“Do not dance Chinese dance”: Intercultural Attitudes and Choreographic Collaboration within Tertiary Education

Abstract

Given the growth in international education, tertiary institutions have sought to integrate intercultural learning within their degree programmes. Collaborative task work has been adopted as a deliberate way to facilitate intercultural interactions by teachers, with the aim of growing both the collaborative abilities and intercultural aptitudes of students, in preparation for 21st century workplaces. Within tertiary dance education, this intercultural collaborative activity can involve bringing together students from diverse cultural backgrounds within group tasks in choreography. Such group tasks are not always without problems however, and students can feel that both their collaborative abilities, and their intercultural skills, have not been extended. Moreover, they can feel that their cultural backgrounds, and their creative contributions, have not been valued. This emphasizes the need for more nuanced understandings of intercultural competence and collaborative competence within the choreography classroom. My research therefore examines how attitude, as a dimension within intercultural competence (Byram, 1997), can impact the way students approach an intercultural task. This study has particularly focused on how a negative intercultural attitude can be expressed and experienced in different ways within a collaborative group task. To understand the complex ways that this negative attitude might influence a collaborative task, I consider how the symmetries of action, status and knowledge within a collaboration (Dillenbourg 1999) might be impacted. These symmetries emphasize the importance of equality within a collaboration, without which a collective creative task becomes a more didactic endeavor. By innovatively bringing together these theories of intercultural attitude and symmetries in collaboration, I produce a framework for investigating dilemmas within intercultural collaboration. I situate this framework within a tertiary dance context, and ask the question: How do international students perceive and experience a negative attitude towards intercultural collaboration within a choreography course? This thesis addresses this research through a qualitative research method, and draws on student narratives from semi-structured interviews with five international students from China. As they share their choreographic experiences in collaborating with local students in a Western liberal tertiary dance educational programmes, various issues associated with negative intercultural attitudes emerge. These include cultural assumptions regarding communication behaviours, creativity practices and dance values.