Critical Intercultural Pedagogy for Difficult Times

Conflict, Crisis, and Creativity

Prue Holmes, John Corbett, Prue Holmes, John Corbett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367714123
• eBook ISBN: 9781000584486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection lends a critical decolonising lens to intercultural communication research, bringing together perspectives on how forms of education embedded in the arts and humanities can open up intercultural understanding among young people in conditions of conflict and protracted crises.

The book draws on case studies from a range of educational contexts in the Global South which engage in creative arts methodologies to foreground decolonising approaches to intercultural communication in which researchers question their own power in the research process. The volume offers intercultural resources that can be used by researchers and community support groups to foster active intercultural communication, dialogue, participation, and responsibility among young people in these settings and those who may be marginalised from them. The collection also highlights the reflexive accounts of researchers working in a transnational, interdisciplinary, and multilingual research network and the subsequent opportunities and challenges of working in such networks.

Advocating for intercultural understanding among young people in higher education and a greater focus on social justice in intercultural communication research, this book will be of interest to students and researchers in applied linguistics, language education, intercultural education, and multilingualism.

1IntroductionCritical intercultural pedagogies in contexts of conflict and crises

Prue Holmes and John Corbett

DOI: 10.4324/9781003150756-1

Conditions of forced migration, conflict, occupation, and other forms of protracted crises have resulted in many young people being denied educational opportunities, not least the opportunity to gain higher educational qualifications, or marginalised within the educational system. Even where educational opportunities are available, many potential students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds feel disengaged, as a result of the continuing association that public universities, in particular, have with monolingual higher education provision for the professional elites in any given country. It is our contention that a necessary response to this situation is the development of pedagogies that engage directly with the many intercultural issues that accompany conflict, crisis, disengagement, and marginalisation. The key question driving such pedagogies is: How can researchers and educators promote intercultural communication, dialogue, participation, and responsibility within and across diverse and marginalised groups of young people in conditions of conflict and/or protracted crisis?

Inspired by this question, a small network of multilingual, multidisciplinary, and multinational researchers in higher education, working mostly in the above contexts (see Guilherme, Chapter 7 in this volume), combined to explore and develop critical intercultural pedagogies grounded in languages, intercultural communication, and the creative arts, in ways that recognise individuals’ multiple languages, identities, cultures, and cultural heritage. In this co-edited research monograph, we present five case studies that emerged from the research network, and four additional chapters that provide further commentaries on intercultural communication and education in conditions of conflict and crisis. The case studies and further chapters suggest to researchers and teachers of languages and intercultural communication, and their stakeholder communities, novel approaches to intercultural communication and intercultural learning, inspired by Freirean (Freire, 1970) critical pedagogy, that take into account conditions of conflict, forced migration, economic marginalisation, and occupation. They also provide a pedagogic resource for educators in formal and non-formal contexts to promote inclusivity in higher education, and to foster participation and responsibility among young people, particularly those affected by conflict and ongoing social crises.

The research aims and focus

The research undertaken in the project, and explored in the five case study chapters in Part I of the book, had three broad aims, as follows:

• to explore how forms of education embedded in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences address multiple languages, difference, diversity, marginalisation, and exclusion to open up intercultural understanding and communication, especially where young people face conditions of conflict, forced migration, economic marginalisation, and occupation;
• to facilitate intercultural understanding through arts-based inquiry, thereby enhancing critical, participatory, and responsible citizenship in young people; and
• to offer intercultural communication resources and teaching and learning approaches that can be used by researchers, educators, and community support groups, particularly in regions and countries affected by the above conditions.

Guided by the three broad aims above, the researchers within the network, across several sites (Bogotá, Natal, Gaza, Istanbul, Sakarya, and Durham), developed their case studies. Inspired by Freire’s (1970) understanding of critical transformative education, whereby researchers engage in dialogue directly with people at grassroots level in communities, the researchers co-constructed critical intercultural pedagogies in collaboration with students in higher education, refugees, forced migrants, and young people living under occupation and conflict. They also sought to foster relations with relevant non-governmental organisations, charities, and other community groups.

To promote intercultural communication among young people from diverse geographical, cultural, religious, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, the emergent case studies drew on the creative arts and new materialist methods (Badwan & Hall, 2020; Barad, 2007; Bradley et al., 2020; Frimberger, 2016; Harvey et al., 2019) and processes of languaging (Phipps, 2011, 2019; Phipps & Kay, 2014) and translanguaging (Blackledge & Creese, 2017; Canagarajah, 2018; Li, 2018). The case studies involved sharing narratives of the self; languages instruction and exchange; ethno-religious music that drew on new and traditional forms of representation and identity; participatory photography; deconstruction of media discourses and representations of refugees and asylum seekers; and creative writing (flash non-fiction and poetry). Furthermore, the intercultural pedagogies developed through the five case studies had a social justice agenda: to engage young people in active intercultural communication through participatory approaches so that they might realise for themselves what it means to practise “respect for the inherent dignity and rights of all human beings, [and] respect for others as equals irrespective of their specific cultural affiliations” (Barrett, 2016, cited in Ladegaard & Phipps, 2020, p. 70). The pedagogies also aimed to foster knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and behaviours that support young people in proactively facing and resolving local and global challenges (Crosbie, 2014; Giroux, 2009; Nussbaum, 2006). While these projects fostered intercultural dialogue primarily at the local level, their goals aligned with those of the of the UNESCO 2030 education strategy and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.7 (United Nations, 2021), which seek to encourage young people to be active, socially responsible participants in the community and public sphere.

To complement the five case studies, we invited contributing chapters from four researchers who are writing in and about language, critical intercultural communication, and intercultural education in similar contexts and conditions. Their chapters, presented in Part II, discuss approaches and contexts that also reflect the above three aims.

As the project involved a network of researchers from a range of disciplinary, linguistic, and geopolitical bases, we also wanted to understand the researchers’ experiences of researching in a multilingual, multidisciplinary, and transnational network; and the researchers’ reflexive accounts of researching in multiple languages, both in their case studies and within the network. Therefore, the book has two additional aims, which are explored in the final two chapters in Part III:

• to understand the affordances and challenges that engagement in a multilingual, multidisciplinary, and transnational network offers to researchers, and to assess its impact; and
• to explore multilingual researcher methods and processes in the above-mentioned context in order to construct an ethic of researching multilingually for other transnational, multilingual, multidisciplinary researcher networks.

The emergent project network

The research presented in the present volume was supported by a multinational, multidisciplinary, multilingual network project. The project, led by Prue Holmes, Durham University in the United Kingdom (UK), originally brought together researchers from Durham and four other universities, all in the Global South: two universities in Latin America (University of São Paulo, Brazil; University of Los Andes, Colombia); and three other universities (Anadolu University and Istanbul University, Turkey; Islamic University of Gaza, Palestine). As a network project, we sought ways to expand our collaboration, so later, educators from the Northeast of Brazil (the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology, and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte) joined the network. The project benefited from funding from United Kingdom Research Innovation (UKRI), specifically, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).¹

The project also brought together researchers from multiple disciplines (anthropology, applied linguistics, education, ethno-religious and music studies, intercultural communication, languages education, and sociology) to enrich understandings of internationalisation and intercultural education. Through our guiding focus on critical intercultural pedagogies, we wanted to foreground local knowledges and methods. While not discounting or discarding research theories and methodologies developed in the Global North, we were aware of the dangers of presenting them as universal panaceas to local challenges, and where apparently technicist approaches were adopted (such as telecollaboration) we were keen to adapt them to local circumstances.

The case study sites also involved multiple languages, for example, national languages (Spanish in Bogotá, Colombia; Portuguese in Natal, Brazil; Turkish in two Turkish universities; and Arabic in Gaza). In addition, the participants, some of whom were refugees, brought their own languages: Arabic and Farsi in the two Turkish and the Durham case studies; and English as the lingua franca in the Natal–Gaza and Durham case studies, the latter of which had many international student and newly arrived refugee participants.

Foregrounding epistemic justice: Research as ethical and political activism

A key aim of the research generated within the network was to valorise knowledges, constructed by the voices of researchers and research participants in the geopolitical South, and in languages other than English. We wanted to foreground epistemologies and methodologies that engage with the ethics and politics of knowledge creation and research in languages and intercultural communication, and in the context of higher education – research that invokes researchers’ ethical and political activism (MacDonald, 2020; Ladegaard & Phipps, 2020). The domain of our interventions was higher or tertiary education.

In co-constructing a pedagogical praxis in and for higher education that combines theory, method, and pedagogy, we were inspired by Walsh (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). In her introduction to On decoloniality Walsh discusses the importance of linking theory with doing, as praxis, understood as thought-reflection-action, in order to “unsettle and disobey – not reproduce – the reign of theory over praxis” (p. 9). She describes praxis as:

the doing-thinking, with the people, collectives, and communities that enact decoloniality as a way, option, standpoint, analytic, project, practice, and praxis; that is, with the activity of thinking and theorizing from praxis.

(Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 9)

We wanted to acknowledge the decentred and decolonial approaches that argue that educators should bypass the knowledge and hegemonic structures emanating from the Global North (Connell, 2007; Santos, 2018). We wanted to acknowledge the decentred and decolonial approaches that argue that educators should bypass the knowledge and hegemonic structures emanating from the Global North (Connell, 2007; Santos, 2018). In consequence, rather than envisaging Southern languages, cultures, and epistemologies as inferior, or as an exotic supplement to supposedly “universal” theories of interculturality, we chose, following R’boul (2020), to position them at the centre of our work together. Even so, as the network included members from the Global North, and as the very constitution of the network implied that there is value in transnational exchange of knowledge and epistemologies, we wished to explore the ethics of praxis at the interface between the local and the global. In this intercultural engagement, we wished to follow critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) in privileging the local without denying the value of the exchange in knowledge and methods across boundaries. Knowledge and method should not simply be transferred from one context to another without relevant reflection and consequent localisation.

We also wanted, as a guiding principle, to encourage an activist stance whereby students and other young people participating in the case studies become the drivers of knowledge creation (rather than the researchers) in their local contexts. Through their creativity, activity, and activism, they come to experience intercultural communication as a participatory process from which they can generate intercultural understanding and learning.

Furthermore, by focusing on the creative arts we attempted to fashion a framework whereby the students are naturally invited to assume the role of knowledge creation, in that knowledge is created and exchanged through the artistic products, and/or artistic and creative activity and performance. Our case study activities bypassed the established norms associated with formal learning in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Critical intercultural pedagogies in contexts of conflict and crises
• Part I The case studies: Examples of critical intercultural pedagogy for language and intercultural communication in contexts of crises
• Part II Responses from the Global South: Decentering “Western” and “Eurocentric” epistemologies and pedagogies
• Part III Building multilingual intercultural research networks in higher education
• Afterword
• Index