From Principles to Practice in Education for Intercultural Citizenship

Michael Byram, Irina Golubeva, Han Hui, Manuela Wagner, Michael Byram, Irina Golubeva, Han Hui, Manuela Wagner

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783096572
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The contributors to this volume have collaborated to present their work on introducing competences in intercultural communication and citizenship into foreign language education. The book examines how learners and teachers think about citizenship and interculturality, and shows how teachers and researchers from primary to university education can work together across continents to develop new curricula and pedagogy. This involves the creation of a new theory of intercultural citizenship and a procedure for implementation. The book is written by teacher researchers who aim to help other teachers, and concludes with reflections on the lessons they have learnt which will help others to implement these ideas in their own practice. The book is essential reading for foreign language educators and researchers, students in pre-service teacher training and teachers in in-service training.

Section 1

The Baseline: Learners’ and Teachers’ Perceptions of Intercultural Citizenship

The first part of this book consists of three chapters in which the authors investigate students’ perceptions of concepts such as ‘global citizenship’ or ‘intercultural citizenship’. In order for educators to plan a curriculum that engages our students in intercultural citizenship, it is crucial for us to gain an insight into their perceptions of related concepts.

In Chapter 1, Irina Golubeva, Manuela Wagner and Mary E. Yakimowski investigate undergraduate students’ perceptions of global citizenship. In particular they were interested in how undergraduate students at the university in the USA and in Hungary define global citizenship and whether or not language plays an important part in global citizenship in their opinion. Their findings provide some evidence that educators need to communicate to and negotiate with students why intercultural citizenship education can and has to happen at every level of their education as students tended to make connections between living in other countries and global citizenship rather than mentioning the role of education.

In Chapter 2, Han Hui, Song Li, Jing Hongtao and Zhao Yuqin explore how undergraduate students from two different educational backgrounds in China view citizenship and intercultural citizenship. Based on the students’ answers the researchers draw conclusions about the role of culture and education in the students’ perceptions. These results therefore highlight the importance of our understanding of different contexts for our curriculum planning while also showing the urgent need for education for intercultural citizenship, confirming findings from Chapter 1 in a different context.

In Chapter 3, Ulla Lundgren takes a different approach to gain insight into pre-service or future teachers’ perceptions of their own intercultural development. Students who participated in a module called ‘Intercultural Encounters’ and taught by the author are at the same time co-authors of the chapter as Ulla Lundgren analyses their development of knowledge, skills and attitudes vis-à-vis intercultural citizenship and criticality through their own voices in the form of their reflections, which they shared throughout the module. As such, we experience personal accounts of the possible effects of intercultural citizenship education but also glimpse some struggles that the students experience as they are exposed to the intercultural citizenship curriculum.

1Comparing Students’ Perceptions of Global Citizenship in Hungary and the USA

Irina Golubeva, Manuela Wagner and Mary E. Yakimowski

Introduction

Throughout this book, the authors engage in transnational collaborations to teach intercultural citizenship in meaningful and systematic ways in a variety of educational contexts. More specifically, educators facilitate transnational communities collaborating on the development of intercultural competence (Byram, 1997). In addition, projects share a focus on action, combining ‘critical cultural awareness’ with ‘internationalism’ and ‘acting in the here and now’ (see the Introduction to this book). Gaining an understanding of what students believe it means to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes that lead to intercultural citizenship can shed light on their perspectives before and during their engagement in such transnational projects. Of particular interest for us is whether students believe that foreign language plays an important role in their becoming an intercultural citizen.

The development of intercultural competence and foreign language education is important in both Hungary and the USA, despite the fact that these countries are significantly different in linguistic, economic and political matters, which could have an effect on learners’ attitudes to foreign language education and global citizenship. For example, although in each country the school system endorses the learning of foreign languages, in Hungary the focus is having students learn more than one foreign language (see National Core Curriculum, 2012), whereas in the USA secondary students primarily learn one foreign language during their four years of high school. The increase in numbers of learners of English as ...