Practical: Cognition and Culture
Full course description
This practical gives students an opportunity to experience working in distributed multi-cultural teams. In their future career, students will probably encounter many opportunities to collaborate with co-workers online. By developing uncertainty management (i.e., knowledge on how insecurity and unfamiliarity can influence communication and interpersonal relations and how these can be influenced) and perspective taking skills, students may be better prepared for such types of work and thus enhance their employability.
A group assignment challenges students to find and reflect on a problem that they can relate to the content of IPN2021. Finding a topic and co-creating a group product invites reflection on intercultural differences and collaboration in (virtual) teams. The assignment will result in a joint group product and an individual reflection report.
Course objectives
Students are able:
- to describe and explain cultural differences in a cognitive process (e.g. moral judgment, decision making, negotiation);
- to collaborate online in culturally diverse groups and improve collaborative problem solving skills, like creating a shared understanding of a problem, taking appropriate action to complete an assignment, and establishing and maintaining team organization;
- to understand how challenges to virtual team work in culturally diverse groups can be overcome;
- to reflect on intercultural differences in communication and cognition.