Towards post-intercultural teacher education: analysing ‘extreme’ intercultural dialogue to reconstruct interculturality

The ‘intercultural’ is now omnipresent in most departments of teacher education in Europe and elsewhere. It can be implemented under the guise of, amongst others, multicultural, transcultural, global and/or development education. In this paper, I problematise post-intercultural teacher education. The context of this study is that of Finnish education. Famed worldwide for its ‘miraculous’ educational system, Finland is rarely talked about for dealing with diversities in education. In this article, I explore the impact of a course on ‘multicultural education’ given to a cohort of ‘local’ and international student teachers studying to become Newly Qualified Teachers. I taught the course myself and decided that since only 8?h would be devoted to the issue of interculturality, the course would have to help the students to learn to develop quickly critical competences towards the many and varied approaches to diversities that are ‘available on the market’. The methodology rests on the use of a documentary on ‘extreme’ intercultural dialogue that the students discussed at the end of the course. Set in Israel, the documentary follows a class in a multicultural school in Tel Aviv during the second Gaza War in 2008–2009. I hypothesise that the documentary, which is often conflictual, would help me to evaluate the students’ learning and how they discuss and problematise such a case of ‘intercultural dialogue’ in education and relate it to their future practice.     

Two novel ways of averaging waveforms by fourier analysis: the representative and the synchronous averages

Two algorithms are provided which define two new ways of averaging waveforms. The representative average maintains shape, has average d.c. offset, average amplitude and average position of noise-free input signals whose onset varies in time after a trigger pulse. The synchronous average removes random bipolar noise, the amplitude of which is below a critical threshhold, from a randomly occuring waveform. The latter does not require a trigger pulse, maintains its shape, has an average d.c. offset and average amplitude. Its position in the output field is such that the centroid of the waveform is placed in the center of the field. Both methods involve the definition of average phase angle and a quantity called the angular standard deviation.