Questions, Ideas, and Concerns about Multicultural Student Teams

[Extract]We live in a globalised world, and one of the most important things that we as educators can do is to help prepare our students to communicate in that world. In our multicultural classrooms, we have tremendous opportunity for students to experience intercultural communication and learn about different values and behaviours so as to develop their intercultural competence. To help students develop this competence, many educators including myself use multicultural student teams. Johnson and Johnson (2005), Michaelson (2002), and others have discussed the benefits of such teams including how they help students develop the employability skills of group and intercultural collaboration, how they are an improved form of learning over lectures largely because they involve active learning, and how they set up an emotionally and cognitively supportive structure for students. However, even when educators follow theory and advice on how to run multicultural student teams, the teams do not work for all students. Therefore, more research is needed on how to help students participate in these teams. In particular, more research needs to be conducted on how students and lecturers can build teams composed of students from individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Research has shown that both groups change behaviour when working together, that the individualists become more dominating and the collectivists begin to drop out (Taras & Rowney, 2007).