CIICPD 2023

self-defined or self-interpreted “turning points in a person’s life” (Tripp, 1993), or as “moments of prime importance” (Cope and Watts, 2000: 112) mostly associated with extreme behaviours or emotions that get interpreted by the participants. These personal insights are then used as a tool to accelerate personal growth, for example, to boost the general “process of learning and growing self-awareness (Cope and Watts, 2000: 113), to “develop an increasing understanding of and control over professional judgement” (Tripp, 1993: 24), or of course to enhance intercultural competence. As such, varied CIs from intercultural encounters have been collected, analysed and sorted into relevant categories (Spencer-Oatey, 2013) to be used to promote intercultural dialogue through training workshops or training materials in the form of exercises, role plays, simulation games, or as a “culture assimilator” (e.g., Brislin, 1986; Wight, 1995). 2. Emerging Critical Incident Research in Selected European Countries New approaches have been emerging in recent CI research in Europe, with the longest tradition, stretching back over 30 years, being traced in Germany. The work of the culture psychologist Alexander Thomas (1991) firmly set the theme into the intercultural context. The linguist Hans Jürgen Heringer (2004; 2017) then first contrasted the established didactic formats, e.g. Thomas’ (1991) Culture Assimilator, to a story-telling form. On this basis, Fetscher (2010; 2015) emphasised a more empirical approach and postulates to distinguish the original narrative from post-edited didactic materials. In pedagogical contexts, Andreas Groß and Wolf Rainer Leenen (2019) focus on “case-based learning” (p.335) and distinguish critical incidents as relatively brief descriptions from broader intercultural relevant stories. In intercultural management training, Barmeyer and Franklin (2016) use critical incidents in the form of complex case studies. Lately, an intensified critical discussion about the use of critical incidents for intercultural learning (Fetscher and Groß, 2022) emerged as part of a more general debate in Germany disputing the use of the notion of ‘culture’ against the background of highly diverse societies and setting it into a more intersectional approach (Mahadevan et al., 2020). The approach of Doris Fetscher and Susanne Klein (see Chapter 1) from the University of Applied Sciences Zwickau analysing a selected set of CI samples from a narratological perspective in order to develop a tool for a meta-reflexive approach, which does not focus on cultural categories, is part of this debate. Research on CIs in Czechia began in the field of psychosocial intervention and forensic psychology. Ingrid Matoušková (Matoušková, 2010, 2013, 2014) from the Škoda Auto University first applied the CIT approach to help eliminate potential traumatic experiences of first responders, i.e. police, fire or rescue workers, subsequently establishing the System of Psychosocial Intervention Services (SPIS) in Czech health care. Scholars from the Department of Language Training and Intercultural Competences (KJPIK) at the Škoda Auto University then adopted the applied approach with regard to the CIs in their language teaching curricula and programmes (Sieglová and Stejskalová, 2021). While building a database of CIs within varied agents of socialisation collected from students in HEIs’ language courses, scenarios taking place in student job internships (Sieglová and Příbramská, 2021), foreign language and intercultural communication (Sieglová, 2022a, 2022b), cross-border tandem cooperation (Sieglová and Gaisch,

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