CIICPD 2023

In contrast to CI applications, as shown above with the example from Markowsky and Thomas (1995), we see, that in six of the CI-narratives of our corpus, the origin of the participants is not even mentioned. In four of the examples, ethnic or national categories are used but not made relevant for further explanations. This is, for example, the case of the CI-narrative 2 (“Paying a bill in a restaurant”), for which we therefore use the term ‘limited ethnicisation’. This is another aspect corresponding to the findings in the German corpus. Thus, the question may arise whether these narratives are useful for intercultural learning and whether intercultural learning depends on the attribution of national or ethnic categories. And indeed, most of the existing training programmes suggest such an approach. In parallel, over the last decade, a critical discussion which focuses, for example, on the deconstruction of such categories (Hinnenkamp, 2022), multi-perspective analysis (von Helmolt, 2022) and culture-reflexive approaches (Nazarkiewicz, 2022) is evident. The expectations of trainees are often oriented versus gaining a stereotypical knowledge about the ‘other’, because it is easy to access and clearly structured (see the example from Markowsky/Thomas (1995) above). It promises a quick but obviously only superficial inside view in often highly complex and differentiated social situations. Our examples do not permit such a clear interpretation and the question arises whether they can be used as training materials without being rewritten. “Greeting” (Appendix I) is the only CI-narrative of the corpus that offers a clear explanation for the irritation (though for reasons of space was not discussed in the paper): the expectation of the narrator about the typical procedure of the greeting sequence is not met. The analysis of the cited CI-narratives as fragments of autobiographical narration invite us to an approach that does not aim to find ‘the one’ explanation based on cultural difference, but stimulates discussion about a multitude of interpretations taking cultural features into account as only one category among many others. To implement this approach, we used the findings from the analysis of the narrative structure and the positioning activities as a basis to develop our stimuli for pedagogical use. Our approach postulates that this type of questioning based on spontaneous and unedited CI narratives can be very fruitful for differentiated intercultural reflection. A subsequent study should observe and evaluate the pedagogical work with the developed stimuli. For this, trainers may gain an analytical perspective that does not focus solely on ethnic or national categories but on how people structure their narratives, what they make relevant through which narrative means and which questions arise from the specific characteristics of every single narrative production.

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