Differences that Make a Difference: Intercultural Communication, Simulation, and the Debriefing Process

Communication is a fundamental life process through which humans learn to make sense of their worlds and relate themselves to other people. Many of the dynamics associated with that process are culture-bound such as the explicit and implicit rules surrounding language choice and usage. To the extent that much of human communication is culture-bound, teaching about communication involves teaching about culture and its effects upon the process of communication. There is a natural isomorphy between experiential learning and the study of communication in general, and inter-cultural communication in particular. Experiential learning in the classroom incorporates those real life processes into the educational setting in order for them to be used and scrutinized. The heart of these sorts of learning experiences is the post-experience analytic process, generally referred to as the debriefing session. This essay focuses on the debriefing process as it accompanies one form of experiential learning, simulations and games. It provides an analysis of the debriefing process and effective strategies for its use, with special attention to debriefing in intercultural communication learning contexts.