Homo Transmutans: Challenges of Educational Discourse in a Digital Multicultural Class

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic factor has unprecedentedly accelerated the processes of identity transformation of a human as a linguistic and communicative personality and as an intercultural personality when acting in a multicultural setting. The pandemic situation proved to become a catalyst and trigger for changes in the educational sector. Education systems in all countries quickly responded to the “COVID-19 force majeure” by creative improvising and innovative digitalizing of their educational processes and operations. Scientific and academic communities, scholars, teachers, and educators at all levels in different countries of the world have launched a discourse on pandemic and post-pandemic pedagogy, placing its issues in the focus of their research. The topical themes covered providing for students’ and educators’ healthcare, ensuring safety, developing an academic anti-crisis policy, choosing strategies, tactics, techniques and technologies of education and training, forms and types of communication, continuity of educational cycles when moving to online platforms, efficiency and quality, pedagogical mediation and facilitation in organizing the educational process in a digital environment, establishing communication between the academic (or school) community, students and their families, pandemic crisis consulting, privacy concern and many more [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].

Among the research methods that led us to a number of inferences and conclusions are participant longitudinal observation, which made it possible to observe and record transformations in the communicative behavior of students from different countries in international online education programs over several academic semesters (during the period of 2020–2024: the pandemic and the immediate post-pandemic years), survey (questionnaires and interviews with open-ended and closed questions aimed at self-reflection and autoethnography of students and identifying signs of transformation of their relationships, values, and orientations in the new conditions of communication), discourse analysis (sentences as units of analysis of written speech (texts of emails, chat-box posts, and research papers), statements as units of analysis of oral speech, as well as interactive blocks as minimal units of communicative interaction); and conceptual analysis, including axiological analysis, of the verbal concepts the students used. These methods made it possible to identify new meanings that emerged in the natural and free (not staged) communication of students from different cultures and register changes in their value orientations and attitudes in the conditions of the virtualized training.

2. Transmodern situation

The digitalization of educational discourse, which has been transforming communication processes, has made it possible to take a closer look at the values and anti-values of transmodernism with all its inherent phenomena having the “trans” prefix. According to the type of mentality, Homo Transmutans (or a person undergoing transformation) is a phenomenological product of the transmodern situation. Transmodernism, as R.M. Rodriguez Magda, the conceptologist of this phenomenon, discusses in her article “Crossroads of Transmodernity,” is a period of transformation, transience, and acceleration of time [9]. The transmodern situation is conceptually (philosophically, semiotically, semantically, and structurally) connected with globalization and informatization of society. “It is not the power of theory that offers us today a new Grand Narrative, but the Great Fact of globalization” [9].

Everything in today’s world is rapidly transforming. The “trans” prefix means transition, turn, and movement “across,” “through,” “beyond,” and “above”. Self-awareness and self-concept cease to be part of a person’s inner world, but go outside, exposed for self-realization. Transparency is the new objectivity. To be is to be seen. This does not mean literal visuality, that is, creating a visual image of oneself for another interactant or a wider audience. To be visible equals to being notable, noticeable, observable, marked, registered, and discernible in any conspicuous way, through any sign systems, symbols, codes, and communication channels. Language as a verbal means of communication is transformed into a nonverbal mode, into some quasi-gesture, into an instrument of phatic communication, to establish a closer contact and a communication channel, but not to transmit meaningful information only. This transmodernist concept of the existence of the subject of communication echoes the famous aphorism from the Antiquity “Speak, that I may see thee,” which Marshall McLuhan recalled in his work “Culture is Our Business” [10].

The primacy of the virtual confronts us with the challenges of the digital mind hegemony. Material reality is enhanced and modified by virtual reality. Globalization creates the effect of simultaneity, while territoriality is replaced by cyberspace, where the global and the local coexist in a hybrid form of “glocality,” unfolding the panorama of transculture. Regarding communication in the digital space, R.M. Rodríguez Magda points out that virtual reality does not materially exist, but it is not reduced to a mere fiction either; it becomes a true reality. The subject is no longer physically represented but is not lost in the vast flow of digital data; it is telepresent, and therefore, it is interactive [11].

The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for further development of globalization and informatization of societies, economies, and cultures, (re)turning us to the limitless possibilities of digitalization of communication practices, intercultural interaction, forcing us to get transformed, developing competencies to exist in the “New Normal”. The concept of the “New Normal” suggests that those facts and circumstances of human existence that were previously perceived as exceptional have now become or are becoming everyday reality or the norm.

Despite the contradictory nature of the processes of globalization and informatization of communication spaces, one of the pandemic-generated effects has become the phenomenon of transgression, that is, the possibility of crossing an impassable border, overcoming the insurmountable, the inaccessible, and the impossible. Discriminatory barriers are eliminated; restrictions are transformed into rights, and intentions into opportunities, involving any interactant in the communicative process, making activity (and interactivity) of any type, form, and quality available to everyone. This transformation of consciousness has led to the understanding of inclusiveness as a reality of life “for everyone”: such concepts as “inclusive environment,” “inclusive education,” “inclusive tourism,” “inclusive theater,” “inclusive museum,” and “inclusive language” have entered the domains of social, cultural, and communicative practice. Inclusivity of education under pandemic restrictions took on new meanings. This means the accessibility of any educational resources, synchronous and asynchronous communication with teachers, participation in all remotely organized educational, scientific, cultural, and social events, in pedagogical discourse of any nature on different digital platforms, while away from the venue, for example, at home. Stationary mobility became possible. Moving around the world, country, city, and university campus got transformed into web navigation.

3. A new configuration of a multicultural class

The educational environment has changed, including contexts, contacts, channels, and the communicators themselves. In digital spaces, the spatiotemporal compression of communicative contexts has become visualized and objectified. The reality of Marshall McLuhan’s “Global Village” appeared in the new version 4.0 and acquired a comprehensive virtual visualization. Contacting cultures, distanced in real physical space, turned out to be localized in spaces of virtual communication. During the COVID-19 pandemic in my digital multicultural class students from China, Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, Japan, France, Spain, Italy, Serbia, Croatia, Colombia, Cuba, and different cities of Russia communicated synchronously in time and space on a regular daily basis, geographically being at home, in their cities and countries, or somewhere on the way, in transit.

Now, in the post-pandemic period, participants of a multicultural digital class come from different continents, cultures, traditions, languages, beliefs, and value systems (Table 1). This reality has ceased to be seen as extraordinary and special or intriguing and exciting any more. It is perceived as a rank-and-file type by all those involved in teaching and learning. For the intercultural competency building and for cross-cultural research, it proves to be extremely useful, contributing, and broadening. It provides real-life cases of cross-cultural educational interaction. After the pandemic, the online format has become part of daily routine. It is seen as a resource for intercampus training courses with the participants residing and located in campuses geographically distant from each other.

An educational event (a lecture, seminar, workshop, and tutorial) in an electronic environment for a multicultural class has become a virtual miniature picture of the world that comes to life during a communication session. It consists of a mosaic of national images brought about by the communication event participants. Their social and communicative space is compressed to the size of a computer (laptop or smartphone) screen with frames as micro-representations of their Home. Screen communication is based on interaction with digital images of participants. In this context, the linguacognitive concept of “frame” (with the literal picture in a frame) receives a visual embodiment—it gets objectified. The opportunities to cognitively expand the boundaries create the conditions for inter – and cross-cultural learning and understanding. The picture of the world unfolds for students in a multicultural class from a mosaic of frames of their classmates.

The “frame” metaphor is conceptualized as a semantic frame and cognitive structure that organizes and systematizes knowledge in the human mental world. Leontovich argues that human mentality automatically completes those objects that are only partially presented in the frame or just roughly outlined [12]. In a multicultural class involving students from different national cultures, it is possible for those involved to complete their sociocultural environment and communicative contexts by expanding their “window” frames. The degree of adequacy of such completion will depend on the cultural competence of each of the interactants, with due consideration of their ability to apply a “thick description” (according to K. Geertz) in order to interpret fragments of cultures on the screen [13]. The completion of the cultural space from frames is based on visible cultural artifacts in the external image of the communicators, on the background with objects and subjects (including family members and pets) falling into the “frame,” as well as on the communicative behavior itself: verbal, paraverbal, and nonverbal [In the COVID-19 period, the online format of classes seemed novel, romantic, exciting, entertaining, and provoking interest on the part of family members and pets, so their fleeting presence in the frame during classes never seemed to be out of place]. Students’ communicative personalities are revealed as cultural identities when the frames of their images on the screen are expanded into a broader context: for instance, a smiling Chinese grandmother emerging behind a student, sounds of a holiday coming from the streets in a Turkish city, and authentic household utensils placed in the background of an Indonesian house. All fall into the communicative context of educational discourse and are perceptually and cognitively integrated into more complex and voluminous images of communicating cultures.

Avatar photographs, which may hide intercultural communicators in the virtual classroom, but which the participants choose for self-presentation, also appear as “frames.” They schematize the cultural experience of the participants and activate the processes of deciphering and completing the images in the photographs (of the participants themselves, as well as of a certain place, event, or situation).

Our survey and observation leave no doubt that in a multicultural class, when participants join a new training course, they start by stereotyping each other because stereotyping is a universal natural cognitive method of becoming familiar with the unfamiliar. Following Walter Lippmann’s interpretation of stereotyping in relation to human communication, there is no doubt that people are psychologically inclined to stereotype, that is, to make judgments about others on the basis of their ethnic or national group membership [14]. Stereotypes are “rigid, inaccurate popular concepts applied indiscriminately to individuals without due regard for their actual characteristics” [15]; therefore, after a while, having gotten to know each other better, students stop generalizing. However, as our participant observation shows, multicultural class students frequently perceive their classmates from other cultures as model personalities, linguacultural types [16], or social types [15], evoking images and associations that correspond to their practical sociocultural experience. For example, Chinese students are seen by their Russian classmates as typical representatives of the Chinese culture, while Russian students are by default perceived by other international students as “typical Russians” and so on. Concurrently, all international students with their linguistic and cultural identities and experience have become a “firsthand” source of cultural knowledge, resource, capital, “added value”, and “asset” for the entire group of students professionally studying intercultural and cross-cultural communication. Consequently, the phenomenon of a digital multicultural class produces a multiplier effect for quality learning.

The concept of “script” as a cognitive structure can also be applied to conceptualize communication in a virtual classroom. The “script” unfolds according to certain canons and rules, based on the context of interaction, the communicative situation, and the type of discourse. In the educational context and pedagogical discourse, the class (lecture or seminar) develops in the genre of a scenario with a plot and distributed roles, part of which is implemented according to the teacher’s plan, and part depends on the conditions of the digital environment and the specific circumstances of electronic communication. Participants in the discourse have now got used to and feel prepared for unexpected turns in the scenario (due to possible technical failures on the part of any of them). Internal readiness for unintentional interruption of contact (break of digital connection) is a new construct of communicative competency. A technological failure, digital distortion of sound or video can and does lead to stressful situations of awkwardness, loss of “face,” attribution errors, irretrievably missed information, and so forth. Meanwhile, the emerging digital communication competency allows the participants in a communicative event to confidently cope with the bifurcations of unstable virtual connection, get reconfigured, go back, speed up or slow down the pace, identify and revise key components of the message, be prepared for different “turns of the plot” in the event scenario, and so on.

“Scripts” dictate the behavior of people, as well as their interpretation of the behavior of other people in a certain communicative situation. In the digital space, the rules are unified and become common to everyone, eliminating the boundaries between in-group and out-group members. Everyone learns to think, speak, and act as a bearer of a new (“digital”) culture.

4. The “new normal”

A well-known argument that the study of a foreign culture reveals the depths and subtleties of one’s own cultural tradition has also got visualized in virtual conditions. Analyzing identities and mentalities, values and beliefs, symbols and signs, stereotypes, and biases, students display and observe revelations, surprises, doubts, bewilderments, grief, or joy of each other when cognitive-communicative processes appear in a close focus of attention, concentrating in time and space.

Literally before our eyes, with a convincing evidence, their recognition and re-recognition occurs based on the “reformatting” of their previous cultural experience. On the one hand, students rediscover their own linguistic culture, evaluating it from the perspective of other cultures, through the eyes of their “another culture” classmates, their values and behavior patterns in the form of orientations, standards, norms, and customs. On the other hand, they are rethinking (reevaluating) their values, beliefs, and customs in the context of a new reality, that is, the emerging “new normal”, enhanced and strengthened by the effect of virtual proximity (“We are so far, but at the same time we are so close”). Meanwhile, they realize that going back to the pre-pandemic world with its “old school” attitudes, rules, and customs will be hardly possible. The concept of “new normal” (now in relation to the sphere of education) means that the previous situation, which was conceptualized as a stable and sustainable norm, is a thing of the past, and there is no return to the pre-pandemic order of things.

As Karasik points out, “each person belongs to different communities and thereby adheres to different cultural prescriptions, and these prescriptions are subject to change” [17]. In the virtual educational process, long-term, with uncertain prospects, with incompletely explored effects, with ambiguously conceptualized gains and losses, the educational communicative environment with its inherent communicative culture seemed to be a certain terra incognita for the vast majority of participants, that is, some terra incognita with prescriptions and regulations not yet established, but with changes already taking place.

In the depths of the “new normal,” new rules and patterns of behavior are emerging and getting fixed. The transformational restructuring of collective mentality consists, in particular, in the mutual adjustment of participants of a communicative event, which is fixed as a socially significant skill. The display of appropriate and socially approved behavior by one of the communicators in the group and the positive evaluative reaction of others sets a certain reference communicative pattern for all. This, according to Karasik, is “orientation on a meaningful model” [17]. For instance, in my multicultural virtual class, Chinese master’s degree students start (though with obvious signs of overcoming internal boundaries) to engage in discussions and debates, in the same way as students from other cultures do. During the survey, they admitted that such communicative activity in class is “not normal” for them. Only after joining the international program, they slowly developed the pattern of speaking up openly and individually in class, discussing the topical issues, arguing and disagreeing, “even with teachers”. This is a new experience for them, because such active student behavior is not practiced (and thus not accepted) at Chinese universities (Entering a debate with a teacher by expressing individual point of view is an inappropriate behavior, it is not only unwise, but also unethical). The Chinese students also noted that it was easier for them to transform their previous attitudes and practices in a virtual environment than in physical reality (in a public discussion in a large classroom offline).

From the perspective of identity changes recorded in the communicative behavior of students, identity is truly context-dependent. Digital multicultural class participants provide numerous narratives of how they have to “switch on” or “switch off” some of their internal impulses to adapt to the New Normal. Identity is “highly context sensitive and any attempt to define it must be situated within a specific frame of reference” [18]. Since in the digital educational space, students share value orientations and behavioral standards of the New Normal, they feel encouraged to adapt or adjust their identities. It is a sort of digital acculturation that interactants go through while restructuring their online Self.

One of our surveys showed that students from different cultures comprehended the teacher’s remark “Any questions?” on the issue or topic under discussion differently. Some took it as a signal for mandatory inclusion in communication, indicating their activity, that is, they MUST ask questions as these are conventions of educational discourse. Students from some other cultures, on the contrary, responded by silence, even if they had some questions because they believed that any question they would ask could be assessed as evidence of their intellectual weakness. Still some others interpreted the teacher’s “Any questions?” as only one of the ritualistic conventions of educational discourse, a formula of politeness, the ethics of interaction, or just a way of filling in a pause before the start of the next segment of the lecture or seminar. The emerging conventions of the digital educational environment reduce such intercultural doubts to uniform rules that regulate and streamline the activities of students.

The existing digital educational platforms have a function of fixing the order of speaking for the participants online. It is based on virtually raised hands in the list of participants, which the system builds itself. So, the teacher online is freed from the need to decide who raised their hand first; that might mean that those students are faster learners and thus won the priority to answer the question first. The rising digital hands are visible to everyone in class, giving confidence to those who are not hesitant to raise their hands, or vice versa, encouraging those who are hesitating.

The focus on “activity in class” (at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics,” this is one of the elements of ongoing monitoring and evaluation criteria for their individual progress assessment and final score for the course) has transformed the communicative behavior of Chinese students in the digital learning environment. Our discourse analysis of interactive blocks showed that for some students, this is expressed in their desire to seize the initiative and hold it for as long as possible, in competition for the teacher’s attention, in noncompliance with the rules of speech and the communicative balance between the nature of the question and the volume of the answer, and in reflexive concern about the control of their participation from the part of the teacher. Initially restrained and silent due to national cultural norms, now they ask, “Did you register my activity in class?”, which, from our perspective, indicates some transformation of their value system in educational discourse and some “reformatting” of their personality in intercultural digital communication. Our observations indicate that in the electronic environment, the activity of students, as well as their concern about recording their involvement in the educational process, has increased, since they know that the digital educational platform itself registers their presence in class and participation in the discourse. In our assessment, these are some signs of adaptation of participants to new conditions of interaction through the transformation of mental maps and cognitive base: from entropy with movement “by touch,” through embedding oneself into a system with constantly updated and completed structural elements (with the development of new behavioral conventions and habits), to the “new normal” situation.

5. Encapsulation of communication

Getting transformed and adapting to the electronic environment, communicators find themselves in the conditions of capsule communication (in an ontologically conceptualized closed capsule or, if we extrapolate the metaphorical projection by Lakoff and Johnson to a digital communication platform, in a container, or receptacle) [19]. Firstly, communicators have a quick access to an unlimited number of a wide variety of Internet resources. Secondly, the collective mind, the center of thematic discourse, the focus of control and evaluation, and their formal educational community are all concentrated on one site, closed from the rest of the university community, in a digital capsule of their virtual stay. A learning capsule continuum emerges. During the COVID-19 period, it was as such on a daily basis with no alternatives. In the post-pandemic period, it is applied on some regular basis, for instance, in Higher School of Economics the virtual mode of classes is used for Master’s degree students on Saturdays. During the day, students and teachers enter and reenter after breaks to their capsule classrooms, then move on to other educational capsules, get together for tutorials, consultations, meetings, workshops, or conferences. At the end of the day, participants exit the multi-capsule digital university moving to their real Home. The capsule becomes a unit of educational space, part of the environment, and the encapsulation of communication becomes a new dimension of the culture of being. Modeling of communication in the conditions of a training capsule with new rules and conventions takes place.

Modeling of cultural concepts with a value component in educational communication in the capsule conditions reflects the axiological picture of the world in relation to the virtual community. For instance, the axiological concept of “sharing” (displaying one’s ideas, solutions, or arguments and making them common) has been transferred from computer discourse to educational discourse and entered the usual lexicon of everyday communication. In educational settings, “sharing” has ceased to be a typically technical term but has gained a “human touch” construct equal to “sharing is caring.” Often an interlocutor’s intention to “share the screen” reflects a desire to provide assistance, render support, explain visually, demonstrate a sequence of actions, show the location of an object, and so forth.

The expansion (and “sharing”) of new knowledge, new meanings and concepts, new experiences, new communication contexts, and new channels and tools of interaction is the expected pattern of communicative behavior of participants of educational discourse in the digital environment. Important in comprehending of such expectations is the understanding of knowledge as a three-component formation consisting of “sensory experience, common sense and a rational system of deducing new knowledge from previously acquired knowledge” [17].

Capsule communication contributes to cultural awareness and sensitivity. With its frontal type of interaction (in front of each other, face to face, or eye to eye), it exacerbates the need to develop the skills of sensing a communication partner in unconventional virtual settings.

Phatic communication acquires new semantic accents and value constructs. Without physical presence of other interlocutors, but communicating with them frontally, it is important to receive signals of human essence, communicative commonality, emotional involvement, support, solidarity, and empathy. The conditions for phatic communication, setting up channels for establishing contact, and transmitting relations and attitudes of participants to each other in a virtual environment have changed. In some ways, it has become simpler, because chronotopically, all the participants are concentrated nearby, beyond their personal “window frames,” in a very close digital proximity. However, the difficulty is that digital phatics has not yet developed according to uniform canons, causing uncertainty about the appropriateness and effectiveness of communication practices for the purpose of establishing contact, taken so for from real reality.

In the capsule class, there is greater democracy in communication. The transformation of the learning space has led to the democratization of communicative behavior with a social distance being greatly reduced. As a result of developing and consolidating such a democratic style in the virtual classroom, it is transferred to the real physical classroom, as our practice shows.

In the context of the encapsulation of communication, it seems that the competencies in demand are those that are studied by scientists within the framework of theories of intelligence, understood not from the perspective of cognition and cognitive abilities, but as a conscious sensitivity, developed adaptability, and well-developed communication skills. Among the types of intelligence, the following are distinguished [20, 21, 22]: (1) cultural intelligence (understanding of cultural values that influence the communicative behavior of interacting partners); (2) emotional intelligence (sensitivity to the emotional state of partners and emotional atmosphere in the setting as the context of communication); (3) social intelligence (the ability to adapt to the social environment); (4) collective intelligence (the ability for collective activity); (5) leadership intelligence (developed leadership qualities); and (6) practical or applied intelligence (developed practical communication skills for creative or analytical activities). In many aspects and constructs, these types of intelligence intersect with the concepts of competencies and “soft” skills.

The response to the challenges of the encapsulation of communication is also found in the modeling of “positive communication” as a universal behavioral strategy. It proves to be transformative, value-based, supportive, and life-affirming, bringing “human touch” into the virtual capsule of communication.

6. Positive communication

Positive communication, which implies interdependent positive intentionality and positive expectations of interactants, feels extremely important in multicultural groups, particularly, online, because participants are isolated (encapsulated) from the real physical classroom, may have no proper understanding of the cultural identities of other students, and lack familiar communication methods and rules. In such conditions, positivity as a strategy of communication can be a solution.

Mirivel in his groundbreaking work “The Art of Positive Communication: Theory and Practice” defines positive communication as “any verbal or non-verbal behaviors that function positively in the course of human interaction.” “It includes all of the behaviors that reflect our best, that produce personal and relational happiness and satisfaction, as well as those that challenge our self to move in the direction of others and to act ethically” [23]. Mirivel developed a model of positive communication based on six behavioral patterns aimed to inspire and influence interactants: greeting, asking, complimenting, disclosing, encouraging, and listening. They are all designed as cause and effect (or signal and response) (Figure 1).

Leontovich argues that positive communication is an interaction based on positive emotions, aimed at achieving mutual understanding and bringing satisfaction to all participants [24]. Positive communication as an imperative for interactional development of society involves a strategy of supportive communication, that is, some strategy chosen to help communicative partners in a difficult situation. In the conditions of virtual multicultural interaction, positive communication aims to become the basis of communicative ethics. Participants are supposed to develop needs to be capable of mutual understanding, demonstrating positive intentions, and transmitting readiness to help or support each other in any situations of unforeseen collapse, loss of contact or poor connection, or any errors caused by uncertainty. Leontovich points out that positive communication embraces communicative initiative, involvement in interaction, adaptation to the interlocutor, and social support and congruence as its intrinsic constitutive features. Communicative initiative is based on positive intentions on the part of communicators. Involvement in interaction presupposes empathy. Adaptation to the interlocutor means adjusting to the partner, because this helps optimize communication. Social support is seen as any help, including emotional, informational, or instrumental. Congruence is understood as the correspondence of internal self-concept to its external manifestations: sincerity, honesty, and openness [24].

Emphasizing the benefits and gains of positive communication, it feels impossible to ignore a controversial phenomenon of positive discrimination, which in the context of digital educational discourse turns out to be a value construct of communication. The policy of positive discrimination, if shared by all members of the group, may serve to support those participants who, for reasons beyond their control, find themselves in an unfavorable or unequal position with the others. In one of the pandemic years, a Cuban student of mine, when defending her project online, encountered problems with Internet access in her country and poor connection quality. However, she received a positive discriminatory support from all participants in her virtual multicultural class. They all agreed that she did not have to stick to the rules of online classes. They were ready to wait for her to get reconnected to the network again and again because of loss of connection, to tolerate poor sound quality, to have audio only without the video mode, to agree to some context-based interpretation of the talk because of the unstable signal, and so on. Solidarity, patience, and support displayed by the students can be conceptualized as a human construct of the “New Normal” situation. Positive communication (positive discrimination) was perceived as much more significant for all and everyone than strict compliance with formal conventions and rules.

7. Multimodality as a competency

Digital educational space is social, communicative, and semiotic. With this in mind, we have to agree that a virtual classroom is a functional space for constructing and developing new competencies.

Within international programs worldwide, communication in a multicultural classroom is carried out in global English as a lingua franca of the participants [25, 26, 27]. The level of language competence of students can vary significantly in terms of both speech production and its interpretation and understanding. Their levels of communicative competence also differ. This has the effect of increasing or decreasing communicative effectiveness. The cultural competence of multicultural class participants is not similar either, and in the conditions of intercultural contacts, it is always subject to correction and renewal. The formation of intercultural competence in e-learning conditions is an even more complex process than in physical reality.

Digital educational platforms create equal communication conditions for everyone, offering many ways for effective discourse. The resources and instruments of digital mediation and the multimodality of the environment make it possible for students to generate ideas, systematize and structure them, transform them into creative products, share them, and analyze and evaluate the products of their fellow-students using a wide range of various tools. Multimodality is understood as a variety of modes and methods used comprehensively to convey meanings. They include printed texts, maps, diagrams, graphs, photographs, screenshots, other images and illustrations, animation, music, sound and color effects, video clips, hyperlinks, QR codes, and other semiotic resources. Students can work in groups or teams in different digital “rooms,” then get together in some common space to discuss the results. It is also possible to conduct an educational discussion using the World Café technology, but in a virtual format, and many more techniques.

By acquiring technological knowledge, forming motivation to communicate effectively, mastering digital communication skills, and gaining experience in educational, scientific, and practical activities on various educational platforms, students develop the ability and readiness to communicate effectively in professional domains (Figure 2). This is a multimodal competency, the formation of which is directly encouraged and facilitated by the digital environment. The multimodality of the digital platform in the semiotic space of communication creates a synergy effect in which the multimodal competency of students is not the sum of individual competences, but the result of their multiplication and integration. The synergistic effect of multimodality adds multidimensionality and volume to the created cultural meanings.

Digital communication creates new conditions and opportunities for an individual as a linguistic and communicative personality in the development of intellectual flexibility, adaptability to a new environment, effective use of time and space compression for the capitalization of knowledge, and synergy of information sources, turning them into competencies of a different order with the increment of new constructs that are significant for the individual.

8. Transculture and transcultural communication

Transculture can be generally understood as some “imaginary artificial culture”—some common space, contact zone, or text—where an intersection and fusion of ideas, beliefs, values, and practices specific for different cultures take place.

Krasnykh reflects on the multidimensionality and “multi-worldliness” of the existence of an individual as a speaking person (homo loquens), representing their language and culture (linguaculture) in communication and at the same time realizing themselves as a personality [28]. Individuals involved in a continuous process of communication, “weaving” language and culture within themselves as well as “weaving” themselves into language and culture, turn out to be not only objects but also subjects (creators) of “language, culture, and communication” [28]. In the space of transculture of the digital communication environment, which interweaves and intertwines elements of different languages, cultures, societies, communities, education systems, and communication systems, an individual becomes both an object and a subject of change. Online communicators prove to start acting as agents of change themselves.

The transformation of the cultural identity and communicative personality of students in a multicultural class is an obvious but at the same time not absolutely obvious process. This is due to the fact that students in the conditions of capsule communication mentally and communicatively become closer to each other, while adapting to a new but common transculture. There they create new ways of self-presentation, accept new “rules of the game,” and share new communicative behavior patterns. At the same time, they strive to correspond to a certain transcultural model of a student, an equal participant in educational discourse. The idea is to be like everyone else (not Other, or Stranger, or Alien from the position of a new culture) so that the criteria for learning progress and success are uniformly applicable to everyone.

As for some obvious signs of transcultural communication, as well as the formation of transcultural identity, there are real cases with students, especially from more traditional cultures, who modify their behavior in order to get adjusted to the transculture of digital education.

A Japanese student wrote a detailed letter to me as her teacher, giving her reasons why she did not show up for classes. She explained that she had not prepared her homework and missed the essay deadline, and her feelings of shame did not allow her to join the online classes with me. The discourse analysis of the email showed that the Japanese student used forms of respect and worship towards her teacher and forms of self-reproach and humiliation towards herself. She built her text on the lexical structures that carried meanings of shameful weaknesses of her personality, inappropriate behavior, and unacceptable actions. She stressed that her laziness, selfishness, and arrogance prevented her from putting in extra effort and spending more time to complete the assignment and meet the professor’s requirements. The discourse analysis of her text showed that she actually transferred the Japanese style of interaction to communicate with her Russian teacher, but in the English language. This case of the transition to transcultural communication with the English-language replacement of the Japanese forms of honorifics when addressing a Russian teacher (combined with the depreciative forms towards herself) in the context of an international virtual education indicates the multifaceted transformation of cultural identity in a multicultural class.

Another case of transcultural communication involves one of my Chinese students who started her research paper, she submitted online, by expressing esteem and respect for me as her lecturing professor in a separate paragraph. Honorifics as part of the Chinese culture value system was applied by the student in a separate paragraph of her study, as in the conditions of virtual communication she did not find other ways to demonstrate her respect. Apart from honorifics, she used metaphors characteristic of the Chinese language and culture, but in English. Signing her paper, she even explained that her name means “flower” in Chinese. For her, this means that she is supposed to exude beauty and harmony. Therefore, she makes every effort to live up to her name.

Identity transformations are not the same, uniform or homogeneous, even for students from culturally close countries and regions. In an interview with a Taiwanese student of mine about the learning barriers and failures she encountered in her virtual multicultural class, she talked about her uncertainty and anxiety because she could not understand whether she was losing face or not when she had to debate in class and when it clearly was not a win-win outcome for her. There were no familiar signs from her classmates that she could decipher, and no familiar physical context that she could rely on. The Taiwanese student negotiated some problems beyond her control with me (as her teacher). One of them was about maintaining face in digital public; another one was about the “class activity” requirement. She asked for my permission to (1) write emails with her questions about her face and get my feedback and (2) stay after class and provide for her “class activity” when other students are gone. She was trying hard to adapt to the new conditions and conventions of learning but still could not (or did not want to?) give up her cultural Self. She did it her way.

For students from traditional, collectivistic, and shame cultures, the issues of positive face and politeness are obviously among the priority ones. The metaphoric concept of “face” stands for the public self-image composed of self-worth and esteem of the others. As the “face” conceptologist Ting-Toomey argues, face refers to “an individual’s claimed sense of positive image in a relational and network context” [29]. Moreover, on the surface level, face can be about give-and-take respect and disrespect attitudes, while on the deeper level, it is about honor and shame belief and value systems [30].

9. Conclusion

Transformation to adapt to a new space of interaction involves restructuring of self-concept, reformatting of the mental map, reprogramming of value systems, beliefs, norms, rules, ethics, and other identity “programs.” Transformation is the result of communication as a process of joint creation of meanings, as shared knowledge in society and culture (including virtual society and global culture). Homo communicativus (a human who communicates) has transformed the environment and got transformed him/herself/themselves. This process is going on, and internal readiness for change has been formed. Can this ability, willingness, and readiness to transform (and get transformed) and to adapt (get adapted) be conceptualized, accepted and expected as a new universal human competency? Time will show.