•Intercultural education may be more effective when the theories about the peripheries exercise self-criticality in theorizing and implementing this pedagogy.•This paper unpacks the cultural and ...epistemic formations of teachers’ understandings of the premises and objectives of intercultural education.•This qualitative study uses email interviews with Moroccan EFL teachers to elicit their epistemic input rather than to situate their responses among mainstream literatures.•Findings illuminated the complex epistemic processes that educators are engaged in to construct their situated knowledges informed by the intersection of available scholarships, their ontologies and contextual factors.•Findings suggest that educators’ exercising of intercultural education is problematized the high-abstract rhetorics in literature and by the lack of training which leads to ‘improvisation’.
The activist underpinnings of intercultural education may be more effective when the theories about the peripheries prioritize self-criticality in conceptualizing and implementing this pedagogy. This warrants examining how epistemic agency is exercised by educators to align the sociologies of intercultural education with the ecologies of their spaces. The aims of this paper are, (a) to unpack the cultural and epistemic formations of teachers’ understandings of the premises and objectives of intercultural education and (b) prompt southern epistemic subjects to produce knowledge about intercultural education that accounts for their epistemological positionalities and their consideration of local intimacies, needs and aspirations. This qualitative study uses email interviews with Moroccan EFL teachers to elicit their epistemic input rather than to situate their responses among mainstream literatures. Findings illuminated the complex epistemic processes that educators are engaged in to construct their situated knowledges informed by the intersection of available scholarships, their ontologies and contextual factors. Findings suggest that educators’ exercising of intercultural education is problematized by the lack of training which leads to ‘improvisation’ and the high-abstract rhetorics in literature which may require educators to sustain more efforts in addition to thorny attempt of doing intercultural education otherwise.
Intercultural education has several objectives: remove educational inequalities, promote social justice, encourage coexistence as subjects of equal dignity who must be given equal opportunities. This ...pedagogical approach looks carefully at all the differences: those cultural and gender ones. The article proposes to reflect on the thought of two North African Islamic women Nawal El Saadawi and Assia Djebar. Both are feminists and yet diverge in several respects. Assia is an Algerian writer and director. She writes in French, the language of the colonizers, because she does not accept Arabic as the official language in the land of Algeria, because it is the language that his father taught her, the language of freedom. Nawal is an Egyptian female doctor, psychiatrist. She writes in Arabic because she addresses an Arab audience: she wants to get his thoughts to women but also to men, those who manage power. The presentation of the thought of these two women is aimed at deepening the knowledge of a culture different from the western and Christian one. It also serves to highlight the contribution of Islamic women to women's emancipation.
En este artículo queremos enriquecer una mirada de la educación intercultural que pueda utilizar las conceptualizaciones de la cognición 4E (enactiva, embebida, corporizada y extendida). Seguimos la ...idea de que la educación se puede entender como comunidad de prácticas situadas. Argüimos que la perspectiva de las prácticas adquiere un sentido desde la cognición 4E que ayudará a promover una epistemología educativa que no se cierne solamente sobre los procesos gnoseológicos, sino que pone en juego otras categorías del entorno sociocultural que ayudan a otro tipo de reflexiones que lleven hacia una interculturalidad crítica, política y ética.
The research aimed to study how did mobile-phone were used for teaching speaking in intercultural education? and was the use of mobile phone for teaching speaking in intercultural education ...effective? Intercultural competence could be seen in the teaching of speaking since the students had to reflect their ideas and opinions orally. Thus, the speaking ability would be much supported by intercultural education. To reach this, the use of technology-based media like mobile-phone in teaching speaking was needed to make it easier and more interesting. In the past decade, several studies have sought to determine the use of technology in education; however, in the university context, the issues of mobile phone used for teaching speaking in intercultural education had not been discussed extensively. The research employed explanatory sequential mix-method research. The instrument of the research was an observation, questionnaire, and test. The research population was 40 students of the fifth semester of the English Education Program of Purworejo Muhammadiyah University. The finding shows that mobile phone is used as the primary tool to access the material and learning platform. Using mobile phones, the student’s speaking ability is improved by 18,3%. In addition, the finding shows that the use of mobile phones for teaching speaking in intercultural education is effective to help the teacher in delivering the material and boosting the students’ motivation to speak.
The study explores intercultural competences in the field of international cooperation. The substantive research question was whether Italian operators who have gained experience abroad, think they ...have developed intercultural competences and what competences they think they possess. This study involved a total of 20 representatives of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) from Lombardy (Italy), 16 operators working for NGOs in developing countries and 10 Italian international professionals from the UNDP and WHO agencies based in Geneva (Switzerland). In this empirical research project, a semi-structured interview was administered to NGO leaders, a questionnaire to NGO co-operators and UN international operators and a narrative interview to the latter. Qualitative methods of textual analysis were used. The author has created a dynamic model of intercultural competences consisting of fifteen recurrent competences. In this article, the author presents her model and how to assess intercultural competences. The empirical study involving professionals of Italian nationality. The topic of intercultural competences raises a substantial question about their deep, inner workings in the individual. Key issues for future developments in intercultural competences training are made explicit.
In the present article I present some activities carried out with a multinational group of ballet artist and dancer and coach students in theoretical subjects, e.g. Hungarian Culture or Dance in Home ...Country. The students regularly shared their newly constructed knowledge with their peers and instructor through products created on various digital platforms. In line with novel intercultural teaching methodology, building trust by offering choices in topics or presentation forms was a key element. The long-term goals were to provide students with a sense of belonging to a universal human culture through practical experiences and extracurricular activities related to intercultural themes (e.g., traditional dances, music, cuisine, sights). The use of ICT tools, which are today indispensable, has provided opportunities for creativity. The present article is a best practice report on the experiences gained while teaching groups of students from senior grades, systematically reversing the roles of educator and student in class. The results of the student-instructor role reversal are: maximum student engagement, development of collaboration, research skills, critical thinking and creativity, and application of skills through cultural information exchange.
The article explores the key provisions of the longstanding experience of the Republic of Poland regarding the development of pedagogy of borderlands, addressing educational issues of children and ...youth in these regions, and affirming the national identity of citizens in border areas. It is shown that in the Republic of Poland, in recent years, the pedagogy of borderlands has been developing as a component of intercultural pedagogy. The precondition for the development of pedagogy of borderlands in the Republic of Poland has been the expansion of research on issues of multicultural and intercultural education, significant attention to culturological issues of teaching and upbringing. A comparison of pedagogical research dedicated to the examination of culturological issues in education, conducted by Ukrainian and Polish scholars, demonstrates that in Poland, researchers distinguish between the content of concepts of multicultural and intercultural education. It is emphasized that while paying significant attention to the development of intercultural education, Polish researchers underline the necessity of preserving and developing national self-awareness, as participation in the multicultural world requires a strong and conscious sense of one's own identity. Borderlands are considered by Polish scholars not only as a certain space but also as a state of consciousness. In the pedagogical context, the basic concept of pedagogy of borderlands is the person living on the borderlands, their status, personal traits, and mode of social functioning. Studying individuals living on the borderlands has not only cognitive and diagnostic dimensions but also educational ones. Understanding the person living on the borderlands, their interests and needs, their multidimensional identity, enables the creation of optimal educational conditions aimed at supporting the individual development of young personalities, forming the most necessary social correlations, taking into account and utilizing the specific opportunities that exist in the diverse ethnic and cultural space encompassing territories within one's own country and beyond the border.
This study examined the learning experiences of Western students in Chinese universities. Thirty Western students were selected for in-depth interviews. It was found that Western students in Chinese ...universities faced many academic challenges. The experiences of these students involved both intercultural education and reverse mobility. The challenges they faced were related to both pedagogical and cultural differences between China and the West and the perceived inferior educational quality provided by Chinese universities. In facing these academic challenges, Western students in Chinese universities remained negative. They had low motivation to adapt to the ‘different and inferior’ educational environment and failed to call for a change of the educational provisions in the host universities. It is found that the micro-level experiences of international students were highly influenced by the macro-level global academic system and its hierarchy.
•Western students face many academic challenges in Chinese universities.•The academic challenges come from intercultural education and reverse mobility.•Western students perceive the education in China as being ‘different and inferior’.•The responses of Western students to these academic challenges are negative.•Western students’ perceptions are affected by global inequality in academic system.
This article presents the results of a study conducted in the Brazilian higher education system aiming at analyzing the contributions of virtual exchange programs to the development of intercultural ...competence in students. The unprecedented study assists to enrich the limited body of knowledge about virtual exchanges in Brazil. The units of analysis consisted of member institutions of the Brazilian Association for International Education (FAUBAI) that were already running virtual exchange programs in 2020. The study follows an exploratory qualitative research approach based on semi-structured interviews with international office administrators of the institutions analyzed. What stands out among the study’s main findings is the fact that, Brazilian international office administrators consider virtual exchanges as an important tool for Internationalization at Home, and thus, a path toward a more inclusive internationalization model. Even with all the difficulties, such as: major technical issues, low level of language proficiency in faculty and students, lack of commitment and the disadvantages deriving from lack of a deeper and more intense cultural immersion when compared to real-life experiences, there is a consensus that virtual exchanges do contribute toward the development of intercultural competence in students. Therefore, it seems important to promote more Internationalization at Home initiatives to create more circumstances of proximity with other cultures and second-language learning opportunities.
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