Focus of this article is communicative challenges in multinational project work
as well as how such challenges can be managed. By analyzing their communication
in so called reflective dialogues and email correspondence the discussion
sheds light upon how the participants of one such project talk about the meaning
and pedagogical fruitfulness of horizontal classroom dialogue, and the degree to
which they themselves actually communicate in a horizontal fashion within the
project group.
Drawing upon the discourse on classroom communication and intercultural
communication data was subject to a qualitative analysis. Among other
things, different aspects of horizontality in the dialogues were discerned but no
significant differences in terms of indexicality were found. It was also shown
that variations in the degree of horizontality-verticality in the dialogues and
email correspondence may originate in different views on gender, project
management and relationships between colleagues.
Moreover, it was shown how reflective dialogues can be a useful tool for
arriving at a common conceptual framework within a crossnational collaborative
project. This said, the results can presumably be transferred to multicultural,
and monocultural classrooms, to teacher teams analyzing problematic
(or successful!) learning situations before ’taking measures’, or in order to raise
teachers’ intercultural awareness.=