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What Do I Need to Know about Cross-Cultural Collaboration?

The Basic Writing Class: A Contact Zone

Investigation of the difficulties of cross-cultural collaboration demands characterization of this practice, a task to which Mary Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone” lends itself. In “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Pratt describes basic writing classrooms as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in the context of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (34). The basic writing classroom, with its typically high degree of both skill and cultural variety, is precisely such an environment. Though classes vary from institution to institution, Karen Uehling illustrates the potential for diversity in the basic writing classroom:

With such a diverse student body, the potential for conflict in the implementation of any collaborative activity is high, but as with many classroom challenges, so too is the potential for valuable and productive interaction among students.

Collaborative Challenge 1: The Silenced Minority

Peter Elbow’s notion of the collaborative collage is an effective stepping stone into the difficulties of cross-cultural collaboration. In this model, students are organized into groups in which they complete individual pieces, which ultimately (though not always) form a coherent piece of writing. The pitfall of this and similar approaches is that “the collaborative process often silences weaker, minority, or marginal voices” (Elbow 9). Often the only ideas fully represented in a collaborative activity are those whose authors are familiar with the culture of the academy. For the purposes of this project, the academy is defined as “an institution predicated on Western European ideas and values” (Powell 3). In any collaborative interaction within such an environment, students culturally unfamiliar with the Euro-centric classroom customs are in an uncomfortable position of relative powerlessness and are likely to be silenced or enter into conflict with those students acclimated to the culture of the classroom.

Sara Kurtz Allaei and Ulla Maija Connor provide an excellent instance of such tension in their “Exploring the Dynamics of Cross Cultural Collaboration.” Allaei and Connor reference cross-cultural educational interaction between members of Athabascan culture and native English speaking Americans, citing “frequent conflicts in that communication [. . .] Athabascans’ [show a] high degree of respect for the individuality of others and a careful guarding of one’s own individuality [. . .] therefore, any conversation can be threatening. However, once Athabascans get to know another person, they become more talkative. American English speakers, on the other hand, were observed to be talkative on all occasions” (20–1).

Elbow does not shy away from the type of cultural incongruity Allaei and Connor describe. If groups enter into conflict, he encourages them to recognize and describe it in their final written product, with the belief that this type of interaction can only strengthen every group member’s individual writing. The rationale behind such thought is located in Kenneth Bruffee’s “Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind,” in which the author, expanding on the work of Vygotsky and Oakeshott, asserts that “if thought is internalized public and social talk. . .then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized” (422). Consequently, an attempt at collaboration between students of seemingly incongruous cultures—even if unsuccessful—allows individual participants a mental dialogism, which in turn leads to more complex individual writing with multiple possible layers and perspectives.

Collaborative Challenge 2: The Classroom as Social Mirror

Thomas Fox expands on the idea of silenced minority voices in “Race and Gender in Collaborative Learning.” In his piece, Fox suggest that the problem of cultural subversion is not rooted in the classroom, but that “racial and gender inequalities which exist socially and politically outside the classroom reassert themselves and thus prohibit [. . .] ‘status-equal’ conversations” (113). The social and political hierarchies that dictate students’ daily lives outside the academy are not checked at the classroom door, but are unfortunately as tangible as the textbooks in students’ bags.

In-class collaboration, then, is threatened not by those more vocal or comfortable with classroom culture but by those who possess membership in the dominant culture outside the classroom. Similar to Elbow, though, Fox sees possibility in this turbulent interaction. Building on John Trimbur’s notion of collaborative learning as the “collective investigation of differences [. . .] reciprocity and the mutual recognition of the participants and their differences” (476), Fox stresses that students must have “time to establish a sense of mutual recognition and obligation [. . .] constantly have to interpret the way they conduct their own work [. . .][and] need to experiment with homogenous grouping [. . .] homogenous groups of marginalized students provide opportunities for the transforming of the personal into the social” (120).

Fox’s model for cross-cultural collaboration has clear benefits. If we assume, as he suggests, the classroom is a mirror for the skewed social and political relationships outside the academy, then helping students toward an investigation, recognition, and appreciation of each other’s differences, toward a Trimburian “heterotopia of voices—a heterogeneity without hierarchy” (477), is desirable; and the progress made should reach beyond the classroom and allow marginalized students an opportunity to obtain their deserved measure of social and political agency.

Collaborative Challenge 3: Issues of Anticipation

In “Cross-Cultural Composition: Mediated Integration of U.S. and International Students,” Paul Kei Matsuda and Tony Silva posit a central difficulty of cross-cultural collaboration as anticipatory self-censorship: “some ESL students were not able to ask questions or participate [. . .] because they anticipated negative reactions from their classmates” (17). The responses ESL learners anticipated from their classmates left them highly apprehensive and effectively self-silenced during collaborative work and discussion. It is not, however, a one-sided problem. For their part, many native English speaking (NES) students exhibited a “lack of awareness and sensitivity towards their [ESL students’] needs” (17). Such a lack of requisite empathy rendered NES students unable to anticipate or encourage the type of responses ESL students would likely offer. The dilemma in Matsuda and Silva’s model is ironic: one group of students anticipates the worst from their classmates, while the other fails to construct any expectations at all.

To combat their difficulties, Matsuda and Silva conjure Pratt’s notion of cultural grappling and renegotiation in the contact zone. They suggest a fusion of an ESL and a composition course, a class they have implemented and termed a “cross-cultural composition course.” Such a class demands highly rigorous and specialized instructor training, as well as an efficient placement policy.

The cross-cultural composition course is beneficial in that it allows NES and ESL students to create a “shared discourse community,” that ensures mutual investment and respect, and provides an environment for ESL students to “openly negotiate how they relate to NES students [. . .]. Furthermore, by integrating NES and ESL students, this course allows them to see one another as complimentary resources” (19). Granted, Matsuda and Silva’s suggestion to develop an ESL /NES combination course lies outside the scope of some basic writing programs, but their suggestions for cultural negotiation and the mutual identification of unfamiliar students as complimentary resources are both important and achievable.

Final Thoughts

Enabling cross-cultural collaboration in the basic writing classroom is a tenuous process, fraught with issues of censorship (self-imposed or otherwise), cultural incongruity, and access or denial to socio-political or academic culture. At the same time, though, collaboration between culturally unique students holds great possibilities for improved writing, cultural recognition, and social empowerment. In “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing,” Maxine Hairston asserts that “every student brings to class a picture of the world in his or her mind that is constructed out of his or her cultural background. . .we must learn to see through their lenses as well as try to explain to them what we see through ours. In an interactive classroom where students collaborate with other writers, this process of decentering so one can understand the ‘other’ can foster genuine multicultural growth.” (710). Though challenging for students and instructors alike, the potential benefits of cross-cultural collaboration far outweigh the risks.

Cross-Cultural Bibliography