Student Discourses of Community in an Intercultural Conflict and Community Course: A Critical Assessment

ABSTRACT This study is based on an undergraduate course on intercultural conflict and community building, which was grounded in critical intercultural communication pedagogy (CICP) and included a two-day, over-night, off-campus retreat. Three themes were critically analyzed and problematized in student retreat reflection paper discourse: celebrating difference and plurality, emphasizing similarity over differences, and building community: tools and tensions. Students praised individuals’ pluralistic cultural identities and differences, described spaces of connection primarily through the identification of similarities, and described communication practices such as sharing culturally-based visions and narratives in community building and intercultural conflict management. Bringing together frameworks for critical reflexivity and critical communities within CICP, the conception of critical intercultural communities becomes an important way to define, orient, and teach intercultural communication, conflict and community building.