BYRAM VERSUS BENNETT: DISCREPANCIES IN THE ... - CERCLL

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Paula Garrett-Rucks Byram Versus Bennett James was also less consistent than the three other focus participants with his participation in the discussions as well as his attendance and general performance in the classroom. For these reasons, I am not including information about the fourth participant’s experiences in this brief overview of the three case studies. For the three focus participants who attained a threshold level in all three IC components during the semester, intercultural knowledge of cultural differences was important, but intercultural skills to relate to diverse French perspectives toward cultural practices seemed pivotal in developing strong intercultural attitudes. Brad, James and Lauren each entered the discussions with differing initial levels of intercultural attitudes, knowledge and skills and each participant attained the threshold level if IC development at differing moments across the semester—Brad in Discussion 1, James in Discussion 2 and Lauren in Discussion 3 as described in detail for each participant in turn below. Brad entered the discussions with developed intercultural knowledge and skills as evidenced by his interest in French history and politics and his ability to relate to differing French and American perspectives toward striking. However, he appeared to have weak intercultural attitudes as evidenced by his monolithic image of the French as being superior on his initial questionnaire and the first part of Discussion 1 where he stated, “I rather like that they [the French] have rules for multiple greetings. […] social interactions in this country need more rules.” Brad’s moment of change occurred after exposure to the French informants in the first discussion concerning their different perspectives toward greetings when he stated: Discussion 1, Phase 2: The thing that most struck me about what we watched was the variety of [French informant] responses. There are clearly wide personal variations within the "traditional" French greeting (Brad, Week 5). It appeared that exposure to diverse French perspectives toward greetings broke Brad’s monolithic image he previously held of the French. He continued to display evidence of strong intercultural knowledge, attitudes and skills for the remainder of the discussions. Jack entered the discussions with weak intercultural skills and attitudes, but evidence of strong intercultural knowledge, as evidenced on his initial questionnaire where he described his first images of the French to come to his mind as “the common stereotype assigned to the French by Americans, that is that they are snobby, rude and ‘elitist,’ if you will. Of course I know that these are unfair generalizations, but you asked what came to mind immediately.” In the first phase of Discussion 2, Jack responded to information about the French education system stating that it might, “cripple a student’s ability to explore all of their interests by making school too practical.” However, in Phase 2 of the discussion, he wrote: Discussion 2, Phase 2: Based on the positive responses of the French students in the YouTube videos, one might assume that the French may have found that little niche between too much choice and too little choice (Jack, Week 5). He continued to display evidence of strong intercultural knowledge, attitudes and skills for the remainder of the discussions. The third focus participant, Lauren, entered the discussion with poor intercultural attitudes, knowledge and skills expressing on her initial questionnaire that she imagined the French as “either being well groomed and dressed nicely or looking unpresentable and smelling like garbage.” She claimed that the “only negative image” to come to her mind was that the French “are snobby and rude.” There was continual evidence of Lauren’s increasing intercultural knowledge, but fluctuations in her developing attitudes and consistent displays of her poor skills relating to French perspectives until Discussion 3. Once Lauren reached a threshold level of IC 20 <strong>CERCLL</strong> ICC Proceedings
Paula Garrett-Rucks Byram Versus Bennett skills in Discussion 3, on family structure, she explicitly wrote that her opinion of the French had changed on her final questionnaire as follows. The only negative image I have of French people is that they rarely smile. However, I don’t think of them as rude or strict people anymore. I realize that I grew up thinking smiling at a person was a polite thing to do. They just grew up thinking the opposite way (that it was overbearing or flirtatious) (Lauren, Final questionnaire). Each of these three participants’ had a shift in worldviews occur in the second phase of a discussion, after personally relating to a French informant’s perspective toward differing cultural practices. Further evidence existed in the data to suggest that these three learners continued to display evidence of IC after the threshold moment of displaying fully developed intercultural attitudes, knowledge and skills. On the contrary, there were continual fluctuation between ethnocentric and ethnorelative thinking found when situating the transcripts of the discussions within Bennett’s DMIS. Evidence to question the linear nature of development proposed in Bennett’s DMIS In an attempt to capture the influences of the pedagogical interventions—explicit cultural instruction and authentic texts during Phase 1 and French informant interviews during Phase 2—I compared the percentage of postings where participants’ worldviews were evaluated at ethnocentric levels (Stages 1-3) to ethnorelative levels (Stages 4-6) for each phase of the discussion in. Based on this criteria, I detected shifts in learners’ ethnocentric to ethnorelative worldviews toward French smiling practices in Discussion 1 and French educational practices in Discussion 2 after exposure to the French informants’ perspectives in Phase 2 of these discussions. However, Discussion 3 was different. The information in Phase 1 of Discussion 3 described the French PACs—a form of civil marriage originally intended to support homosexual unions—as an increasingly accepted cultural practice among heterosexual and homosexual partners. However, the four French informants expressed a personal preference for traditional marriages in their own lives, and inadvertently discredited the status of PACs stating things like, “the PACs is an arrangement for convenience, like for tax breaks, not love” (Florence). Many participants in the discussion appeared disappointed by the French informants’ apparent lack of acceptance of the PACS stating things like, “the abuse of the PACS reminds me of the abuse of the welfare system here” (participant, week 5). Consequently, there was a shift from ethnorelative to ethnocentric thinking in Discussion 3 in Phase 2 of the discussion (see Figure 1). <strong>CERCLL</strong> ICC Proceedings 21
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