「社会はコミュニケーションによって再生産される」というコミュニケーション学の重要な知見に鑑みれば、教員養成系大学におけるコミュニケーション教育が社会の再生産の根幹に関わる重要な役割を担っていることは明らかである。教育が社会の一システムとして機能している限り、目指すべき社会像が教育の方向性を決定づけ、逆に教育の実践が未来の社会を形作る。教育の成功は社会の成功であり、その失敗は社会の失敗でもある。その意味で教育と社会デザインは不可分といってよい。本稿では特に「近代」という時代的要請を鍵とし、教員養成大学におけるコミュニケーション教育について考える。

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This volume of Speech Communication Education contains four feature essays on the relationship between communication education and intercultural communication studies, a continued critical exchange initiated in the last volume's special feature titled "Pedagogical Implications of Intercultural Communication Studies." In this introductory remark, the Editor attempts not to summarize the discussion over problematics and issues presented but rather to call attention to ways in which we approach and discuss these problematics, accentuating the rhetorical significance (and signification) of "/bunka/," a symbolic used by Imahori (2008) to represent what we normally call bunka or culture in intercultural communication studies and pedagogy.

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This is my response to Imahori (2008), which is written for a special project "Pedagogical Implications of Intercultural Communication Studies" in the 21^<st> volume of Speech Communication Education. Despite the fact that Imahori critiques a logicalpositivistic attitude when he unfolds ontological and epistemological analyses on /culture/, Imahori blindly maintains "the natural attitude" (in a phenomenological sense) by posing a question "whether/culture/exists." Imahori is right in that culture does not possess a physical entity, yet/culture/is still treated as if it did, arguing that "/culture/exists." I insist that culture be regarded as something that emerges as "meaning" in one's consciousness, not as "fact," as far as culture is a representation through communication. The critique reveals inevitability for communication researchers and educators to recur to the magnetic field of communication, where things are reduced to meanings and where such meaning-generation processes are reflexively analyzed.

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In this article, I discuss what constitutes "cultural differences" in intercultural communication research. To frame this question in another way, how can we determine whether a certain interaction is intercultural? I argue that there are currently at least three different views on what counts as cultural differences: (1) cultural differences as defined by communicators' backgrounds; (2) cultural differences as researchers' abstraction about meanings of actions; and (3) cultural differences as defined by participants. After briefly reviewing the first view, the one held by the traditional intercultural communication researchers, I introduce Schneider (1976) to exemplify the second view. I consider how we can answer the question of cultural differences by taking his view and discuss how it can be used as a discussion material in intercultural communication class. I finally touch on the third view, the one that is consistent with my research in the ethnography of communication.

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Intercultural communication research and education are marked by increasing polyphonization of different values and approaches to the study of cultures. As an illustration, Afrocentricity and Asiacentricity have attempted to shed light on the underrepresented coverage of research interests and theories dominated by traditional Intercultural Communication thinking and have implemented a new framework for study on cultures and communication. The polyphonization has caused a symptom that is characteristic of "growing pains" among scholars in the field of Intercultural Communication. This article first provides a summary and background of the discussion by four papers published in Volume 21 of Speech Communication Education. Second, the article will explain growing pains in the field of Intercultural Communication through analyses of both their macro- and micro-level symptoms. Finally, this author proposes that a metaphor of "voices" which is a concept borrowed from Russian Philosopher M.M. Bakhtin for cultural boundaries, is used to understand the polyphonization of Intercultural Communication as a discipline and to overcome these growing pains.

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In response to what Imahori raised in his paper published in the previous issue of Speech Communication Education, I could not help pondering what we need to do as a "researcher/educator" when dealing with social issues. This paper tries to respond to Imahori's paper and, at the same time, discusses further "relations," which is an essential issue in the field of communication, by referring to the fieldwork I conducted in Miyako and its surroundings of Iwate Prefecture in March, 2008. My encounter with an interviewee, who is a professional surfer and an owner of a surf shop, especially gave me insight into the concept of "relations." This paper explores the notion of "asobi (room/play)" as a possibility for enriching relations. By realizing that every relation has "asobi," we may associate with each other organically and empower ourselves to deconstruct the discourse of forcing one to choose "either/or."

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In this rejoinder article, I respond to the four articles that were written in response to my earlier response published in the Volume 21 of Speech Communication Education. Based on the critiques and suggestions offered by Ikeda, Kosaka, Kotani, and Yoshitake in this volume, I try to reiterate the dialectical problems associated with discourse about /bunka/ (culture). In the first part of my paper, I offer a definition of "discourse," and argue that the subject-object dialectics exist in discourse in general, and how discourses are all political. Based on these arguments, I then present self-reflexive accounts in writing this particular paper. The second part of my paper will specifically address the dialectical problems with discourse about /bunka/. I conclude my paper with an emphasis on the importance of examining how researchers are positioned in relation to /bunka/ in terms of their ontology and epistemology so that alternative ways of interpreting and symbolizing /bunka/ can be explored fully. Such effort to understand /bunka/ more fully should not only be encouraged as academic debates as my paper has done but also realized in research studies that directly examine real living /bunka/.

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This study provides a critical-interpretive enquiry into the educational impacts of a short-term overseas English as a Second Language (ESL) programme on a group of university students visiting Australia from Japan. Unlike previous research that confined 'educational impacts' to a few preordained criteria such as improved ESL proficiency, attitude towards host nationals, cross-cultural adaptation and culture learning, the present study is aimed at theorising students' learning experience from a broader perspective by taking cultural, historical, economic, institutional and situational constraints into consideration. A case study involving twenty-three undergraduate students was conducted, and the data obtained from preliminary questionnaires, semi-structured individual and group interviews, participant observations and related documents were analysed in accordance with the social constructionist version of grounded theory methodology. The findings demonstrated a three-factor interactive learning process (i.e. communication difficulties, buffering behaviours and learning outcomes) in which the students learned several different things while overcoming difficulties of communicating in English. The emergence of 'new interpretations' that embodied self-reflexivity and creativity was particularly important for transforming the students' epistemological foundations on culture and communication and for deconstructing cultural essentialism and nationalism that some theorists claim are detrimental to harmonious communication across cultural boundaries. The implications of the findings for future research and educational practices are also considered.

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The purpose of this study is to suggest the usefulness of an electronic bulletin board in order to teach about the close relationship between verbal communication and nonverbal communication. 284 undergraduate students were asked to view 7-8 minutes of a TV drama placed on an electronic bulletin board and first write down all of the verbal communication observed and next write the nonverbal cues along with the verbal conversations with their assigned group members by using an electronic bulletin board. Then they wrote 2 page long reports about the characteristics of nonverbal communication and the relationship with the verbal communication as well as comments about the electric bulletin board. After submitting the reports, they were asked to answer questionnaires about the usefulness of the tasks. The results reveal that this method is useful to let students realize about implicit communication by focusing on the various roles of nonverbal communication. The dramas especially make it easier to follow people's 'likes and dislikes' dimension, and the students could find various functions of nonverbal communication such as slight changes in facial expressions, eye movements, tone of voice depending on a person s' mood, different expressions used in public and private, degree of a person s' anger and so on. Regarding the use of the electric bulletin board, 20 positive points and 16 negative points are listed and discussed. The statistical analysis of the questionnaires proved the validity of the contents of the drama, the length and so on. Based on these results, the positive use of an electronic bulletin board to teach the importance of nonverbal cues in relation to verbal communication is presented.

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