Interculturality in Education: A Theoretical and Methodological Toolbox By Fred Dervin
What is international education pdf
Trying to work out what has been or needs to be learnt assessment is something of a nightmare Knowing just what an interculturally capable student might look like is a large part of the problem here A lot of the work that has been done overseas on assessing intercultural understanding has focused on kids who are about to go to study or to spend time in another country This is a very particular form of intercultural experience I m not saying it is better or worse than other intercultural experiences just that it is different from broader notions of intercultural interactions and one that is quite middle class You know.
Book interculturality in education pdf
This book on interculturality in education demolishes some long held beliefs and practices in the field of intercultural communication as it is taught and practiced in schools Dervin points out several common misconceptions of what culture is and advocates a complex view of interculturality The book draws on experiences from the Finnish education system where Dervin is based I highly recommend this for those who are interested in intercultural communication as a part of an education program Fred Dervin Intercultural education is a capability in the Australian national curriculum which means it is required to be taught in Australian schools and yet while it is hard enough to know what to teach as intercultural understanding curriculum or how to go about teaching it pedagogy the kids generally able to afford six months to a year studying in a foreign country need some form of financial support to achieve that so this type of intercultural experience is quite specific to certain kids Also the assessment instruments that are used to assess intercultural understanding in kids about to go study overseas mostly end up being surveys that is quizzes that the students take prior to leaving or again once they have returned home These generally measure any changes in their attitudes However the types of questions that end up on these quizzes might sometimes be better to assess a young person s level of extroversion with questions like how comfortable do you feel meeting people different to you It isn t clear to me that being outgoing is the sole or even a major requirement for being interculturally aware Hitler never seemed all that shy or retiring to me. Interculturality in educationroutiere saaq So what is it to be interculturally competent Is it something you know If it is then we should just teach young people those things and then give them a quick test at the end to make sure everything has been retained Or perhaps it isn t quite as simple as something you know but rather a kind of skill you can acquire We normally test skills by observing them being applied a bit like getting someone to drive a car so they can get a driver s licence But where would you test someone to see how interculturally competent they are Is such a competence a single skill so that all you have to do is test it once and in one situation and that means they will be competent in all situations Or is it perhaps a series of skills that might need to be tested across a range of different situations And if it is a series of skills are we able to tick off the skills the students acquire as they acquire them a bit like boy scout badges and then once the student has gotten than 75% of them we can say they have intercultural understanding Or rather at least a solid B in being interculturally capable Perhaps intercultural understanding isn t so much a skill as a disposition That is less what you do and how you do it So that two people might do almost exactly the same thing but in one case it will be read as someone having a disposition towards being interculturally aware while someone else doing much the same thing will be read as a racist If it is a disposition then how can that be assessed and who gets to decide Can it even be taught How do you avoid overtly subjective assessments you know where all the white students in a classroom are assessed to being interculturally competent and all the coloured students are incompetent Some countries assess intercultural awareness by finding out what their students know about global issues or how many languages they speak or if the students do anything to address global problems Often this is measured in quizzes too although these tend to be somewhat different from the quizzes mentioned above They might ask questions about the student s likelihood to buy free trade coffee or their level of concern for refugees Sometimes this kind of quiz will also ask if you are likely to go on a march to protest world hunger or join a Facebook group to protect the whales The problem is that students already know the right answers to these quizzes that is the answers their teachers are most likely to want and so it isn t totally clear if they are answering as a display their own beliefs or if they are answering to get a good mark. Epub interculturality in education pdf Interestingly many of the questions on these kinds of surveys reduce students to both individuals and also effectively to consumers rather than to citizens capable of non self interested collective action And this is one of the themes of the book and one of the main concerns it raises For the author the idea that intercultural understanding is seen as a series of things students need to know is or less nonsense This is because human interconnections are essentially infinite and so you can t be once and for all time interculturally capable and thus guaranteed to behave appropriately in all situations and circumstances The probability and likelihood of making mistakes is not a sign of failure but rather a gauge of being interculturally competent The whole point of intercultural understanding is that it is relational and contextual it only exists within our all too human interactions The idea that someone might be intercultural than someone else that they are interacting with ignores the fact that interactions require two to tango The potential for one party to blame the other for not knowing the steps to the dance being interculturally aware is all too real but might well miss the point of the interaction and read it purely from one side In fact it might make sense to try to understand why they can t or won t dance rather than blaming them for not following rules we have set down for them to follow perhaps without ever telling them what the rules were in the first place. Interculturality in education book pdf The author stresses that human interactions virtually always involve power differentials The danger with too many intercultural abilities is that they are framed by the expectations of those with the most power. Interculturality in international education The author is also very concerned that culture is an overused and not terribly helpful concept Firstly culture is vague do you mean culture as in food high culture festivals Culture also implies a number of things he wants to explicitly avoid For instance we often blame our responses to various things on our culture as if an entire group of people just happen to carry with them an identical character trait that forces them to like or dislike something The example given here is Finland where the author lives but obviously this works for any national culture to the extent that it is viewed as being a national culture The problem is that these national traits often are nearly meaningless Our recently deposed Australian Prime Minister doing a bit of dog whistling to attract the votes of the racist among the Australian population said migrants should adopt of Australia s core values When asked what these core values were he provided a list Mr Turnbull identified Australian values as freedom equality of men and women the rule of law democracy and a fair go and claimed these were uniquely Australian It might be faster to make a list of the nations in the world that didn t hold these uniquely Australian values or that say that they don t A nation that locks asylum seekers away on an island for five years until their children attempt suicide ought to blush when saying it believes in a fair go or in freedom or for the rule of law for that matter. Interculturality in educationusa fair A focus on culture tends to exaggerate difference and the author is very keen that we should instead look toward those things that unite rather than divide us The idea of culture also implies a kind of statue something fixed and permanent but really cultures change all of the time You don t have to take my word for it talk to someone 20 years older than yourself Every generation moans that theirs was the best generation the last true generation and now this generation is mostly hopeless and lacking in all of the things that made this country great But while we recognise that our culture is capable of change we struggle with the idea that other cultures are too We are always diverse while they are always a monolith like a swarm than a group of individuals. Interculturality in education ebook free download This fluidity and malleability is exactly what the author would prefer interculturality to be focused upon But how do you go about assessing that Well in part it comes from having a recognition of the fact that intercultural encounters don t require you to leave the country and sometimes they don t even require you to leave home If intercultural awareness means being able to understand and work with people who are different from ourselves then this doesn t just require people having a different ethnicity to the one we have but different social classes and genders will also provide plenty of scope for us to interact interculturally Assessing such interactions is anything but a one off task but it can t really be done in the abstract Rather than having students complete a quiz to see how interculturally aware they are perhaps a better means of assessing them would be to have them reflect upon the interactions they have had with other people and to consider what happened why it happened and how they may have behaved differently Or how their behaviour helped to structure and reinforce the behaviour of the other people they were interacting with Sure such assessments are harder to give a score of 64. Epub interculturality in education articles Some Quotestime spent at school should contribute effectively to prepare students to be real interculturalists who can question these phenomena and act critically ethically and responsively 2Like many other important notions in education interculturality tends to be polysemic fictional and empty at the same time conveniently meaning either too much or too little 3too often the powerful speak for and over the powerless when it comes to interculturality 3One cannot meet a culture but people who are made to represent it or rather represent imaginaries and representations of it 9People can clash not cultures 10In many instances of misunderstanding between people from different countries interculturality has nothing to do with culture 11it is through the eyes of the other that self is constructed 14In our societies some people always need to explain their identity while others don t 16One of the myths of our time is that Westerners have done away with collectivism while the East is still very much dependent upon it 19What differs today is of course the speed at which globalization is taking place and how it influences systematically the local hence the word glocalization which is sometimes used instead of globalization 25How often do we hear teachers label a refugee kid as a cosmopolitan Probably never 26The way the very idea of diversity is approached today is thus highly problematic and biased While the word diversity should refer to multiplicity it often means difference and oneness While the other is often imprisoned in the straitjackets of a homogenized diversity the majority can freely claim to be normal not visible and thus not needing special attention 28I argue that diversity touches us all and that educators should start treating everyone from a position of diversities for all in order to put an end to these examples of concocted fa ade diversity 30it is not the same to be for example a veiled Muslim woman at Harrods in London and a woman wearing a hijab in Southall West London UK The same doors do not open for these individuals the same encounters are not possible and so on 33While cultural difference is often celebrated in schools similarities with the other tend to be rejected and banished This bias has an impact on how minority students get treated and on our assumptions about them 35the overemphasis on discourses of culture in relation to interculturality has led researchers and practitioners alike to think exclusively in terms of difference 35Starting critically and reflexively from similarities rather than differences might open up new vistas for both research and practice 37In order to other one needs to compare self to other 45In sociology amongst others othering refers to differentiating discourses that lead to moral and political judgement of superiority and inferiority between us and them In this understanding of othering power is always employed in representing other and self 46Instead of concentrating for example only on culture as a sole contributor to othering one should also include systems of race gender class ethnicity disability sexuality and so on in how people identify and differentiate 51However while reading the description of the initiative I worry about its supposedly universal and objective appeal Who will make the final decision as to what for example critical thinking means or as to what responsibility entails Whose voices will be included in the descriptors Will this lead to the centre Europe dictating to the rest of the world what democratic and intercultural competences are 63the notion of tolerance has been criticized by many interculturalists for its somewhat passive and potentially patronizing characteristics 63One thing is for sure We need to move away from a perspective that lays an emphasis on facts about a target culture presents grammars of culture do s and don ts concentrates on cultural difference and confronts cultures and civilizations 72intercultural competences IC and defined as the values attitudes skills knowledge and critical understanding that enable us to participate effectively in today s diverse democracies 73The model is thus very much individualistic in the sense that it relies too much on the performance of one individual and ignores the fact that interculturality is co constructed influenced and somewhat determined by the presence of an other by power differentials and by specific contexts and intertextuality 76Its starting point is the idea of diverse diversities everybody is diverse regardless of their origins skin colour social background and so on 80The liquid realistic approach to IC that I propose to consider wishes to move beyond this problematic issue by recognizing that essentialism is a universal sin and that no one is immune to it 81Simplexity a portmanteau word composed of simple and complexity represents a continuum between the simple and the complex 81No one can claim to be able to analyse understand and or talk about the interculturalityfrom a complex perspective because sooner or later the complex becomes simple and vice versa 81Another important issue relating to IC is to get used to discomfort to appreciate entering risky territory and to accept that some degree of pain is involved in dealing with intercultural encounters 83intercultural competences has often ignored such aspects to concentrate solely on the easy and often a political aspect of cultural difference 83Too many models have blamed one of the participants for being not competent enough while her competence depends on the presence of another physical or virtual individual 84Discourses on the self and the other identity constructions are always co constructed between people 104Place Justice at the centre of interculturality in education 105The use of words is never innocent We also need to bear in mind that language use is very political and that it usually translates power differentials and symbolic violence 106 Fred Dervin
| Interculturality in Education: A Theoretical and Methodological Toolbox By Fred Dervin |
| 1137545437 |
| 9781137545435 |
| English |
| 128 |
| Hardcover |
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