Boundary brokering for cross-cultural professional learning in international school contexts

Although much research has been done on the internalisation of education, issues related to intercultural professional learning, especially in the school education context, remain underexplored. This study examines the potential of boundary brokering in facilitating cross-cultural professional learning in an international school context. This article reports the qualitative findings from an interview study with seven non-ethnic Chinese language teachers who resided at the borders of Chinese and western communities of practice on their boundary brokering experience in bridging the different norms of being and practice in the Chinese teacher community and the western communities in international schools in Asia. Interview responses from the participants show that the participants’ cultural brokering generated critical and eclectic perspectives and practices, and reshaped the power landscape in the workplace. At the same time, their cultural brokering was shaped by the interactions among power relations within and across communities of practice, social suggestions on cultural brokering and the boundary brokers’ self-positioning. The findings suggest that cultural brokering could serve as a potential teacher professional development tool to foster reciprocal learning across culture borders. The complex network of influencing factors at play suggests that, in order to facilitate positive cultural brokering, it is necessary to adopt a systemic approach that underscores resetting valued skills and expertise within and across communities, creating a positive school culture that encourages reciprocal learning and managing individual teachers’ brokering mentalities and capacities.     

Narrative and counternarrative in print‐mediated coverage of Milwaukee alderman Michael Mcgee

This essay mounts a counternarrative to address the mainstream print‐mediated coverage of Milwaukee alderman Michael McGee. In analyzing racialized discourse in Milwaukee, the essay highlights the importance of focusing on rhetoric marginalized in or outside of the public sphere. A clash in rhetorical style can subvert the substance of public discourse with deleterious social consequences. We contend that a true dialogue on race relations will not occur until whites assume the responsibility for engaging in and sustaining this dialogue. The essay also establishes a rationale for why it is critically important to the discipline and to our respective communities to focus on local discourse and discursive communities. Finally, we offer a number of suggestions concerning rhetorical critical practices and the roles that critics can play in bringing about social change.     

Crafting cosmopolitan nationalism: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s rhetorical leadership*

This essay analyzes the rhetoric of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of post-conflict Liberia, for how it transformed national citizenship into cosmopolitan citizenship. Specifically, she promoted cosmopolitan values to global and regional audiences; codified cosmopolitan values into national policies and initiatives; and enabled Liberian women as citizens whose cosmopolitan practices fortified national, regional, and global communities. Through these concrete cosmopolitan practices, Liberian women performed as ideal citizens of the new democracy. Thus, this essay demonstrates how rhetorical scholars can turn to cosmopolitan theory to explain how rhetorical leaders can transform how and what it means to belong, especially for women.     

教育领域不同文化间的对话:比较教育的角色

本文倡导通过不同文化间的对话来促进国际领域教育家、实践者和哲学家们在一起分享彼此的知识、智慧,维护世界和平,促进相互理解.本文概述作者从事不同文化间对话的一些经验,然后探讨比较教育学术界对理解全球化时代文化传统和教育的影响,指出教育交流有赖于技术和市场经济的推动,也需要本土的、边缘文化群体以及贫困国家的参与,这些群体或因国家资源贫乏而无法跟上全球化的发展进程.世界比较教育学会联合会应该在保持文化的完整性,减少不同文化间冲突中发挥重要作用.     

Understanding the symbolic capital of intercultural interactions: a case study of international students in Australia

Intercultural interaction plays an important role in contributing to international students’ learning and wellbeing in the host country. While research on international students’ intercultural interactions reveals multifaceted aspects of personal and social factors, there is a tendency to consider language barrier and cultural differences as individual factors that constrain their interactions with the institutional community. Drawing on 105 interviews with international students in Australian vocational education and training and dual sector institutions, this paper examines international students’ intercultural interactions in host institutions and the factors that act as enablers or inhibitors for intercultural interactions. It highlights the social and structural conditions in creating symbolic capital of elitist Anglo-Australian culture and English language, and social differentiation. This paper offers insights into understanding the legitimacy of such elitism, in hope that future conceptualisation, research and practices of intercultural interactions may locate international students within their cultural diversity.     

巴赫金对话理论的修辞学研究

巴赫金(M.M.Bakhtin)学术思想的核心和精髓是对话理论,其主旨在于强调一种积极的、崇尚个性、注重平等参与的人文精神,对话思想贯穿于他的语言学和符号学思想。虽然巴赫金不是修辞学家,但他有关修辞学的陈述都倡导将修辞学解释为对话,从而确认了话语的各种形式。巴赫金的对话概念极大地发展和丰富了修辞学传统,由此而形成的对话修辞学将巴赫金作品中和现代文化理论中所形成的新的概念应用于修辞学传统,给传统修辞学注入了新的活力。巴赫金的对话修辞学是一种检测我们与他人的观点以及检测我们自身的手段,尤其是对我们个体的和文化的差异的一种检测。从修辞学的视角来探讨巴赫金的对话理论,有助于对其理论能进一步加以审视和理解。     

Becoming cosmopolitan and other dilemmas of internationalisation: reflections from the Gulf States

Drawing on the concept of cosmopolitans and locals within competing discourses regarding the aims of higher education and international marketization, this paper suggests that cultural cosmopolitanism may be developed through intercultural dialogue. It reflects on the findings of an action research-based teacher professional education programme in Qatar, with further delivery in other Gulf States, and suggests that potential negative outcomes of uncritical ‘othering’ forms of marketization, potentially resulting in epistemological mnemocide through the exercise of cultural imperialism, may be avoided through developing dialogical communities of inquiry, where issues of values pluralism may be negotiated according to participants’ needs and capacities for knowledge creation. These ideas may be significant for negotiating appropriate criteria for judging the quality of delivery and methodological ethics of the increasing numbers of international programmes using practice-based forms of enquiry. They are essential if international development work is to encourage sustainability through independent knowledge creation.     

“Until I Became a Professional,I Was Not,Consciously, Indigenous”: One Intercultural Bilingual Educator’s Trajectory in Indigenous Language Revitalization

Drawing from long-term ethnographic research in the Andes, this paper examines one Quechua-speaking Indigenous bilingual educator’s trajectory as she traversed (and traverses) from rural highland communities of southern Peru through development as teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate for Indigenous identity and language revitalization across urban, periurban, and rural spaces. Neri Mamani grew up in highland Peru and at the time I met her in 2005 was a bilingual intercultural education practitioner enrolled in master’s studies at the Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB-Andes) at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Drawing from my ethnographic research at PROEIB that year, situated also within a broader context of my ethnographic research on bilingual education in the Andes across several decades and Neri’s life trajectory across those same decades, this paper analyzes her narrative as it emerged in a 4-hour interview with me. I argue that Neri and her peers’ recognizing, valorizing, and studying the multiple and mobile linguistic, cultural, and intercultural resources at play in their own and others’ professional practices around bilingual intercultural education enable them to co-construct an Indigenous identity that challenges deep-seated social inequalities in their Andean world.     

作为社会修辞的中国当代文论

作为一种社会修辞,中国当代文论近60年的发展过程中,话语策略呈现明显的标志性、断裂性,具体表征为政治修辞、审美修辞和文化修辞的交错更替。修辞形态的转换,是社会历史语境变迁的产物,也是知识生产自身逻辑演进的结果。但文论中蕴涵的人文精神传统不能丢失。     

Educating ‘others’: Drawing on the collective wisdom of intercultural experts

Forty invited interculturalists (both academics and non-academics) from nine countries engaged in developing a coherent culture of dialogue and collective action to address the challenge of redefining intercultural education provisions with regard to the needs of refugee children. The method of cooperative inquiry to elicit theoretical and professional expertise from the participants was adopted. This inquiry was based on four dimensions of reflective practice, drawing on experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowledge. The intercultural experts (seen as ‘co-researchers’ and/or ‘co-subjects’) who participated engaged in a rigorous intercultural and reflexive dialogue developed in four distinct phases. The first two phases took place in their own local contexts and the final ones in a forum organised in Greece. During the forum, the participants’ diverse knowledge and experience were renegotiated to ascertain the ‘collective wisdom’ of the group and to address issues of otherness and approaches to refugee education, teachers’ training and mediation. The consensus reached by the participants included the following: the need for local communities to be supported so as to avoid and mitigate any hostility towards refugees; the urgency of a common European asylum policy; the realisation of the ‘other’ as a social construct based on hierarchical connotations and defined by diverse (meta)narratives; the urgency for providing formal/mainstream education to secure a pathway to social citizenship for refugees; the adoption of culturally responsive education practices to empower intercultural learning using refugee children’s own cultural knowledge and collaborating with parents; and the need for systemic intercultural and mediation training for teachers.     

Rhetoric, Action, and Agency in Institutionalized Science and Technology

This essay argues that to an unprecedented degree the practices of contemporary science and technology are embedded within complex institutional systems. This embeddedness problematizes received views of rhetorical action and agency, which must be reformulated to locate these principles within larger systems of power/ knowledge. Three sets of resources are identified for this reformulation: theories of organizational rhetoric, Foucauldian studies of knowledge-intensive organizations, and Foucauldian approaches to the philosophy of science.     

Teachers’ intercultural competence: a requirement or an option in a culturally diverse classroom?

This paper reports an exploratory study of the development of intercultural competence (IC) in elementary school teachers in Catalonia, Spain, utilising mixed-method quantitative and qualitative assessments. Through enrolment in a teacher training activity, the starting point was the administration of the Intercultural development inventory (IDI) to assess IC. Later, a discussion group was held to reflect on the results of the evaluation and to discuss educational practices in the face of cultural diversity. The quantitative IDI findings indicated that, regardless of the presence of foreign origin students at schools, participant teachers overestimate their level of intercultural sensitivity; there is a tendency to emphasise similarities in all cultures, which can minimise significant cultural differences. Nevertheless, the teachers became interested in cultural diversity after considering their potentially controversial and problematic educational context. Beyond admitted limitations of this study, inherent to small-scale methodological approach, our practice-based reflective proposal highlights obstacles and potentialities for managing cultural diversity in the classroom. These findings support the conclusion that IC is distributed throughout members of a community rather than being strictly an individual attribute. At the same time, the study thus demonstrates a mixed-method training design as an effective means of developing and assessing IC.     

The language of friendship and identity: children’s communication choices in an interfaith exchange

The development of partnerships between schools and school children of different religious and cultural backgrounds is currently being promoted at national level in an attempt to encourage social cohesion in ethnically and religiously diverse societies. This article reports on one such partnership, a programme of email communication between children from primary schools in Leicester and East Sussex. It uses concepts of presence and space to analyse the different linguistic and paralinguistic devices children employ to construct their identities as friends and as representatives of their communities, and to project these identities across a cultural divide. Evaluation of the children’s language choices identifies tensions and limitations as well as possibilities. The article makes use of Derrida’s deconstruction of hospitality as it questions a too ready adoption of the discourse of friendship for children’s intercultural encounter, and suggests that the development of a more sophisticated language of interest, politeness and respect provides them with a firmer foundation for positive and productive dialogue with religious difference.     

Dialogical rhetoric: An application of martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue

Underlying much twentieth century rhetorical theorizing has been the intuition that functionally and instrumentally, rhetoric requires a complement, for instance, dialectic or “dialogic.” While the work of Maurice Natanson, Richard Weaver, and recent rhetoricians of inquiry provides a dialectical complement to instrumental rhetoric, another tradition in rhetoric represented by the work of Wayne Brockriede and Allen Clark explores dialogue as a complement to instrumental rhetoric. This essay postulates that the philosophy of dialogue developed by Martin Buber provides a coherent grounding for a dialogical/ontological rhetoric. It contrasts, respectively, instrumental and dialogical conceptions of the rhetorical situation and instrumental and dialogical characterizations of the rhetor, the rhetor's purposes and modes of influence. It concludes with a discussion of research issues confronting those interested in further development of a dialogic rhetoric.     

“Second Line to Bury White Supremacy”: Take 'Em Down Nola,monument removal,and residual memory

ABSTRACT

As Lost Cause statues come down across the country, communities are forced to reckon with monumental absences. While the rhetorical significance of monuments is well-established in scholarly literature, the rhetoric of monumental absence is not as thoroughly covered. To better understand the role that monumental absence plays in both public space and civic life, this essay theorizes residual memory as the remaining rhetorical potency that clings to a commemorative site after the focal object or structure of memorialization is removed. To demonstrate the theoretical utility of residual memory and contribute to ongoing public debates about Lost Cause monuments, this essay uses rhetorical field methods to conduct a rhetorical analysis of Take 'Em Down NOLA's “Second Line to Bury White Supremacy.” The secretive night time removal of the Liberty Place Monument in New Orleans on April 24, 2017 and the activist celebration that followed two weeks later provide an exemplary case for exploring how residual memories can be used to resist and revise regressive practices of public memory.     

俄汉身势语的文化差异

身势语和语言一样也是文化的载体,反映了不同语言、不同文化、不同时代的某些心理特征。身势语属于非语言交际系统,是语言系统之外的边缘部分,与语言交际理论密切相关,涉及交际场景,交际者双方的社会文化与心理特征。随着跨文化交际的日益频繁,俄汉身势语的文化差异已是交际的主要障碍之一。了解并把握俄汉身势语文化内涵的差异,有助于帮助外语学习者准确地表达意思,成功地进行跨文化交际。     

Head teachers’ attitudes towards religious diversity and interreligious dialogue and their implications for secondary schools in Catalonia

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the attitudes of secondary-school head teachers towards religious diversity, intercultural and interreligious dialogue and the role of education in fostering intercultural and interreligious dialogue. A sample comprising 275 head teachers in Catalan secondary schools answered an online questionnaire. The results revealed attitudes which were moderately favourable towards cultural and religious diversity, more strongly favourable towards interreligious dialogue, and less favourable towards education playing a major role in managing religious and cultural diversity and in fostering interreligious dialogue. We found significant differences in head teachers’ attitudes in line with the specific features of the schools where they worked. Amongst these differences, it was noticeable that heads of religious and private–public schools had more positive attitudes towards managing religious and cultural diversity and towards education playing a leading role in promoting dialogue. Also, we identified three groups of head teachers who showed differing degrees of positivity according to the perceived religious diversity of their schools. The more diverse the school, the less favourable the attitude, and vice-versa; the most moderate favourability was also associated with the most moderate diversity.     

Pre-service teachers teaching about and across cultures using digital environments: the case of eTutor

Increasingly, school teachers are expected to be able to teach about and across cultures, as well as teach in digitally enriched classrooms. Teacher educators are expected to prepare their teaching students for such challenges. One university designed the eTutor online environment to enhance and support the development of pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) intercultural capability, as well as enhance their capability to use digital technologies in their own teaching practices. Over 450 PSTs and school students from eight schools across four countries interacted with each other online for a 14-week period. Participants posted blogs, comments, wall posts and shared images and videos centred on cultural exchange. Despite the challenges of access to technology and conflicting calendars, eTutor was seen by participating schools as a potentially useful way to engage their students in intercultural learning. The experience of interacting with children from multiple cultures in an online environment contributed positively to a shift, for the majority of PSTs, from an ethnocentric to a more ethnorelative worldview. However, PSTs found establishing relationships with students in the online environment challenging.     

Ideology,knowledge and text: Pulling at the knot in Ariadne's thread

Contemporary controversies in rhetorical criticism cluster in three ostensibly separate areas: the ethical and political consequences of ideological or cultural criticism, the possibility and desirability of viewing rhetoric as an epistemic process, and the implications of broadening the purview of rhetoric beyond text to include cultural and personal performance. In each of these realms, current theory provides no conceptual room for reconciling oppositional positions. Proponents are left to agree to disagree‐a civil enough resolution within the discipline, but a sign that the current paradigm might have outlived its usefulness. This essay argues that contemporary critical vexations are not unrelated, but stem from a single theoretical source: a failure to consistently distinguish between culture‐bound rhetorical practice and the transcultural processes by which humans create and maintain rhetorical community.     

有限的概念术语 无限的发展前景——论王希杰先生的"三一"修辞学理论

当代语言学、修辞学大家王希杰先生的“三一”修辞学理论，反愉部修辞学的问题建立在以下三组概念之上：四个世界、零度和偏离、显性和潜性。这个理论体系抽象出了当代修辞学最重要最基本的概念，提高了 修辞学的科学品位和社会功能，因此，可望为21世纪的修辞学研究带来无限广阔的发展前景。