Teaching culture beyond nationalist boundaries: national identities,stereotyping, and culture in language education

The authors take a critical language pedagogy approach to examining a 2011 controversy over disparaging comments towards Mexicans made by commentators of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s automotive show Top Gear. In particular, they focus on the characterization of groups and individuals according to their nationality and examine the ubiquity of nationalism and its ability to shape our conception of culture and in turn our understandings of others as members of ‘X national culture.’ The fact that humor is often a justification for national stereotyping and that these stereotypes are also connected to racist discourse are also explored. In the second part of the article, the implications of the stereotyping debate for language classrooms are considered. The authors argue that the controversy itself can be used as a tool for critical engagement that helps students deconstruct the underlying nationalist paradigm in L2 classrooms and build greater intercultural awareness.

Español: Los autores examinan, desde una perspectiva de la pedagogía crítica del lenguaje, la controversia que surgió en el 2011 debido a los comentarios nocivos hechos hacia los mexicanos por los locutores del show automotriz del BBC, Top Gear. En particular, se enfocan en la caracterización de los grupos e individuos de acuerdo a su nacionalidad, y examinan la ubiquidad del nacionalismo y su capacidad para darle forma a nuestra conceptualización de la cultura y, a su vez, nuestra forma de ver a otros como miembros de una ‘cultural nacional X’. Los autores también exploran el hecho de que a menudo se utiliza el humor como una justificación para los estereotipos nacionales, y que estos estereotipos también están conectados al discurso racista. En la segunda parte del artículo, se consideran las implicaciones para la enseñanza de idiomas del debate sobre los estereotipos. Argumentan los autores que la controversia en sí se puede utilizar como una herramienta para promover una postura crítica que ayude a los alumnos a deconstruir el paradigma subyacente del nacionalismo en el salón de lenguas extranjeras y fomente la conciencia intercultural.     

Mobilisation strategies of individual and institutional actors in Brussels’ artistic and cultural scenes

Though sharing a common territory, the cultural spaces of Brussels are divided according to a complex structure where Francophone and Flemish Communities play a dominant role. These two language-based communities set separate cultural policies and programming for their residents in Brussels. Within this fragmented structure, local socio-cultural actors have mobilised promoting cross-Community collaboration towards a shared vision for the Brussels-Capital Region (ex. Cultural Plan for Brussels). Further, individual artists themselves have developed strategies to participate in Community-defined cultural programming and to gain recognition for their talent as local (Bruxellois) artists regardless of their ethnic, linguistic or migrant background. This article explores how socio-cultural actors and artists have mobilised to reframe ‘culture’ in Brussels, and to gain access to cultural venues particularly in the case of migrant and migrant-origin artists whose engagement and recognition in Brussels’ cultural scenes have been little studied.     

Why Interculturalidad is not Interculturality

Interculturality is a notion that has come to dominate the debate on cultural diversity among supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in recent years. The EU goes so far as to identify interculturality as a key cultural and linguistic characteristic of a union which, it argues, acts as an inspiration to other parts of the world. At the same time, the very notion of interculturality is a core component of indigenous movements in the Andean region of Latin America in their struggles for decolonization. Every bit as contingent as any other concept, it is apparent that several translations of interculturality are simultaneously in play. Through interviews with students and teachers in a course on interculturality run by indigenous alliances, my aim in this essay is to study how the notion is translated in the sociopolitical context of the Andes. With reference points drawn from the works of Walter Mignolo and the concept of delinking, I will engage in a discussion about the potential for interculturality to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary – modernization, progress and salvation – that lingers on in official memory. Engagement in such an interchange of experiences, memories and significations provides not only recognition of other forms of subjectivity, knowledge systems and visions of the future, but also a possible contribution to an understanding of how any attempt to invoke a universal reach for interculturality, as in the case of the EU and UNESCO, risks echoing the imperial order that the notion in another context attempts to overcome.     

Bildung and intercultural understanding

The concept of Bildung, sometimes translated as self-cultivation, is located at the core of an influential tradition of educational thought. A key question concerns the relationship between Bildung and interculturality. Drawing on Wilhelm von Humboldt and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and on the so-called transformative learning theory, Bildung can be interpreted as a process of transforming one’s meaning perspective in encounters with others. A meaning perspective is a set of largely implicit presuppositions underlying one’s habitual ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Confrontation with alternative perspectives can be an opportunity to become aware of one’s own perspective, to critically assess it and to transform it. Thus conceived, Bildung is closely related to interculturality.     

Misadventures with Aboriginalism

For 30 years the dominant approach to Aboriginal affairs in Australia has been to support cultural recovery and accommodate cultural difference in the expectation that this will enhance Aborigines’ and Torres Strait Islanders’ equality as citizens.This approach has been driven by a dialectic of progressivist desire to ameliorate the effects of earlier colonialist policy and Aboriginalist discourse that assumes isolable cultures, unitary identities and uni-directional causes of marginalisation. That discursive formation, once counter to dominant colonialist discourse, has now itself become normative, internally repressive, counter-productive and resistant to change. This is the national misadventure with Aboriginalism. This paper argues that this unexpected development is a product of the national governing attempt to gain control through public policy that is inadequate to Aborigines’ contemporary lived reality of interculturality, post-ethnicity and political agency. It uses an indicative case study and an analysis of the national misadventure to propose a deliberative intercultural approach to public policy in respect of Aborigines.     

Globalization,multiculturalism and brain drain

Abstract

The cultural turn is nowadays simultaneous to the greatest market enlargement, the globalization, which confronts institutions and leaders with new situations, characterized by the meeting of multiple cultures and by the need of intercultural understanding. As a consequence, among many others, the globalization obliges us to elucidate the multiculturalism, the interculturality and the leadership, as well as their connection.     

跨文化交往和世界文明共同进步

当今世界全球性交往日益密切,又呈现出文化与发展的多样性.跨文化研究和世界文明研究都已成为备受国际学术界关注的新兴跨学科研究领域.世界文明的多样性和同一性是其中的焦点课题,需要我们通过深化跨文化交往的理论研究来进行探察.跨文化交往与世界文明进程的关系主要有三个方面:(1)跨文化交往是世界文明(包括哲学传统)的重要动因;(2)跨文化理解、跨文化性和世界文明多样性中的同一性;(3)持合理的跨文化态度,遵守跨文化交往的伦理原则.因此,为了建立一个和谐世界,我们应致力于在合理的跨文化交往中实现不同文明的和谐进步.在全球化时代,跨文化交往是世界文明理论研究的重要课题,此项研究有助于树立合理的"文明交往观",促进世界文明和谐的共同进步.     

Turbulence in intercultural communication education (ICE): does it affect higher education?

This article examines a rather neglected context of intercultural education: intercultural communication education (ICE). ICE can be found in different fields such as business, applied linguistics, intercultural communication and health education, amongst others. The authors start by reviewing the latest and ongoing changes (‘turbulences’) in the way that ‘intercultural’ is conceptualized in this field and form a template for analysing a focus group with lecturers focusing on intercultural communication in the Nordic country of Finland. Our analysis shows that these practitioners, who are also researchers specialized in intercultural communication, share discourses about the importance of the ‘intercultural’ in education, but that they are unable to clearly position themselves within the existing polysemic definitions and approaches. The current turbulences seem to have very little coherent impact on the way they talk about the ‘intercultural’.     

Jewish Hatzolah and the barriers to equivalent Aboriginal Australian cultural adaptation

Insofar as they perceive secularisation as loss of attachment to tradition and community, Orthodox Jews face difficulties somewhat similar to those facing Aboriginal Australians. Both fear that engagement with the wider society equates to loss of cultural particularity. Orthodox Australian Jews have responded to this fear by countering the trend to secularisation and adapting traditional cultural beliefs and practices so that they may be retained while also allowing engagement in modern secular life. Hatzolah is one adaptation that reconciles dissonances between cultural heritage, secular life and good health. My interest in Hatzolah is as a metaphor that may help in exploring the possibility of equivalent Aboriginal responses, whereby Aborigines may negotiate the discourse that, for them, pits culture against health, education and socio-economic status. In this case, powerful discourse makes structured adaptation like Hatzolah less likely than it might otherwise be. Yet in their everyday, Aborigines do negotiate the tensions of being modern, much as Orthodox Jews. I argue that the discursive oppositions are the product of public policy and identity politics that are both invested in a solidary culture, unitary identity and binary difference. I also argue that the emergence of Hatzolah-like adaptations depends on the recognition and full consideration in policy of Aborigines' contemporary lived realities of interculturality, subjective multiplicity and ambiguity.     

Educating refugee-background students in Australian schools and universities

The Australian federal government recently set a challenging national aim: By 2020, 20% of higher education enrolment at the undergraduate level will include students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Although refugee-background students are often members of the targeted sub-population, their educational journeys frequently require special forms of support to ensure academic success. This article reports and discusses the findings of a multisite, qualitative study of refugee-background learners across three regional areas. Based on semi-structured interview data, participants from three universities and six high schools identified three primary domains that educators must address to promote student success: prior life experiences, language development and the culture of learning environments.