills’ (Convey, Citation1995, p. 165).

Central to the discussion above is a disclaimer that we have no intention of romanticising the effects of the intercultural dialogues, which are, precisely, discursively constructed in this specific intervention setting. In a fashion that concurs with our aim of exercising reflexivity ourselves in devising this pedagogy, we provide some reflective remarks by linking to some caveats that have been identified by critical IC researchers. Firstly, as Zhou and Pilcher (Citation2018) rightfully warn, it is incumbent on intercultural educators to have heightened awareness of the tension between relatively neutral locales in which reflective experiential leaning occurs, and much-vaunted positive IC attributes, and the complex actualities of intercultural encounters. This propels us to acknowledge the neutral and later possibly benign nature of the intercultural encounters in our setting, when the participants already held a rather open-minded attitude towards different societies from the start, and their familiarity with each other gradually grew throughout the course of the intervention. However, upon our full realisation of the limitation of this intervention in dealing with complexities, we maintain that the reflective experiential learning is not a placebo; instead, it has led to truly meaningful and rich experiences for our students enrolled in the specific study programmes. After all, ‘autoethnography is intrinsically subjective’ (Custer, Citation2014, p. 8) and ‘ethnographic projects are geared to the small, the local and the detailed’ (Roberts, Citation2003, p. 127). Future effort should go into exploring alternative and various ways of ‘doing interculturality’, with consideration given to exposing students to more ‘critical’ or ‘problematic’ scenarios (see e.g. Dervin & Härkönen, Citation2018 for a framework for training).

Secondly, the willingness and preparedness Mei and Ran harboured as well as the abilities they honed to question the self and embrace a space of diversity have urged us to interrogate and revoke our initial suspicion that they might stand to gain more from the critical discussions than do the Belgian undergraduates. While they have proved to gain substantial personally transformative experiences, we, as researchers, are reminded of the prejudice and the danger of essentialising the study abroad experiences of Chinese students and international students in general. Dervin (Citation2011) and Harvey (Citation2016) have both explicitly challenged the western ‘hidden’ intercultural discourses in which Chinese students and international students are categorically characterised as a reduced other or being too different. We firmly align ourselves with this position and make a case that the local students equally, if not more, need tremendous support for becoming globally and interculturally minded. Taken to the broader context of internationalising universities, this suggests the need and the benefits for staff and students in any international universities to engage with international students with a mindset to learn from them and with them (Jin & Cortazzi, Citation2017). In this sense, practising ‘cultures of learning’, that is, devoting ‘attention to the different cultural ways and emphases of learning’ will help achieve ‘reciprocal learning and cultural synergy’ (Jin & Cortazzi, Citation2017, p. 241, 248).

Furthermore, as Van Maele et al. (Citation2016) and Sakurai et al. (Citation2010) have demonstrated, social contacts and social ties are strong indicators of sojourn success for mobility students. We believe it crucial for higher education institutions to find ways to connect local students with study abroad students on an international campus. In times of mounting geopolitical tensions, it is utterly imperative to warrant bottom-up meaningful interactions between students from diverse backgrounds. As intercultural mentors, helping students eliminate the solid self/other dichotomy and boundaries requires us to put to the fore ‘the socially and historically constructed nature of their motivations, desires and identities’ (Harvey, Citation2016, p. 371). Finally, it has been observed that the current practice of intercultural teaching in China remains unsystematic and fragmented and that both teachers and students lack a deep understanding of the dynamics and diversity of cultures (RICH-Ed, Citation2021). We thus hope that the combination of reflexivity on the part of us, the researchers, and that on the students’ part as well as the critical theoretical approach we take to interculturality will provide intercultural educators in Chinese higher education with some inspiration.