This article presents findings from a study that investigated intercultural teaching through teachers’ collaborative conversations about critical intercultural incidents in schools. The data were generated through Web-CT and face-to-face dialogues between preservice, inservice, and university teachers about critical intercultural incidents identified by the preservice candidates during practicum experiences. Findings focus on teachers’ intercultural decision making within two broad categories: “minding” (making choices, enabling cultures, respecting and sharing power, and arbitrating and agonizing what is just) and “responding” (fostering intercultural communities, opening “safe” spaces, protecting students and surroundings, and “stepping up” to address it). Implications include the role of social and emotional learning and power dynamics in intercultural teaching and the potential for a case-study approach to intercultural teacher education.

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This article explores the identity struggles of a community of Tibetan refugee women in the Indian Himalayas whose educational program combines a traditional Buddhist philosophical curriculum in Tibetan alongside a modern, secular bilingual curriculum in English-Tibetan. Ethnographic and action research data illustrate how negotiations of meanings in multicultural, multilingual EFL/EIL contexts go well beyond mere linguistic features to include cultural and gender identity struggles. Five students serve as case studies to consider five alternative patterns of identity and language negotiations: rejection, assimilation, marginality, bicultural accommodation, and intercultural creativity. The author relates these cross-cultural identity negotiations to various gender identity stances. She concludes by recommending a program of intercultural language teaching to address the increasingly global context of English language teaching and learning.

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