This paper presentation explores intercultural knowledge and knowing as displayed in student portfolios. The portfolios were written by student pairs who took a generic-culture course. Centria University of Applied Sciences in Kokkola, Finland offers an elective, five-credit culture course for domestic students, international degree-taking students, and exchange students. Topics of this experiential course (“Getting Local and Global”) include culture as a theoretical concept, intercultural learning, person-to-person encounters; the roles of an international student; communication and social roles; verbal and non-verbal communication. The objective of the course is to strengthen the students’ identity and develop their intercultural skills.

Towards the end of the course, the students submit a portfolio composed in pairs. In the discussion part of the portfolio, the students reflect on the activities they described in the portfolio; why did these activities end up in the portfolio? They contemplate why the activities of the course are important to their own intercultural learning.  Students also reflect how these things motivate them to learning more in the future.

Researchers including Lakoff and Johnson (2003/1980, 1-23), Kövecses (2000) and Grady (1997; 2005) examined the experiential grounding of metaphors noted that metaphors are often combined into larger metaphoric groupings. These scholars proposed that both metaphors and metonymies may be hierarchically related. In our study, however, we assume that conceptual mappings, especially in the case of complex metaphors and metonymies, may be dependent on culture and context.

The research questions of our study are: What conceptual metaphors do the students utilise when writing about culture and interculturality? What main conceptions of culture and interculturality do the metaphors and metonymies reflect? Here we define interculturality as interaction of people representing various cultural backgrounds, world-views and identities.

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