Interculturality in Teacher Education in Times of Unprecedented Global Challenges

Abstract

As societies face unprecedented challenges that are global in scope and “more-than-wicked” in nature, educators and educational policy makers emphasize the importance of deepening knowledge about the causes of these problems, creating policies to address them more efficiently, and offering more compelling moral arguments that might persuade people to change their convictions, and ‐ as a consequence ‐ their behaviour. These concerns shape how policies on the study of interculturality are approached in contemporary teacher education in our contexts in Canada and the UK. Our research, however, positions these as problems that cannot be solved with improved information, enhanced cross-cultural skills, or moral claims, because they are rooted in modernity’s systems, which structure the possibilities for co-existence on the planet. We see these problems as ontological challenges of being that emerge from a modernist ontology rooted in colonial violences. Our approach therefore explores an orientation to intercultural education which enables student teachers to expand their understanding of cultural and ecological relationships beyond existing frameworks of modernist knowledge, politics, and economic systems. In this paper, we share some of our current learning about the affordances and limitations of dominant approaches to intercultural education, and then explore how the method of “social cartography” can enable engagement with ontological problems in teacher education in a way that generates possibilities for imagining decolonial learning futures, beyond modernity.

Defining and preparing for diversity teacherhood—Chinese Minzu (“ethnic”) teacher education as an example

“…examining the situation in specific contexts of diversity (Amsler et al, 2020;Dervin, 2023). Most aspects of Minzu teacherhood that we used as a template for observing and analyzing the datasets (i.e., unity in diversity, economic development, Minzu literacy, positive attitude, and multilingualism) were identified in what the teacher educators had to say about Minzu teacherhood and preparation for it.…”

An agenda for reinventing teacher education in South Africa: Next steps for deliberation

“…How do they come together to develop more inclusive research agendas for teacher education? It may be useful to examine debates in other former colonies' societies to help bring out an explicit articulation of issues within a South African context such as among Canadian First Nations (Amsler, Kerr & Andreotti, 2020;Dénommé-Welch & Montero, 2014) or Maori experience in New Zealand (Smith & Smith, 2019), unpacking the materiality of practices in Tuck and Wang's approach to decoloniality as "more than a metaphor" (2012:1).…”

Cultural Distance, Classroom Silence and Culturally Responsive and Inclusive Education: Evidences from Migrant College Students in Shanghai

“…Since the works of Philips [ 11 ] and Banks [ 12 ], more and more attention has been paid to the classroom silence of migrant students from foreign countries and, in particular, cultural groups such as American Indian students, African American students, Japanese American students, and Chinese American girls [ 5 , 13 , 14 ]. These studies basically used ideologies regarding race diversity in multicultural education; hence, they have been criticized for being “Americano-centric” or “overly Western” by many other authors [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ].…”

“…Following the same vein, another strand of the literature of classroom silence is based on local students learning foreign culture, such as English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Japan [ 20 ], Turkey [ 21 ], Australia, China, Korea, and Vietnam [ 22 ]. However, Amsler et al [ 15 ] called for multicultural and intercultural education around the world to move “beyond existing frameworks of modernist knowledge, politics and economic systems”. Achieving a profound understanding of the classroom silence of migrant students within a non-Western country is still a complex process, as most migrant students are actually from other regions of the same country, rather than from foreign countries.…”