Intercultural Competence in the Work of Teachers

Confronting Ideologies and Practices

Fred Dervin, Robyn Moloney, Ashley Simpson, Fred Dervin, Robyn Moloney, Ashley Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367002381
• eBook ISBN: 9780429684449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book critiques models of intercultural competence, whilst suggesting examples of specific alternative approaches that will successfully foster intercultural competence in teacher education.

Bringing together diverse perspectives from teacher educators and student teachers, this volume discusses the need to move beyond essentialism, culturalism and assumptions about an us versus them perspective and recognises that multiple identities of an individual are negotiated in interaction with others. Intercultural Competence in the Work of Teachers is divided into four sections: critiquing intercultural competence in teacher education; exploring critical intercultural competences in teacher education; reflexivity and intercultural competence in teacher education; and indigeneity and intercultural competence in teacher education, providing a methodological approach through which to explore this critical framework further.

This book is ideal for teacher educators or academics of education specialising in global education who are looking to explore alternative perspectives towards intercultural competence and wish to gain an insight into the ways it can be utilised in a more effective and productive manner.

Part I

Critiquing Intercultural Competence in teacher education

Chapter 1

Going forward with Intercultural Competence (IC) in teacher education and training

Beyond the ‘walls built by ghosts’?

Fred Dervin, Robyn Moloney and Ashley Simpson

Introduction

Daily practices in education can be frightening. A recent incident, reported by a Finnish student, shows that we are far from having won the battle(s) of interculturality (the reader can understand this last word the way s/he wants to at this stage). This took place within the context of initial teacher education in Finland, a country famous for its education, and concerns for well-being and equality. A white professor-teacher educator was introducing the concept of genres in the didactics of history. He presented the students with a collection of short texts about American slavery. In all the texts, that had been translated into Finnish, the ‘N-word’ appeared several times. The professor read the texts and said aloud the ‘N-word’ in Finnish. It is important to note at this stage that a Black student was also attending the lecture. The student who reported the incident started to complain about the use of the word and asked the professor, politely, to refrain from saying it because it made her feel uncomfortable. The professor confronted the student by asking her if she was trying to censor him. He also claimed that the N-word did not have the same connotation in Finnish and that Finland did not have a history of slavery (using the typical fallacy of Finnish exceptionalism) and thus, the word was ‘harmless’ in the Finnish language. The student left the lecture hall, accompanied by the Black student. The same week, a white professor was fired in the USA for having read a text written by Black author James Baldwin that contained the ‘N-word’.

History has had its dose of such incidents and attitudes.

In his Remarks, Benjamin Franklin (1783–1784/2014) talks of a Swedish minister giving a sermon to the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, telling them of the ‘facts’ that his religion rested on. In return the Indians told him about their own ‘facts’ about their beliefs. Franklin (ibid.: 425) notes: ‘The good missionary, disgusted with this idle tale, said: “What I delivered to you were sacred truths; but what you tell me is mere fable, fiction, and falsehood.”’

Another example is about one hero of our time: Albert Einstein. In his recently published diaries about his trips to China, Einstein (2018) quotes Portuguese teachers he meets who ‘claim that the Chinese are incapable of being trained to think logically and that they specifically have no talent for mathematics’. Einstein does not challenge this assertion in any way in his diaries and appears to hold many negative and Western-centric views about the Chinese throughout.

These examples are from the ‘West’. One could easily find similar examples in other parts of the world.

In this chapter, we call these phenomena, beliefs and the ensuing attitudes, ‘walls that have been built by ghosts’ (鬼打墙, Gui Da Qiang). This Chinese aphorism refers to the story of a man trapped behind labyrinthine walls built by ghosts. It means that one is stuck in one’s own thinking, at one stage of one’s journey and unable to move on.

In research on encounters beyond (national) borders, the concept of Intercultural Competence (IC) has been with us for decades, in the ‘West’ first and then globally, to counter – maybe? – the kind of static thinking found in the opening examples. Having spread to different fields of research (business, health, education, linguistics, etc.), one easily notices when one examines the literature and types of studies that have been led worldwide on the concept that ‘walls have also been built by ghosts’ in research – different kinds of walls, but walls too. We could say that we are not going forward with the intercultural and the concept of IC but still rehearsing the same (flawed) ideas around the world and following ‘false prophets’ from the British-American global neo-colonialist motorway of knowledge, supported by powerful supranational institutions and a world governance of research that over-privileges them. These have contributed to make IC in education a specific and politically-oriented figment of our imagination. At the same time, like the aforementioned examples, they have confined us in the ‘dream of the other’. And as Deleuze (1987: 83) would have it: ‘If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re in trouble’.

Anything new to say about IC?

This is yet another book about the concept of Intercultural Competence, with a focus on teachers and teacher education/training. Let us start with a warning: any discourse on IC is ideological. This means that any perspective on the concept relies on (amongst others) political, sociological, personal, glocal ideologemes (bits and pieces of ideology) that are passed onto us by the media, decision-makers, glocal curricula, research, etc. This is why we have decided not to define IC in this first chapter but to let the reader discover and examine the ways the chapter authors understand the concept. We each have our own (incomplete) understandings of IC, of course. We agree on some aspects while disagreeing on others. We know that our understanding of IC is the result of our own experiences, ideological training and brainwashing, and would not want to give the impression that ours is THE right understanding of IC. That is why we have decided not to share our definitions. We three have chapters in the volume that will give a clear idea of what they are. In this first chapter, we wish to guide the reader in his/her interrogation of the idea of IC, to help him/her tread their own paths through the muddy roads of IC in education.

In a sense we act as conductors here. When they work with an orchestra, conductors use their bodies, faces and hands to communicate. In many cases the conductor and the players do not share a common language. But through their reading of the notes, they come to an understanding as to how the music should/could be played. Each orchestra conductor has his or her own way of conducting (different gestures and postures). Developing his/her own character and personality is essential. For Zolt Nagy (2009: n. p.):

very often an orchestra is a preconception … you know it is like daily life … two different people go to an office … somebody can manage that, their goal, somebody cannot … how to deal with, how to talk, how to manage the orchestra.

In a similar way, for composer and conductor Pierre Boulez (1999: 23), learning to conduct is not about copying other conductors (for example Karajan or Solti), their gestures and postures but to find one’s own, the ones that make us feel comfortable with others and vice versa. In this first chapter we thus wish to help the reader find his/her own gestures and postures to be able to read the chapters through critical and reflexive lenses, without having ‘our’ predetermined way of understanding what IC is or should be.

Today it feels like everything has been said and written about IC. It even appears that every single teacher’s and student’s IC has been analysed by scholars around the world (e.g. Danish French teachers’ IC; Chinese language learners’ IC; Migrant nurses’ IC in Finland, etc. Note the methodological nationalism of these labels). Interestingly, one of us (Fred) keeps receiving emails from postgraduate students from outside Europe (China, Iran, Mexico, amongst others) asking him to take part in very similar surveys about the concept in order for the students to summarise current scientific views on IC. These surveys, all in English, share the same values, same pre-discourses about IC, although they emerge from different contexts. When Fred asked the students who they contacted for their surveys, they only mentioned the names of white Western scholars, who are overrepresented in the field.

We could go as far as say that the state of IC research and practice in education is somewhat worrying. First, IC is not always central in university departments of education, being often offered as an add-on. It is also sometimes substituted by other trendy words such as global or transcultural. Second, teachers in schools are often treated unequally in the opportunities they have to be educated and trained for interculturality. If educated and trained, they may be easily brainwashed to believe in and worship global systems of IC (Byram, 1997; Deardorff, 2009) or they may receive hands-on intercultural training purged of any theoretical and methodological elements – yet full of neo-liberal ideologies: there has been a recent push in Finland, for example, to make people ‘play’ to learn about the intercultural.

We feel that there is an urgent need to identify the multiple ideologemes, from both so-called ‘critical’ and ‘conservative’ researchers and practitioners, that have been packaged and sold around the concept. It is vital for teachers, teacher educators but also researchers and students to dig into these ‘walls built by ghosts’. The nicely packaged ideologemes often lead to pre-discourses about IC, see propaganda for wider dominant ideologies. It is high time we found important answers rather than mere echoes of these ideologies. Once the latter have been identified, one could offer keys to problematise and maybe construct new, alternative and fairer ways of dealing with the idea of IC. This is one central objective of the chapters of this volume.

In what follows, we, the ‘conductors’, provide the reader with tools to work their way through the chapters as well as beyond this volume.

In previous publications, we noted the following assumptions and controversies about IC (Dervin, 2016; Simpson & Dervin, 2019). First, it is important to note that interculturality is not something that was invented by the ‘West’, although it is often presented as such. Second, interculturality appears to be a mish-mash of a concept, used by policy-makers, businesspersons, educators and scholars alike to refer to certain categories of individuals (e.g. certain migrants – open secret: not all migrants are valued the same way). Third, the notion is a victim of Western-centrisms (ab/use of the words ‘culture’ and ‘identity’, while discarding the social and race in some cases), politicised discourses and practices but also idealistic ‘postmodern’ ideology (non-essentialism, non-culturalism). Fourth, the notion recycles concepts and notions without caring too much about their potential multilingual connotations (e.g. tolerance, respect, open-mindedness, democracy, etc.). Neither does it take into account the ‘social lives of concepts’ in our glocal worlds (Hann, 2016). Fifth, interculturality still seems to over-emphasise nation-states (even perspectives that refuse to do so) and to rely on ‘Western geography’ and ethnocentrism (e.g. use of the idea of the Orient to refer to China when the name of the country itself means the Middle Kingdom in Chinese, Zhōngguó (中国), Hann, 2016). Sixth, differentialism and comparativism, which are neither neutral nor disinterested, still dominate research on intercultural communication education. As Radhakrishnan (2013) notes: ‘behind the seeming generosity of comparison, there always lurks the aggression of a thesis’. Seventh, most perspectives are still very rationalist in the way they attempt to uncover some ‘truth’ about what people do and say when they meet ‘across cultures’ (see: the resistant idea of culture shock).

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed to see interculturality, and IC, through these problematic perspectives, these walls.

What to do to take down the walls built by ghosts?

In what follows, as an important complement to the chapters composing this volume, we suggest an approach that consists of two steps when dealing with the current crisis of IC in education. We illustrate the steps below by proposing a list of questions one may use to rethink IC (and enter into meaningful dialogues about it).

Following the philosopher Michel Serres (2019) we believe that the first step should begin with a deep and serious ‘intellectual and emotional catharsis’. The word catharsis is from the Greek and refers to emotional discharge through which one can achieve a state of renew...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Part I Critiquing Intercultural Competence in teacher education
• Part II Exploring critical Intercultural Competences in teacher education
• Part III Reflexivity and Intercultural Competence in teacher education
• Part IV Indigeneity and Intercultural Competence in teacher education
• Index