Knowledge Creation through Inter-Cultural Communication in Multi-Cultural Group Work

We no longer work in separate compartments. As globalization sweeps across the world, multiple-cultural groupwork has become common in many fields such as higher education, business, and science. We present a case study of an intercultural communication class at Waseda University in Tokyo in which a multi-cultural group of 17 students participated from April to July, 2010. The research question concerns how multi-cultural groupwork was actually done in an autonomous learning class. The author collected data through participant observation, questionnaires, and interviews, in addition to Bulletin Board System (hereinafter referred to as BBS) messages, 7 facilitators’ observation notes, and 17 students’ reports. Qualitative data analysis software, MAXQDA, was used to analyze the text data. The case study constructed a theoretical model of knowledge creation through intercultural communication in multi-cultural groupwork. This model reveals the process of multi-cultural groupwork as a spiral of four phases of knowledge: articulation, socialization, consolidation, and internalization.