‘Korea … it's not really actually an Asian country’: Australian children's experiences of an intercultural school partnership programme

ABSTRACT

In Australia, intercultural understanding has been prioritised in education and curriculum documents at both federal and state levels. Alongside this educational priority, schools have also been encouraged to demonstrate ‘engagement’ with ‘Asia’, such as through a partnership with another school in the Asia-Pacific region. My research findings are based on an ethnographic study of Year 5 and 6 Australian children's experiences of an intercultural school partnership initiative through on-line classroom exchanges over a two-year period. Through a critical analysis of ‘complexity reduction’ I draw attention to the processes through which children made sense of perceived racial and cultural differences as part of their involvement in partnership activities and conclude with some reflections on the extent to which educational initiatives such as intercultural school partnership programmes that aim to foster intercultural understanding can do so without reinforcing unequal intercultural relations and stereotypes.     

Educational Justice and Occupational Mobility: The Role of Civic Commitment and of Imagination

In Italy, the exploration of, and debate on, problems of educational rights and justice are not subsumed under the comprehensive rubric of “Urban Education”. They are rather studied from disciplinary realms and approaches such as social education or intercultural education that aim to understand and respond to issues of pressing social, political and educational concerns relative to migration, educational inclusion of immigrants’ and minorities’ children, recognition of cultural diversities as teaching and learning resources, among others. In this article the intercultural perspective is focused on the Italian occupational minority of the fairground and circus people, whose intensely mobile way of life impacts on their children’s school attendance and learning, and on the schools’ capacity to elaborate effective educational paths also able to valorize those people’s cultural diversity. Three relevant “bottom up” projects are here presented that mean to positively answer the mismatch between the mobility of the attractionist students and the schooling curricula, the annual teaching schedule and the attendance requirements.     

Intercultural education in Detroit, 1943–1954

In the World War II era, many United States educators recognised that the claims of racial superiority underlying German anti-Semitism and Japanese imperialism challenged the fundamental democratic idea of human equality that is the bedrock of US political ideals. At the same time, these educators realised the importance of national social cohesion for political unity and strength. Their response to this challenge was to develop school programmes that emphasised the principles of equality of opportunity and inalienable human rights, that promoted respect for diverse races and cultures, that warned against the dangers of race-based totalitarianism and that taught all students to fulfil their responsibilities as US citizens. These programmes, generally referred to as ‘intercultural education’, enjoyed their greatest success from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.

In practice, most intercultural education programmes, as implemented in schools, did not live up to the ideals established by intercultural education’s founders. Instead, most programmes focused on the cultural contributions of diverse groups and on values such as tolerance and appreciation for differences. Yet one large and influential public school district, the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) district, did fulfil many of the expectations for the programmes. DPS administrators and teachers pushed intercultural education in more daring directions, directly tackling deeper structural issues such as power, privilege, discrimination, equality and race to help students from different racial and cultural backgrounds respect one another and to help groups that were traditionally discriminated against achieve their full rights as citizens. Intercultural education in Detroit simultaneously taught students to value racial and cultural diversity and to cherish and follow civic values – not an easy task. Although intercultural education was a short-lived movement, ending in the 1950s in Detroit and around the country, we demonstrate that many initiatives of intercultural education formed the basis for accomplishments several decades later, during what is known as the multicultural education movement. Intercultural education also had a legacy through Norman Drachler, a leader of the intercultural programmes in the 1940s: years later, as General Superintendent of the DPS in the late 1960s, Drachler would lead the effort to dramatically change US history textbooks to be inclusive of diverse people and groups.     

The legacy of Cold War anti-racism: a genealogy of cultural distance in the internationalisation of higher education

ABSTRACT

In this article, we develop a genealogy of international education studies’ tenets of culture shock and skills deficit. To trace their emergence, we map the discursive shifts which underpinned cultural anthropology’s involvement in the administration of US colonial, domestic, and international affairs respectively in the early 1900s and 1950s. These shifts are concomitantly linked to the formation of the field of intercultural communication, of which popularisation in the form of Hofstede model of “cultural distance” has structured international education when turning from a Cold War tool of total diplomacy to an export industry. Taking the development of international education in Australia as a case study, we demonstrate how the shifts in the disciplinary fields aforementioned are best understood as an anti-racist strategy, which mobilisation of the concept of culture has led to the paradoxical evacuation of the heuristic of race from the lexicon of intercultural contact between “Asian” international students and presumably white host institutions.     

Selling education through “culture”: responses to the market by new, non-government schools

The move to a market model of schooling has seen a radical restructuring of the ways schooling is “done” in recent times in Western countries. Although there has been a great deal of work to examine the effects of a market model on local school management (LSM), teachers’ work and university systems, relatively little has been done to examine its effect on parents’ choice of school in the non-government sector in Australia. This study examines the reasons parents give for choosing a nongovernment school in the outer suburbs of one large city in Australia. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu specifically his ideas on “cultural capital” (1977), this study revealed that parents were choosing the non-government school over the government school to ensure that their children would be provided, through the school’s emphasis on cultural capital, access to a perceived “better life” thus enhancing the potential to facilitate “extraordinary children”, one of the school’s marketing claims.     

儿童立场 生活眼光 故事表达——“新东方1001夜”传统文化故事教育的架构与实施

"和"是中华传统文化的基本理念与核心,"美"是教育的品质与目标。普陀小学将"和美"作为学校鲜明的文化特色和个性形象,以"新东方1001夜"故事为载体,创新学习方式,致力于打造"一个有故事的学校",以"儿童立场生活眼光故事表达"为课程理念,通过学习文化故事,根据学生不同年龄、不同年级,梳理出不同的课程内容和目标要求,创新学习方式,开展丰富多彩的寓教于乐的主题教育活动,让传统文化焕发蓬勃的生命活力。     

Can an educational intervention,specifically Theatre in Education,influence students’ perceptions of and attitudes to cultural and religious diversity? A socio‐educational research

Contemporary thinking seems to be particularly interested in the investigation of the role of culture in socio‐political life. This article presents aspects of a research project, undertaken in Greece, looking into whether a cultural product can foster intercultural communication and influence young people’s perceptions of and attitudes to cultural and religious diversity. Such cultural products are the Theatre in Education (TiE) programmes, which focus on the use of the art of theatre as a means of educational intervention. For the purposes of our research a specially designed TiE programme was used as a means of intervention and as a research tool. Our research examines secondary education students’ perceptions of and attitudes to cultural and religious diversity prior to and following the intervention in Thessaloniki and in Thrace, Greece. This cultural intervention, which incorporates art and religion, offers new insights into the possibility of the use of TiE for the religious education of young people.     

The Female Stranger in a Male School

A questionnaire was issued to 18 girls undertaking their Year 12 studies at an Australian private Catholic boys’ day school of 700 students. The questionnaire encompassed several factors in regard to gender issues and differentiation in education — subject choices, career ambitions, interaction between the sexes, female friendships, perception of gender differentiation and stereotyping in teaching styles and school structures. The girls were also asked to consider various feminist principles in relation to personal future goals. The theoretical framework within which the study was conducted was Schutz's notion of the “stranger” attempting to interpret and accommodate to the “cultural patterns” of the “approached group”; of the “thinking‐as usual” of the “foreign group” confronting that of the “approached group” and its “unquestioned and unquestionable reality”. The results indicate the girls’ high level of awareness of gender differentiation amongst peers, teachers and in‐school structures; criticism of and unwillingness to accept the new “cultural pattern”; and a modelling of their future lives along liberal feminist principles.     

High school biology evolution learning experiences in a rural context: a case of and for cultural border crossing

Although the concept of “rural” is difficult to define, rural science education provides the possibility for learning centered upon a strong connection to the local community. Rural American adolescents tend to be more religious than their urban counterparts and less accepting of evolution than their non-rural peers. Because the status and perception of evolutionary theory may be very different within the students’ lifeworlds and the subcultures of the science classroom and science itself, a cultural border crossing metaphor can be applied to evolution teaching and learning. This study examines how a teacher may serve as a cultural border crossing tour guide for students at a rural high school as they explore the concept of biological evolution in their high school biology class. Data collection entailed two formal teacher interviews, field note observations of two biology class periods each day for 16 days during the Evolution unit, individual interviews with 14 students, student evolution acceptance surveys, student evolution content tests, and classroom artifacts. The major findings center upon three themes regarding how this teacher and these students had largely positive evolution learning experiences even as some students continued to reject evolution. First, the teacher strategically positioned himself in two ways: using his unique “local” trusted position in the community and school and taking a position in which he did not personally represent science by instead consistently teaching evolution “according to scientists.” Second, his instruction honored local “rural” funds of knowledge with respect to local knowledge of nature and by treating students’ religious knowledge as a form of local expertise about one set of answers to questions also addressed by evolution. Third, the teacher served as a border crossing “tour guide” by helping students identify how the culture of science and the culture of their lifeworlds may differ with respect to evolutionary theory. Students negotiated the cultural borders for learning evolution in several ways, and different types of border crossings are described. The students respected the teacher’s apparent neutrality, sensitivity toward multiple positions, explicit attention to religion/evolution, and transparency of purposes for teaching evolution. These findings add to the current literature on rural science education by highlighting local funds of knowledge for evolution learning and how rural teachers may help students navigate seemingly hazardous scientific topics. The study’s findings also add to the current evolution education literature by examining how students’ religious perspectives may be respected as a form of expertise about questions of origins by allowing students to examine similarities and differences between scientific and religious approaches to questions of biological origins and change.     

Fostering Intercultural Communicative Competence in Business English Teaching

The higher education institutions in China have to meet the challenges posed by internationalization and cultural diversity to foster students' intercultural communicative competence.In Business English teaching,the students will benefit from these approaches through providing intercultural communication courses and lectures,improving students' cultural awareness,implementing reforms of teaching methods and enhancing faculty construction.     

让课堂成为学生幸福成长的地方——南菁高中文化课堂建设的理论自觉与实践探索

文化课堂是基于对南菁书院文化的传承创新和现代课堂教育价值的多维审视提出的课堂建设愿景。南菁高中的文化课堂建设,承载着学生生命成长的一切价值诉求,凸显"自主为先"的特色,让教学回归到"人"的世界;以学定教,尊重学生个性差异,满足不同学生幸福成长的需要;以美育整合教学内容,建立课堂与生活世界的联系;丰富课堂的存在形态,建立学习共同体,促进学生全面发展。南菁高中追求学生在课堂的"主体性、人文性、发展性、生命性"价值的实现,课堂建设由模式建构到文化自觉,努力让课堂成为学生幸福成长的地方。     

Reproducing,disrupting and reforming understanding of cultural diversity: theorising future subject teachers’ pedagogical reflections

Despite the growing demands for carrying out intercultural education as part of all teaching and learning, little attention has been given to the ways in which future subject teachers understand the meaning of ‘cultural diversity’ and how teacher education programmes prepare future teachers to consider intercultural aims in education. Therefore, this study investigates how future subject teachers, studying in an international teacher education programme in Finland, conceptualise the educational aims related to cultural diversity in reflective group discussions. For theorising the student teachers’ reflections, this study applies the idea of cultural reproduction depicted in the theory of communicative action by Habermas as an analytical framework for identifying how student teachers reach agreement or disagreement in issues regarding educational aims related to cultural diversity. This study identified three main forms of cultural reproduction from the student teachers’ discussions and showed that the underlying understanding about ‘cultural diversity’ and the educational aims related to it are in a state of disruption. This study highlights the need to clarify the theoretical concepts and aims used to guide intercultural education and to further emphasise issues of cultural diversity during teacher education. The findings are important for developing practices within subject teacher education internationally.     

British Women Education Officers and progressive education for an independent Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the work of three British Women Education Officers (WEOs) in Nigeria as the colony was preparing for independence. Well-qualified and progressive women teachers, Kathleen Player, Evelyn Clark (née Hyde), and Mary Hargrave (née Robinson), were appointed as WEOs in 1945, 1949, and 1950 respectively. I argue that the three WEOs endeavoured to reconcile their British cultural values, progressive education, English language instruction, and the intricacies of Nigerian cultures in order to prepare students for life and work in an independent Nigeria. Their roles were diverse, encompassing administration and teaching, teacher education, and leadership of girls’ boarding schools and residential training colleges where English was the language of instruction. Following an outline of the WEOs’ prior experiences, I compare and contrast their approaches to progressive education, beginning with Clark’s endeavours to make girls’ education “a graft that would grow onto and into their own way of life” at the Women’s Training College, Sokoto, in far Northern Nigeria. Then I discuss Robinson’s work in a men’s elementary training college at Bauchi where she dispensed a “down-to-earth practical” progressive education to prospective primary school teachers. Finally, Player gave girls “as complete an education as possible for life as a worker, wife and mother” at Queen Elizabeth School, the first government secondary school for girls in Northern Nigeria. Each situation illustrates the complex social relations involved in realising WEOs’ commitments to progressive education as an emancipatory project.     

Educating World Teachers for Cosmopolitan Classrooms and Schools

This essay responds to the question of what it might mean to educate “world teachers” for cosmopolitan classrooms and schools through an examination of an ethnographic play entitled Satellite Kids. The author begins with the idea that teachers need to develop or build up “intercultural capital”, that is, knowledge and dispositions that will help them in intercultural exchanges of teaching and learning. The author then explores what such knowledge and dispositions might entail through an analysis of Satellite Kids. The play's focus on issues of power, identity, and intercultural conflict within a Canadian cosmopolitan school makes an interesting case study for exploring what intercultural knowledge and dispositions might look and sound like, and how the educational project of building intercultural capital is different from the project of multicultural education that has been dominant in Western teacher education throughout 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.     

Reclaiming aboriginal knowledge at the cultural interface

Many studies and papers have explored and critiqued the “what” and the “why” of working at the cultural interface of mainstream curricula and local Indigenous knowledge, but this project sought to understand the “how”. Participants went beyond explorations of “cultural items” and worked in the overlap between the New South Wales Department’s Quality Teaching Framework and Indigenous Pedagogies drawn from local lore, language and the sentient landscape. Indigenous knowledge was used not merely as content, but to provide innovative ways of thinking and problem solving in the field of design and technology. The methodology for the study was based on a significant site in the local river system. The focus of the action research study shifted in the early stages from the students to the teachers, who required a radical shift in their thinking in order to set aside deficit logic, or stimulus-response approaches to teaching and learning, to embrace sophisticated Indigenous ways of knowing.     

Re-envisioning land-based pedagogies as a transformative third space: perspectives from university academics,students, and Indigenous knowledge holders from Manitoba,Canada

ABSTRACT

This research project examines experiences at the University of Winnipeg in facilitating land-based pedagogical (LBP) courses to ascertain the potential of land-based learning in strengthening students’ connection with Indigenous ways of knowing in Manitoba. The overarching aim of the research was to create empirical support for building bridges among the pedagogical approaches of land-based learning, two-eyed seeing, and transformative learning as a strategy for promoting transformative third space through land-based education programs. Transformative third space is utilized to conceptualize the process of weaving together Indigenous knowledges and academic knowledge to encourage intercultural dialogue and perceptual shifts in students’ understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing.     

Homo pontem: teachers as bridges to a multicultural Italy

Abstract

This article explores the appearance of new teacher roles within the Italian education discourse, in particular focusing on official and scholarly texts from 1990 to 2015. During the second half of this period, the conceptual borders of two distinct roles, the intercultural teacher and the cultural mediator, begin to blur so that all teachers are called to engage in mediation. The role of mediator is made up of practices and dispositions intended to create a bridge between non-Italian students and Italian schools. The collapse of the teacher and mediator roles creates a new discursive context in which the Italian teacher is positioned to reconstitute her/himself through the adoption of these new practices and dispositions, thus constituting a new subjectivity. The new subjectivity, homo pontem, is in part an effect of political reasoning and the theorising of intercultural and citizenship education that has produced state-sponsored policies meant to manage immigrants in Italian schools. The Italian Ministry of Education first referred to intercultural education in 1990, marking a starting-off point for this study. Through a discourse analysis of ministerial documents and Italian scholarship, the overlapping of the roles of cultural mediator and intercultural teacher is tracked. The effect of this overlapping suggests the availability of new techniques of the self, with the Italian teacher called upon to engage in practices that facilitate non-Italian students’ integration, foster dialogue between cultures, and protect a new Italian way of being in today’s multicultural Italian nation-state.     

Shaking Religious Education: A New Look At The Literature

This article offers an analysis of religious education practice through the literature that informs it. It engages Derrida's critique of the “metaphysics of presence” (1982a) to develop a theoretical framework for a new look at the ways in which different approaches to religious education represent religion and racial difference. The article specifically examines literature that has impacted mainstream Christian and “secular” religious education in South Australia from the 1970s until today. The article concludes by proposing a new approach to racial, cultural, and religious difference in religious education—one that begins to understand religious education's engagement with Others in terms of ethical questions, deliberation, and a radical openness to what is unforeseeable. It argues for the need for religious educators to begin to actively and deliberatively engage with “who” and “what” has traditionally been absent from multireligious approaches to religious education.     

Effects of ICT: Do we know what we should know?

Many decades after the introduction of ICT into classrooms there are still unanswered questions about the impact of technology in the long and short term on students’ learning, and how it has affected simple and complex learning tasks. These are important for (a) forming government policies; (b) directing teacher education programmes: (c) advancing national curricula; (d); designing or reforming classroom implementation and (e) analysing costs and benefits. While a plethora of studies has been conducted on the effects of ICT in education, major policy and methodological problems have precluded an unambiguous answer to such questions as:—“Does the way in which ICT is implemented have a major/minor impact on students’ knowledge and understanding?” and “Does the impact affect the surface or deep structure of students’ thinking and acting?” To date we have had no large-scale longitudinal studies of ICT’s impact in education such as we have in the form of studies of earlier major curriculum development projects. Nor have we had many comprehensive studies of the complex interactions between various types of ICT implementation and the effects of other factors such as school-based interventions, socio-economic status and school expenditures which have been shown to have a greater impact on education compared with other previous innovations in education. Furthermore we do not know if previous research studies have used research methods that matched learning objectives to instruments/procedures. Many previous studies are vague as to the actual measures used but we can infer that standardized tests were a frequent measure. In other instances, ad hoc analyses, with criteria that may have varied from analyst to analyst and were not “blind” analyses were certainly used to measure “success.” All of these limitations and uncertainties and many more point to the need for a thorough, rigorous, and multifaceted approach to analysing the impact of ICT on students’ learning. This paper draws on previous research evidence to identify relevant research strategies to address the gaps in our knowledge about ICT and students’ learning explained above.