Intercultural Communication in the Global Classroom

Abstract

The Global Classroom Project, a joint experiment in long-distance, cross-cultural, transnational learning (“not,” the authors point out, “the one-sided ‘missionary’ instruction typical of distance learning courses”), is outlined in “Intercultural Communication in the Global Classroom” by TyAnna K. Herrington and Yuri P. Tretyakov, originally published in 2004 in Russian-American Links: 300 Years of Cooperation (Russian Academy of Sciences). Here, the authors review the history of their experiment in communication studies, which revealed a number of challenges in intercultural communication styles among Russian, Swedish, and American students. This valuable study lends insight into early attempts to bring “collaborative” practice to transnational and cross-cultural constituencies meeting each other for the first time. The “chaos” that the authors report is read as a space for unstructured and unimagined discoveries for students and professors alike, testifying perhaps to broad, non-ideologically informed but technologically enhanced creative and transnational networks yet to come.