In a recent meeting for DePaul’s ongoing series of GLE (Global Learning Experience), professor of Italian Caterina Farina Mongiat suggested facilitators of GLE might gain valuable insights from the field of intercultural communication to prepare for coordinating cross-cultural interactions between student cohorts.

Though conceptualizing what to apply from an entire scholarly field is difficult to do when also planning the logistics and curriculum for a GLE course, we can try to start somewhere with an accessible application. As a student of TESOL studies and now intercultural communication at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I have started by looking at W. Barnett Pearce’s (2005) initial work on the coordinated management of meaning (CMM). The context for Pearce’s work, though now dated, parallels our present challenges in engaging meaningful intercultural discussions, even within an academic space: global nation-state relations, misunderstandings of the cultural and social other, conflicting faith-based and cultural values, among the many complexities that cannot all be accounted for here.  

An exigence for a communication theory

Reflecting on the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing and its subsequent jury trial of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, Pearce (2005) identified cultural pluralism as the source of the communication challenge: How can we have reasonable communication between diverse and often opposing cultural positions? In the communication event between Yousef and Judge Kevin Michael Duffy, it was clear that both communicators (Pearce uses the term actors) believed the other to be identified as “terrorist.” Looking at courtroom transcripts of Yousef’s statement, Yousef defines terrorism in terms of U.S. action, then applies this meaning to himself:

“You keep talking also about collective punishment and killing innocent people to force governments to change their policies; you call this terrorism when someone would kill innocent people or civilians in order to force the government to change its policies. Well, when you were the first one who invented this terrorism.

You were the first one who killed innocent people, and you are the first one who introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you dropped an atomic bomb which killed tens of thousands of women and children in Japan and when you killed over a hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, in Tokyo with fire bombings. You killed them by burning them to death…

And now you have invented new ways to kill innocent people. You have so-called economic embargo which kills nobody other than children and elderly people, and which other than Iraq you have been placing the economic embargo on Cuba and other countries for over 35 years. . . .

The Government in its summations and opening statement said that I was a terrorist. Yes, I am a terrorist and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it was against the United States Government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.” (as cited in NYT, 1996).

Duffy’s response to Yousef, quoting from the Qur’an, calls Yousef “an apostle of evil” and deems him unfit for the faith.

This communication event of a courtroom hearing between these two particular actors presents a dire instance of an intercultural exchange, but allows us to reflect on how to adopt a constructive approach for our own global and intercultural endeavors. First, we can establish the nature of communication itself: this allows us to identify the participants and their goals in engaging in the communication.

From Pearce (2005), we can assume that communication is performative rather than referential, meaning the communication itself has characteristics, rather than just content or material of communication. In a GLE, though the topic or subject matter to be discussed is integral to the course or effort, the act of meeting in a video conference room or a live chat differs in dynamic with an asynchronous exchange. Pearce’s referent of communicators as actors engaging in an event is a point of emphasis, as communication is a living process instead of a transaction.

Communication relies on multiple levels of embedded contexts, or the “hierarchy model of actor’s meanings” (p. 39). In other words, meaning is dependent on the contexts in which a communication occurs, and it is thoughtful to take note of what is taking place in your cultural other’s environment and political climate, as your communication with that other is always happening within a larger context. With that said, each actor self-presents their own perception of an episode (sequence of events) from the position of their culture (here a nontechnical referent for what someone believes is right and wrong), so checking the immediacy of your response to the other helps to assess your own position on an episode.

Applying CMM to Global Learning Experiences

Considering what communication involves, who it involves, and the complexities that are embedded in any exchange, Pearce offers the theory of coordinated management of meaning (CMM) with the goal of respectful, fair, and productive intercultural communication. In a CMM approach to communication, communication should be

• collaborative rather than individual, as action (and communication) is done between others;
• between actors that are self-aware, as the individual communicates in the context of a larger system and must recognize that social systemic ethic in order to act responsibly;
• an ongoing sequence, as the meanings produced by the first actor intermeshes with the meanings of the recipient/responder; and
• done in the spirit of wanting to do something constructive in the social worlds that it interprets and critiques (p.45).

Though many theories of communication seem like common sense, reflecting on our own practices as actors within larger contexts reminds us to reassess our positions, exchanges, and our goals. Looking at scholarship and research in the field of intercultural communication can only broaden your spirit of constructiveness in our greater society, and also make for a great GLE.

Pearce, W. B. (2005). The coordinated management of meaning (CMM). In W. Gudykunst (Ed.),

Theorizing about intercultural communication (35-54). Thousand Oaks: SAGE.