Malgorzata Lahti – University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Margarethe Olbertz-Siitonen – University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Keywords
EFL, intercultural competence, cultural self-awareness, identity, eportfolios
Abstract
Our study explores online interactions of a group of intercultural communication students at two European universities collaborating in a virtual exchange project that centres around the topic of food. It is notable that popular discourses on both student exchange and university internationalisation, and food and culinary practices, are predominantly essentialist (for discussion, see e.g. Dervin & Layne, 2013; Wilczek-Watson, 2018). In our analysis, we are interested in how the participants jointly construct their identities with relation to the two themes.Our data consists of three Skype video meetings of a five-member student group formed for the purpose of a virtual exchange project. Three of the group members were taking an introductory course to intercultural communication in a university in the Netherlands, while the remaining two were enrolled in a similar course in a university in Finland. Both courses introduced a critical perspective on interculturality and supported the students in developing a critical stance towards essentialist ideas on culture and identity. Within the virtual exchange project, students from the two universities were put together in groups of 4-5. They first introduced themselves by sharing photos of the food they were eating for a week, using a shared Google Classroom folder. Following that a series of online group meetings took place where the participants assisted each other with their respective course assignments. The students in the Netherlands conducted an exploratory study on food and dietary views by interviewing customers in local grocery shops. The students in Finland analysed a dinner party they had prepared and enjoyed together. The three online meetings we explore in the study took place in February 2019, they have between three to five students participating (all members of the same virtual exchange group), and their total length is approximately 40 minutes. The students conduct their meetings in English but they also introduce short expressions in other languages.We draw on the work of Goffman (1959) and treat the online interactions as situated in the public sphere. We argue that, when engaging in online meetings with persons they hardly know, the participants can be seen as putting on front stage performances of desirable identities (see also Bullingham & Vasconcelos, 2013). We further lean on the research program of discursive psychology (DP) to explore identities as common sense and publicly available resources for making infercences about and building descriptions of the social world that are ”deployed in, oriented to and handled” in social interaction (Tileaga & Stokoe, 2015, p. 5). We are specifically interested in the DP concepts of interpretative repertoires and ideological dilemmas. Interpretative repertoires refer to the discrete ways of talking about objects and situations in the social world (Edley, 2001). These common sense lived ideologies may often be contradictory in nature, presenting interactants with ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988).What we can observe in our data is that the participants are producing both essentialist and non-essentialist identities and descriptions to make sense of their relationships with one another, and their relation to the offline locality they are currently embedded in. While essentialist ideas about national cultures and dietary habits are used as conversational starting points, the participants also reflect on essentialist assumptions and produce more complex accounts. These essentialist and non-essentialist notions do not appear as problematic to our participants. The two interpretive schemes appear as interdependent and impossible to separate. This observation encourages us to ask whether we could learn from our students about practices of reconciling the two ways of explaining the social world. We believe that a better understanding of these observably unproblematic blendings of or switches between mundane and more compound accounts of interculturality in the ‘public sphere’ of virtual exchange sessions can prove useful for the development of novel intercultural communication competence trainings – also and especially in terms of so called “simplexity” (Dervin 2016, p. 81).
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