CIICPD 2023

completed by American and German students to find out whether these categories were perceived as typical. Furthermore, they compared their results with existing literature dealing with differences in German–American encounters. As a result, they claim to be able to formulate essential standards of German culture. The four questions that follow the text about Fritz and Gloria mirror this essentialist approach through strongly stereotyping formulations about ‘German men’. The cited example belongs to the second training unit from Studienhalber in Deutschland dealing with the German standard of “directness in interpersonal communication”. Reading the background information for this standard (Markowsky and Thomas, 1995, p. 53f), one will certainly find, even today, a relative degree of truth (e.g. the case with stereotypes (Fetscher and Heringer, 2011)). However, many questions remain neglected: for example, we do not know whether Fritz has done complex face work through nonverbal and paraverbal means, which attenuate the directness of the verbal message. In addition, information on the interaction history of the participants or the context in which the situation took place is absent. The text as well as the whole exercise constructs difference per se. In our paper, we focus on critical incidents as written fragments of autobiographical narratives drawing on the categories developed by Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2004) (3.1), Bamberg (2012) and Giaxoglu and Georgakopoulou (2022) (3.2), originally used to analyse autobiographical interviews and already applied in a previous study by Fetscher (2022). In the context of this approach, it is common practice to present the data in its authentic, not post-edited form (see Appendix I). For the present analysis the following questions have been formulated: – Which procedures of representation underlie CI-narratives? – Which aspects of representation are used? – How do the narrators position themselves and the other actors? – How can their specific characteristics be made fruitful for intercultural learning, considering a critical, interactionist concept of culture? 2. A Brief Reflection on Terms: CIs as raw and didactic versions Fetscher (2022) underlines that it is only in recent years that researchers have viewed the use of the term ‘critical incident’ (CI) through a more critical lens. Hans Jürgen Heringer, for example, in the introduction to the fifth edition of Interkulturelle Kommunikation (2017), added a sub-chapter to the chapter on CIs dealing with storytelling, which was further juxtaposed with a chapter discussing didacticised forms of them. Correspondingly, in two older contributions on working with CIs, Fetscher differentiates between a) a raw version for the unedited CI-narratives and b) the didactic post-edited version (2010; 2015). In the handbook Handbuch Methoden interkultureller Weiterbildung , Andreas Groß and Wolf Rainer Leenen also dedicate a separate chapter to critical incidents as a “special form of case-based learning” 3 (2019, p. 331). In this chapter, they distinguish critical incidents as “relatively brief descriptions” from relevant intercultural narratives, tales or stories, which in turn are

Translated by the authors.

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