Why You Should Take an Intercultural Communications Class While Abroad

Studying abroad is a large step into developing your cultural knowledge and exposure to new and unique experiences. Before you take off and even after you arrive at your host destination, you may feel excited, prepared, or eager, but you could also be feeling nervous, scared, or uncertain of what to expect. It is this internal tension that can be hard to process, leading your body to go into survival mode. You may feel overwhelmed with the bustling city, frustrated with your lack of communication ability, or uncomfortable with aspects of your host culture. It is important to ask yourself, how can you deal with this tension in a way that fosters understanding and growth?

Well, Intercultural Communications and Leadership is a class offered by CIEE that is designed to help you not only answer that question, but put it in practice. The class is structured very differently from any other class offered by CIEE or Yonsei. It is structured around the students and our lives, having a safe space to talk about what we’ve experienced during our time abroad. We often do activities about what culture means, how culture is created, what values are, and how traditions are developed. We had multiple guest speakers come in to talk about their experience in different cultures and how they navigated these tensions within their own life. We also had fieldtrips to local museums to explore the art and history of Korea, analyzing it using what we've learned in class. One of the most important aspects of the class however, was the cultural partner assignments. At the start of the semester you must choose a cultural partner who has lived within the host culture for a long time and can provide you with a new cultural perspective. These assignments are activities including explaining the origin of your names, comparing values and how they were developed, and evaluating if we use more high or low context methods of communication. I found that interacting, teaching, and learning from my cultural partner was the most valuable part of this class for me. While talking about how to have effective intercultural communication is important, putting it directly into practice was the most rewarding for me.

You may be thinking why is this important to learn while abroad?  The class offers a safe space for exchange students to talk about their experiences and struggles living within the host culture, compare these experiences to our home culture, and have productive discussions on how to deal with tension. The class is a mix of sociology, psychology, communications, history and cultural studies, incorporating all of these subjects to create an environment for exploration and reflection. The class begins with setting the stage for the rest of the semester, teaching you the universal human needs, safety and connection, two concepts that you will be referencing for the rest of the semester. Through the discussions of our lived experiences we dissect what it is that makes us react a certain way when confronted with the tension of being in an unfamiliar culture. We learned about what cultural shock and cultural clash is and discussed what humans need to maintain culture and exchange culture in a way that holds space for everyone. 

Overall, this class was a crash course on how we as humans function when confronted with unfamiliar tension. As humans we tend to encode a response before decoding the information that was just presented to us. For example, when you first arrive in your host country you may produce an emotional response as a result of excitement or fear. However, in this class we learn that through learning how to decode and process information before encoding a response, we can produce more effective methods of existing with these emotions and communicating them with others. Long story short, the purpose of the class is in the name, to teach you how to adopt an interculturalist lifestyle, moving past cultural tolerance, and not only being aware of the differences you will encounter, but existing well within them to flourish, create peace, and communicate peacefully while abroad.