Expressive Practices: The Local Enactment of Culture in the Communication Classroom

Abstract

As students participate in corporate communication classes, they may, on occasion, use the term culture to make sense of their experiences. The authors use Mino's idea of a learning paradigm to shift the emphasis away from teaching traditional theories of culture and use student-centered experiences to teach culture as an expressive practice. Using instances drawn from their own classrooms, the authors show how students can recognize the value of understanding their role in creating culture each time they choose how to act, how to evaluate others' behavior, and whether to label what is going on as cultural.AS A RESPONSE to the strong current carrying culture in new directions, we embarked on a research endeavor to explore the challenges we felt, as instructors, to more carefully define and delineate how we teach the concept of culture. The objective of this article is to propose an alternative treatment to the concept of culture, one that suggests an expressive quality that encourages students to think critically about basic beliefs related to how people and business settings operate. We examine specific instances of student communication to assess how the process of communication about culture affected interaction in specific classroom situations. Based on this analysis, we identify a pedagogical strategy that incorporates and builds on the need to reconsider the ways and means by which we utilize the term culture in our classrooms, specifically focusing on what Mino (2001) describes as a learning paradigm. That is, we shift the emphasis away from teaching at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on June 21, 2015 bcq.sagepub.com Downloaded from

Serious Games

“…This interdisciplinary faculty produced activities drawing from management, communication, intercultural, and language teaching techniques, which were then refined by all members of the seminar teaching and learning committee. The combination of these activities was improved over 3 years based on Theory Sources: Avery & Steingard, 2008;Avery & Thomas, 2004;Belbin, 1998Belbin, , 2000Berg, 2012;Boyacigiller, Kleinberg, Philips, & Sackmann, 2004;Gibson & Zellmer-Bruhn, 2001;Rexeisen & Al-Khatib, 2009;Wolf, Milburn, & Wilkins, 2008 • An exercise titled the "Meaning Market" involved international teams in a race to resolve the answers to a foreign language quotation game. The game requires students to consolidate their own linguistic and cultural knowledge and obtain answers from the "market" of language and cultural competency in the class • Ostracize free riding, social loafing, low student commitment to teams…”

“…This interdisciplinary faculty produced activities drawing from management, communication, intercultural, and language teaching techniques, which were then refined by all members of the seminar teaching and learning committee. The combination of these activities was improved over 3 years based on Theory Sources: Avery & Steingard, 2008;Avery & Thomas, 2004;Belbin, 1998Belbin, , 2000Berg, 2012;Boyacigiller, Kleinberg, Philips, & Sackmann, 2004;Gibson & Zellmer-Bruhn, 2001;Rexeisen & Al-Khatib, 2009;Wolf, Milburn, & Wilkins, 2008 Goal 2: Rule-Based Culture Educational objectives…”

Piecing the puzzle

“…Finally, inspired by what nevertheless seemed like an ambitious undertaking, the project embraced the challenge articulated by Suarez‐Orozco and Sattin (2007) to collaborate with a university in another part of the world to provide an opportunity for students to work with others via the internet on a topic that would be relevant to both parties. The project was therefore designed to develop in‐depth understandings of intercultural communication focusing upon computer mediated communication contexts, so desired by employers (Riemer and Jansen, 2003; Xiaoping, 2006) and business educational researchers (Saatci, 2008; Wolf et al , 2008; Zeiss and Isabelli‐Garcia, 2005) alike.…”