Individuals as the problem: cultures, subcultures and learning styles

Hybridization in online classrooms thus evades extant frameworks of cultural analysis: moreover, the individual learner likewise escapes such frameworks – first, as we have seen, as the individual is more than simply a token for a presumptively monolithic national culture. In addition, individuals represent a constantly shifting intersection of multiple cultures and subcultures, which in turn alter over time at varying rates, that is, from national/linguistic cultures that change relatively slowly, to youth cultures, which change very quickly (e.g. as we have seen, with regard to such fundamental notions as privacy and the nature of the self).

A given individual may further reflect some number of ethnic and/or other subcultures, including those shaped by economic and social class. Insofar as each individual may be thought of as a distinctive construction and inflection of each of these diverse levels of ‘culture’, she or he may inhabit a near-infinite continuum of possibilities that are only poorly and incompletely captured by the five cultural dimensions articulated by Hall and Hofstede.

More radically, as we have seen, the cross-cultural online learning environment facilitates such individuals’ creation of distinctive new syntheses and amalgams of diverse cultural elements that again escape overly simple frameworks of cultural analyses. Hewling (2005), for example, documents forcefully how students in one of her intercultural online classrooms repeatedly exhibited communicative behaviours and values that (a) either could not have been predicted by using Hofstede or, worse yet (b), directly contradicted whatever predictions one might have made on the basis of those schema. So Hewling finds that among her students – Canadians, a North American, and a Sudanese – concerns about authority are expressed primarily by the (North) Americans. But according to Hofstede’s framework, (North) Americans, as members of a low-power distant country, should be least concerned about issues of authority.

Rather, as members of an individualist country, according to Hofstede, these students should be most likely to express their opinions directly and without hesitation. Hewling (2005), however, shows that this was not the case. For her part, Hewling proposes a content analysis methodology that she argues is more appropriate for analyzing the intercultural communication that takes place in online classrooms (2005) – a methodology that we can understand to incorporate both Koch’s second approach (‘culture as text’) and third approach (‘culture as community and practice’) to cultural analysis (Koch 2006: 221ff.).

Additional frameworks for cultural analysis have also been proposed. One of the most notable has been developed by Cantoni and his colleagues. Their frameworks take up Baumgartner’s much more complex matrix of cultural dimensions, one that adds to Hall and Hofstede an additional seventeen cultural factors developed in part from the theoretical work of Gould (2005). The resulting framework is then applied to a project involving ICTs for teacher-training in Brazil (Cantoni et al. 2006).

But again, this sophisticated enhancement of Hall and Hofstede as a framework for cultural analysis of intercultural online learning reiterates the point already made regarding intercultural communication online: while Hall and Hofstede (among others) may be used in initial ways, these frameworks provide only limited, and sometimes profoundly misleading, approaches to the realities of intercultural communication online.

While new, more comprehensive frameworks and approaches are being developed (e.g. by Cantoni et al.) that promise to offer us better understanding of online intercultural communication – and thus, of how we can shape both our technologies and their uses to foster the most effective intercultural communication and e-learning. We have only just begun.
Read More : Learning Cultures in Online Education