Yea-Wen Chen

The intercultural communication classroom can be a place an emotionally and intellectually heavy place for many students and teachers. Sensitive topics arise and students must face complex issues with intellectual curiosity and collegial respect. To navigate the precarious waters of intercultural communications, teachers need an intentional approach to foster meaningful discussion and learning. This pedagogical guide presents conceptual overviews, student activities, and problem-solving strategies for teaching intercultural communication. The authors navigate eight categories of potential conflict, including: communicating power and privilege, community engagement in social justice, and assessing intercultural pedagogies for social justice. In addition to empirical studies and the authors’ own classroom experiences, the book features the personal narratives of junior and senior intercultural communication teacher-scholars whose journeys will encourage and instruct readers towards more fulfilling teaching experiences.

The intercultural communication classroom can be a place an emotionally and intellectually heavy place for many students and teachers. Sensitive topics arise and students must face complex issues with intellectual curiosity and collegial respect. To navigate the precarious waters of intercultural communications, teachers need an intentional approach to foster meaningful discussion and learning. This pedagogical guide presents conceptual overviews, student activities, and problem-solving strategies for teaching intercultural communication. The authors navigate eight categories of potential conflict, including: communicating power and privilege, community engagement in social justice, and assessing intercultural pedagogies for social justice. In addition to empirical studies and the authors’ own classroom experiences, the book features the personal narratives of junior and senior intercultural communication teacher-scholars whose journeys will encourage and instruct readers towards more fulfilling teaching experiences.

Our Voices: Essays in Culture, Ethnicity, and Communication examines intercultural communication through an array of cultural and personal perspectives, with each of its contributors writing a first-person account of his or her experiences in the real world. While most readers are collections of scholarly essays that describe intercultural communication, Our Voices presents short, student-oriented readings chosen with an eye toward engaging the reader. Collectively, the readings tackle the key areas of communication-rhetoric, mass communication, and interpersonal communication-using a uniquely expansive and humanist perspective that provides a voice to otherwise marginalized members of society. Praised by students for its abundance of short, first-person narratives, Our Voices traverses topics as diverse as queer identity, racial discourse, and codes of communication in nontraditional families.