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Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education: a new approach
Higher Education institutions face specific challenges preparing graduates to live and work in transdisciplinary and transcultural environments. It is imperative for these institutions to provide their students with the skill sets that will give them the mobility and flexibility to be able to operate efficiently in different cultural and professional contexts. This position paper proposes that developing proficiency in Cultural Literacy will allow graduates of Higher Education institutions to transcend such cultural and disciplinary boundaries. In this paper we define Cultural Literacy in Higher Education as a modus operandi and a threshold concept, following Meyer and Land’s understanding of the term. We also propose ‘Destabilisation’ and ‘Reflection’ as two strategies for teaching Cultural Literacy, and examine three case studies where these strategies were successfully embedded into teaching and learning spaces. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION on 19 JANUARY 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14675986.2016.1241551\].
FLEKS - Scandinavian Journal of Intercultural Theory and Practice, 2016
With growing diversity in the population, higher education faces a new situation with increasing student diversity. In our paper, we will explore questions concerning the consequences student diversity has for higher-education institutions. Based on our experience from three different R&D projects, the differences in culture and academic literacy practices give culturally diverse students challenges that have often been ignored in academia. Some other studies also document that this group of students has a much higher risk of dropping out and underachieving than majority students (Andersen & Skaarer- Kreutz, 2007; Støren, 2009). In our paper, we are going to discuss the students’ challenges and discourse of remediation that is often associated with their challenges and suggest how higher-education institutions can adjust their practices to be more oriented to intercultural communication. Intercultural communication as a dialogic approach may create dynamics in academic tutoring and ...
In this paper we examine the tension between the educational needs of a globalized world and the institutional structures of a globalized education system. The globalized education system encompasses market-driven funding arrangements for both research and teaching in higher education, which depend on international ratings systems structured around traditional discipline areas. The development of these competitive market structures has resulted in the removal by institutions of 'unsuccessful' disciplines, and a risk-averse approach to cross-disciplinary, problem-focused research and curricula. One of the most important consequences of this discipline-based education system is a missed opportunity to encourage reflexive thinking about discipline-based normative assumptions and world views. An advantage of interdisciplinary work is that it casts new light on the practitioner’s own discipline, as well as enabling a critique of assumptions in other disciplines. A reflexive and critical approach to disciplinary knowledge is, we propose, one of the conditions necessary for cultural competence in both researchers and students. Yet just as it is now argued that the globalized world needs graduates who are culturally competent - cross-culturally aware, reflexive, engaged with community in messy non-discipline-specific problems, able to critique and integrate information from many knowledge sources and work collaboratively – the competitive global education system increasingly marginalizes the cultural and structural contexts which foster such cultural competence. We provide two case studies in Indigenous Australia and the Pacific: both involve students and demonstrate the special quality and value of cultural competence and its connection with work across, and beyond, academic disciplines. We conclude that, while the political economy of the globalized education system is largely inimical to interdisciplinary work and the development of cultural competence, catalysing and supporting these processes is the responsibility of higher education institutions in a globalized world.
Journal of Praxis in Higher Education
This is the first special issue that JPHE hosts—and could there be a more suitable forum for an issue dedicated to exploring and encouraging a critical dialogue around transformative intercultural communication teaching practices in higher education (HE)? What has led us to engage with the theme of making intercultural education meaningful is a shared observation that there seems to be an increasing disconnect between recent developments in intercultural communication theory and practice. With so much critique published over the years, we are perplexed as to why traditional notions of culture still prevail not only in mainstream intercultural communication research but also in institutional discourses in HE and in popular discourses as articulated by the people who sit—or have once sat—in our classrooms. In this editorial and Special Issue, we approach intercultural communication from a critical angle, akin to the theorization of interculturality as a discursive and contingent, unst...
Destabilisation and cultural literacy
Intercultural Education, 2018
There is a growing body of work on the field of what is now known as ‘cultural literacy’, but little has been written about its application, and even less on how to teach it in the context of higher education. This article discusses ‘destabilisation’ as an approach to teaching cultural literacy in higher education in the context of the global challenges that universities face today. It defines the characteristics of destabilisation and highlights its advantages in relation to other teaching approaches that have a similar focus on developing cultural competence in students. The article also situates ‘destabilisation’ as a pedagogical term within a spectrum of experiential learning methods and techniques that are focused on developing cultural competence.
2010
which benefits both Home and Overseas Students Graduates increasingly need to operate across national and cultural boundaries. This paper discusses the need to ensure that all students are equipped to operate within complex and diverse multicultural environments. The work builds on three earlier studies. Using these, the author has created a new theoretical fi:amework and designed an intervention which aimed to increase diverse students ' awareness of intercultural differences and their ability to function effectively in multicultural learning (and thus work) environments. The paper evaluates this highly innovative training. It concludes that it was effective in making a wide range of students aware of issues around cultural difference and competence. The training significantly changed the outlook of students who took part in it. Whilst the framework was robust, effective, and generalisable to other contexts, there are a number of issues which will be addressed in the re-runnin...