Intercultural Insight Reflective Practices for GTAs

Welcome to this space dedicated to reflective practice on intercultural critical incidents in GTAs’ teaching experiences

Your perception and practice of teaching and learning is deeply cultural

Culture does not mean country:

Here, we explore “culture” NEITHER as a fixed national identity NOR as rules, norms, or essences that determine people's perspectives and practices.
Culture emerges at many levels: In educational settings, culture can be discussed at multiple levels—across the university as an institution, within disciplines and departments, and in the more immediate contexts of classrooms, research groups, offices, and labs.

For individuals, culture is the interpretive resources that we have developed from past life experience and that we draw on to interpret new experience:

Culture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each member’s behaviour and interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour (Spencer-Oatey, 2008)
Culture is both stable and dynamic: it can be sustained and reproduced, but it can also be negotiated, reshaped, and even subverted. It is always entangled with relations of power that shape whose voices and practices are amplified and whose are marginalized.

Why is it important to reflect on "culture" in your teaching?

You should consider yourself and your students in terms of people's diverse and complex past experiences and educational trajectories rather than reducing people to broad "cultural" categories such as racial, national, or ethnic labels.
In your teaching, you bring assumptions, beliefs, and expectations about teaching and learning, which are shaped by your own experiences and your socialisation.
Often, you draw on these meaning resources unconsciously to interpret, evaluate, and respond to students and classroom situations. However, what feels “normal” to you may be very different for students with other perspectives.
By making these unconscious influences visible, you can choose to either rely on them or open your teaching to alternative perspectives and practices, rather than being determined by your existing perspective.

Reflecting on your interpretations of critical incidents and analysing the cultural aspects of your assumptions and interpretations help you:

Notice how you and your students may hold different assumptions and expectations.
Recognize how your own assumptions and expectations have been shaped by your previous experiences.
Analyse how these assumptions and expectations shape your interactions with and responses to students in teaching.
Understand how unawareness of these differences can lead to misunderstandings or miscommunication.
Engage with alternative perspectives and practices and co-create local classroom cultures with students

What is a critical incident ?

Andy Molinsky (2013) said we need to be stimulated to grow: such as through disorienting dilemmas, also known as critical incidents.

In intercultural studies, a critical incident is:

“situations in which there is a misunderstanding, problem, or conflict arising from cultural differences between interacting parties or where there is a problem of cross-cultural adaptation.”- Wight (1995)

In teacher education, a critical incident is:

“ … an unplanned and unanticipated event that occurs during a lesson and that serves to trigger insights about some aspect of teaching and learning”(Farrell, 2008, p.113).

How to reflect on a critical incident?

Think about a time when:

something unplanned and unexpected happened to you in teaching. How did you handle it, and what did you learn from the experience?
you were involved in a misunderstanding, problem, or conflict in teaching. What did you do and what was the outcome?

Critical Incident Stories

Introduction

The following stories, shared by fellow GTAs, highlight real challenges, mistakes, and strategies that others have used to navigate them. As you read, consider the reflective questions.

When students push back against your marking

I worked as a GTA for lab sessions. In the lab, we asked students to work in groups of two or four. They were given three patient samples and had to identify, using a bunch of tests, what the infections were. They would be assessed in their lab skills as well as their transferrable skills such as teamwork and communication.

In one group of four, two students did their task really quickly and left behind the other two that weren’t that confident. Also, one of the two that left early set their gloves on fire and got burned, about which I didn’t know until the next day. I reported the incident to the senior, gave the whole group a poor mark (6/7 out of 10) and provided feedback on their teamwork and communication. The students disagreed with my mark and feedback and emailed the module lead to say that they weren’t happy with their mark.

I understand that they had never worked in a lab setting before and thus felt that I was being too harsh. They were in their final year and needed good grades. However, health and safety are a key thing in a lab. I also want my students to develop good transferrable skills after their degree. Going forwards, I am going to go into these labs and set what I expect out on the table.

Reflective questions:

What do you think caused this incident? Why?
How would you advice this GTA to handle task induction in future? Why in this way?

When students don’t answer the questions

I worked as a seminar tutor in WBS and led discussions with materials given by the lecturer. One time, there was one question where students were asked to use three words to describe their personal identity and write down three brands consistent with their identity.

I was surprised that no one wanted to answer this question. When it happened in the first group, I thought maybe the students were really tired and didn’t want to engage, because it was at one o’clock in the afternoon. In the second seminar, even the usually active students didn’t want to answer this question and I had to nominate. In the third group, I did an experiment: I incentivised their participation by giving each speaker a piece of chocolate and more students engaged.

I think maybe some of the students were reluctant to answer the question because it’s a private question. Perhaps they were worried that they would be judged by their classmates if they share their personal identity in class. In the future, I should give them four to five questions so that they can have the freedom to choose and don’t feel forced to self-disclose.

Reflective questions:

What do you think of this GTA's interpretation of what happened? Why?
How would you advise this GTA to design questions in future? Why in this way?

When classroom debates become disruptive

In one of my seminars for first-years, two students got very excited about a political topic in the discussion and started arguing with each other loudly. They disrupted the whole class and made the other students uncomfortable.

I was confused: I come from an education background where there aren’t many opportunities to talk and respect is instilled in us; I wasn’t sure if that kind of discussion was normal in this context. I also felt frustrated, because I didn’t know how to get their attention back in a way that wouldn’t make me seem too strict. Afterwards, prompted by conversations with my colleagues, I decided to send all students an email to reinforce the class culture and stress that it is important to be respectful in the classroom. One of the two students responded apologetically, and I haven’t had problems in my seminars since then.

From this incident, I have learned to set clear expectations early on so that students can know where the boundaries are. I have also learned to think of more creative ways to engage the students such as role play and games.

Reflective questions:

What might one's previous educational experience influence the way they participate in the classroom discussion?
How would you build a classroom culture of respectful discussion/debate? Why in this way?

When a student’s “joke” offends others

In a lab class, there was a student who was brought to my attention by one of the other GTAs. He was doing an impression of an accent that wasn’t his. Some students seemed to be offended by his behaviour.

I felt disappointed, because the student is an adult and is supposed to have some cultural awareness. At the same time, I also felt conflicted, because he is only eighteen and I didn’t want to be too harsh on him. Young people should be allowed to make mistakes and learn from them. We reported the incident to the lecturer and the student said that he was just joking around.

After talking to the other GTAs from different backgrounds, we decided that was not enough and escalated it to the school and the EDI team took it over from us. In my future practice, I will take things like this more seriously than I did and turn them into learning opportunities for students to be more empathetic.

Reflective questions:

What do you think of the way this GTA handled the situation? Why?
How could you balance holding students accountable for their behavior and showing empathy and care for the students? Why in this way?

Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the WIHEA Seed Fund, which made this project possible, and the Intercultural Training Program by Student Opportunity, which inspired the content development of this workshop. We also extend our heartfelt thanks to all the participants who shared their experiences, insights, and reflections—your contributions have brought this resource to life.

Get in touch

Dr. Zi Wang, Lecturer, Shanghai University

Yvette Yitong Wang, Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick

Sara Hattersley, Associate Professor, Academic Development Centre,

University of Warwick

Literature

Farrell, T. S. C. (2008). Reflective Language Teaching: From Research to Practice. Continuum Press.

Molinsky, A. (2013).Global dexterity: How to adapt your behavior across cultures without losing yourself in the process. Harvard Business Review Press.

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008). Culturally Speaking. Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum.

Wight, A. R. (1995). The critical incident as a training tool. In S. M. Fowler (Ed.), Intercultural sourcebook: Cross-cultural training methods. Volume 1 (pp. 127-140). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press.