Post 147: Case Study of Multicultural communication

Multicultural Communication: refers to when people from multiple backgrounds with different ways of communicating coexist without interacting deeply. Often one culture has more prestige or is dominant over the other minority culture. Multicultural Communication exists in schools where you can have a classroom filled with students of many different cultures in a teacher-centered classroom where the teacher does most of the talking and the students of many cultures rarely interact with each other. These students of many backgrounds merely exist side by side in the classroom. Usually, there is a dominant culture involved and everyone is expected to abide by the rules of the dominant culture. And in a classroom, the dominant culture is that of the teacher-centered classroom.

When I went to elementary school, my teacher was the one who did all the talking. My classmates and I came from many different ethnic backgrounds. There were mostly African Americans in the class, Chinese American (me), a school from the Netherlands, an Native American girl and some Hispanic girls. (I don't know which country).  The reason I never got to know my classmates very well is because we hardly did any talking other than, "What date did the teacher say the quiz was?",  or "When is the project due?". Each of us would work on our projects individually and then show and tell it to the class. We never got to work together to get to know each other so our conversations were superficial at best. You have multicultural communication when people of different nationalities coexist side by side without really getting to know each other deeply.  I never learned about the different cultures in my class. I would have loved to learn about Dutch culture, Dutch food from Anne Marie or learn about Native American songs and food from Priscilla but since our teacher did all the talking and the focus was on reading and writing, for me to learn about the culture of my fellow students was lost. We communicated about class assignments, but we did not interact on any kind of deep levels.  We existed side by side but always separate in the classroom.