An analysis of the use of autobiographical narrative for teachers' intercultural learning (original) (raw)
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Australian Educational Researcher, 2022
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Reflective Practice: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 2015
Teachers' development of critical cultural skills is integral to their awareness of what and how they teach as well as how they communicate with students in the multilingual, multicultural classrooms of today. This research reports the analysis of 33 pre-service teachers' written narrative reflections. The reflective writing task was designed to elicit description and analysis of their experiences of linguistic and cultural difference (termed 'intercultural'). The study examined what learning is afforded by the reflective task and how this learning is evaluated by the participants. The reflective narratives were analysed using a four-type model to identify writing characteristics and degree of intercultural awareness. Findings show that overall, the reflective narrative was a catalyst for critical intercultural understanding for the pre-service teachers, was effective in supporting personal affirmations of background and prior knowledge, and sharpened awareness of their role in opening up critical cultural thinking in their future classrooms. This study demonstrates that a structured reflective narrative task can enhance an active and continuous process of personal and professional growth for all teachers.
Autobiographical Narrative and Intercultural Awareness
Journal of e-learning and knowledge society, 2019
The currency of intercultural education has risen worldwide in response to increased diversity within societies resulting from migration and global flows of populations. As intercultural education becomes a core responsibility of schooling, the attention to developing students’ intercultural capabilities grows even faster. The school and all the educational agencies must find the most suitable tools to adequately address the complex multiculturalism of the third millennium, so to promote the students’ ability to understand one another across and beyond all types of cultural barriers. This paper offers a reflexive analysis of the efficacy of using autobiographical narratives for enhancing students’ intercultural awareness. Autobiographical narratives have a productive potential as a strategy for stimulating reflexivity about cultural identities and intercultural relations. The Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters (AIE), published by the Council of Europe (2009), is proposed and ...
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2012
Interest is growing in the potential of international intercultural teaching practicums to connect students to international dimensions of education and to productively disturb the conceptions of teaching, diversity and culture that some pre-service teachers bring with them into their teaching. This paper reports on an international teaching practicum, wherein a cohort of preservice students from Australia undertakes a three week practicum in schools and communitybased settings in Johannesburg, South Africa. The practicum is part of an ongoing international project, which is now in its fourth year. It is supported by partnerships between universities in Australia and South Africa, and ongoing relationships with schools and NGOs in the host country. Using narrative-based inquiry methods, the authors inquire into the experiences of three cohorts of pre-service teachers who undertook the practicum from 2009-2011. They find that the pre-service teachers’ experiences of this practicum in...
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The article analyzes the issue of educational practices focusing on narration and autobiography. The theoretical and methodological framework used is that of intercultural education and action research in education. In this perspective, the authors present some approaches to narrative and autobiographical educational interventions and, finally, are presented the data related to a research on immigrant children in Italy. Key-Words: Intercultural Education, Autobiography, Educational Theories, Narrative, Immigration.
Teachers and Teaching, 2014
This paper reports on a study that investigated teachers' perceptions about the significance of intercultural understanding (IU) in the modern foreign languages (MFL) curriculum. The research was conducted in the wake of a National Curriculum revision in 2007 in England that for the first time listed 'IU' as one of the four key concepts underpinning the study of languages in the Programme of Study. In contrast to other writers who frequently explain MFL teachers' attention to intercultural learning as a consequence of their (lack of) knowledge about intercultural languages theory or pedagogy, or as the result of contextual factors, our findings suggest that the significance attached to IU seems to be profoundly affected by the interests, personalities and life experiences of individuals. This finding emerged from a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 teachers in 13 secondary schools in the North-West of England between May 2008 and June 2009. We illustrate our point by mapping the narratives of four teachers, conveyed through pen-portraits, with an adapted version of Kelchtermans's personal interpretive framework, and thus draw on narrative inquiry as our research approach. We claim that our hitherto relatively unnoticed finding, i.e. the central influence of the teacher as an individual on intercultural language teaching, has important implications for MFL teacher education. We suggest that the stories of the four teachers could be used as a professional development tool to identify motivators and inhibitors in developing IU that may resonate with practitioners' own beliefs and practice, and that parallel to this, our adapted Kelchtermans's framework may be used as a blank template to scaffold self analysis. Whilst this article considers teacher development in intercultural languages education, it also seeks to make a contribution to the literature on the usefulness of teacher narrative as a professional development tool.
ICONELT
The new era of global flows opens more chances for people to interact with others from a different cultures. Globalization offers a new lens to examine intercultural sensitive (IS) language tasks in designing teaching material. However, this study's design of intercultural sensitivity in the Indonesian-Thai context focuses on teachers' perceptions and is still under-researched. Thus, this study investigates teachers' perception of IS pedagogy in English language teaching (ELT) for promoting primary English teachers' merged into their practice of teaching materials. This study uses autobiographical narrative inquiry. The data analysis uses Bennett's (1993) framework of IS, which involves the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) in five stages to communicate across cultures in the Indonesian-Thai context. The data garnered autobiographical data from narrative inquiry in the form of short stories and lesson plans. The results capture that the teac...
European Educational Research Journal, 2018
Intercultural education (ICE) is a priority for schools and schooling systems worldwide. While extensive policy and academic literature exists that describes how ICE should be done in schools, relatively little has been published about the pragmatics of implementing and enacting ICE, despite evidence that principals, teachers and schools feel ill equipped to teach and engage in ICE. This article investigates how schools implementing ICE are confronted with distinctive challenges. Engaging methodological tools of social constructivism (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005) and an analytical lens supported by social cultural theories of identity and representation (Hall, 1997; Gee, 2004), we argue that the everyday experiences and practices of teachers need be explored, but also interrogated and understood otherwise (Lather, 1991). We draw on qualitative data from a large-scale study conducted in schools in Victoria, Australia. We present three vignettes that elucidate how ICE was enacted at the ...
Conceptualizing interculturality in multicultural teacher education
Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2016
This study examined student teachers' and teacher educators' discourses about multiculturalism in an international English-medium teacher education programme in Finland. An analysis with discursive pragmatics of semi-structured interviews revealed four positioning strategies for initial responses to multiculturalism: stereotyping and othering, distancing oneself, verbalizing experiences, and downplaying multiculturalism. Although the same strategies were present to a large extent among both student teachers and teacher educators, these have different implications. The teacher educators' lack of a shared critical understanding of interculturality created uncertainty when considering multicultural issues and can lead to a situation where the coherence between the objectives, implementation methods and assessment in the programme suffers. The student teachers had difficulties transferring their immediate experiences of multiculturalism into reflections of how these may contribute to their future work as teachers. Student teachers seemed dependent on teacher educators' support in recognizing challenges with diversities as learning opportunities. Teacher educators should be provided with opportunities to compare and contest their conceptions of interculturality so that they would be able to guide student teachers in reflecting on theirs.