Erasmus Student Reflections: Intercultural Communication and Self-Discovery through Tallinn-Monroe Telecollaboration

Intercultural communication is a challenging process: by confronting oneself to difference, one learns not only about others, but also about oneself. As a British-born and an Aotearoa/New Zealand citizen who grew up mostly in the Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, my feelings about cultural belonging have always been complicated, especially when it comes to situating myself within national borders. This class on “KOI7067.FK Basics of Intercultural Communication” has confronted me to these feelings of inadequacy and provided some crucial insight that I will take home with me when returning from my semester-long exchange in Tallinn.

View on Tallinn from Linnahall, September 2024. 

By meeting students from University of Louisiana Monroe, I was faced not only with my assumptions about Americans, but my difficulty to identify with one specific culture. It seemed easier to some of the group members to call themselves Americans, as they had lived most of their lives, if not all, in the same county and/or State. This feeling of inadequacy opened up discussions about the complexities of identifying with the broad notion of one national culture, not only in trans-/multinational contexts, but also in the contexts of ethnic minorities and regional identification. I found it interesting to note how people from different backgrounds, but sometimes the same country, had diverging feelings about these issues. However, I came to understand how the regional cultural divides within the US were more than just how far south and/or west a state was located, but also vary within a state, at least in Louisiana’s case, where environment and other cultural influences (e.g. Caribbean, French, Hispanic) play a major role. Although our group seemed to agree that in comparison to Europe, the US and Turkey were relatively more culturally homogenous, there is still a great deal of change in politeness norms, dialects, and cuisine within a State.

View over Senate square in Helsinki, September 2024.

I also remember once talking to my group about how I had spent a weekend in Helsinki with two German friends I had met during my Erasmus in Tallinn. To one of the American students, the idea of casually crossing a border on a spontaneous weekend trip with two friends I had just met seemed out of this world. It was only when he reacted that I remembered how small yet culturally compact Europe is, and how Schengen citizens tend to have a rather abstract relationship with borders – something I take too much for granted. When it is so easy to expose oneself to other cultures, it becomes easier to forget where they actually differ. This realisation was once again reconfirmed outside of the classroom, when I visited Narva, staring at the Eastern border of Estonia with Russia, which has become a rather ominous place in the current geopolitical context. Indeed, not all borders are so superfluous. 

View across the Narva river, or the Estonian-Russian border into Ivangorod, Russia, October 2024.

Beyond our discussions and comparisons, the experience of intercultural collaboration in itself has been revelatory: although I still find myself to identify little with Swiss values and work ethic, I have certainly grown used to them. I have noticed my tendency to automatically expect similar standards of timeliness and precision when working with people who have not evolved in similar cultural contexts, despite often feeling not up to these same standards in Switzerland. Sometimes, I found myself frustrated at this difference of expectations although it is not until the end of collaboration that I realised that there may also have some relation to my cultural influences. When creating some AI characters with the group for our final project, we made a Swiss-French character and Spaniard who had come to work in France (French culture is highly influential in the western and francophone part of Switzerland where I live), an issue that came up was the tendency the scrupulosity and seriousness with which work was taken – what some people in Switzerland jokingly refer to as ‘the protestant work ethic.’ It was only when a friend from Switzerland mentioned this on a phone call that I made that connexion. I may still feel like I do not sufficiently correspond to Swiss cultural norms when there, but when confronted with a greater degree of cultural difference, such as in situations of intercultural communication or of a semester abroad, these ‘Swiss’ traits seem more apparent. 

This essay has essentially consisted of variations on the same theme: the relative notion of cultural identification – specifically, how cultural affinities and influences may become more manifest through contrasts in situations of intercultural communication. Exposing oneself to individuals of different backgrounds is more than a broadening of one’s horizons, but an invitation to introspection into one’s perception of the many differing, yet intersecting cultures across the globe, including one’s own belonging. 

P.S. An opening photo is a picture of a swamp not far from Tallinn area, which was taken in October 2024. Although I do not mention swamps in my text, I think they represent the murkiness and richness of intercultural dynamics.