Theories of intercultural education, Joseba Arregi, Asier Barandiaran, Dmitrii Enygin, Venera Midova [7 ebook reader .TXT] 📗

minimise its meaning. Elements of one’s own cultural world view are experienced as universal. Cultural differences may be subordinated to the fact that we are all humans (and we have the same physiological needs – ignoring the fact that we might have different ways of satisfying them) or that religious, economic or philosophical concepts have a cross-cultural applicability. Even if differences exist, they are not perceived as relevant.

Ethno-relativism – Difference is no longer perceived as a threat, but as something that needs to be sought in order to progress. An attempt is made to develop new categories of understanding, rather than to preserve existing ones. One’s own culture is experienced in the context of other cultures.

The three ethno-relative stages are as follows.

Acceptance – Difference is acknowledged and respected. At this stage, there is both an acceptance of different behaviours and their underlying values. Acceptance does not mean agreement, but the diffe- rences are not judged based on ethnocentric and hierarchical world views. Cultural relativity is accepted and one’s world view is considered to be just one of many complex world views.

Adaptation – Difference is perceived as part of one’s normal self, as one has internalised it in two or more different cultural frames. Culture is not seen as something one has, but more as a process. New behav- iour that is appropriate to a different world view is learned and added to one’s repertoire of behaving, with new styles of communication being at the forefront. Central to adaptation is empathy, the ability to understand others by taking their perspective, not only at a cognitive level, but also at affective and behavioural levels. An individual can rely on several distinct frames of reference, or multiple cultural frames. One does not have to give up one’s own culture and adopt another. One’s world view is expanded to include relevant constructs from other cultural world views.

Integration – Whereas in the adaptation stage several frames of reference exist next to each other within one person, in the integration stage an attempt is made to integrate the various frames into a coherent whole that is culturally marginal. Integration demands an ongoing definition of one’s own identity in terms of lived experiences and one’s own relationship to a given context. Contextual evaluation is the ability to evaluate different situations and world views from one or more cultural perspectives. Individuals in this stage are marginal to all cultures and therefore create their own realities. This can be a very uncom- fortable place (if people fail to assume responsibility for the reality they create), but it is also a powerful state. People in this stage are well suited to act as cultural mediators.

Relevance for the context of youth work

People are generally more inclined to fear difference that to seek it. Overcoming ethnocentrism requires hard work in becoming more aware of the differences, understanding why people react the way they do in certain

Intercultural learning: theories, contexts, realities Page 31

situations and exploring new relationships across differences. Bennett’s model has proven to be a good star- ting point for the design of educational programmes for developing intercultural sensitivity. Bennett implies that intercultural learning is a process characterised by continuous advancement (with the possibility to move back and forth in that process), and that it is possible to measure the stage an individual has reached in terms of intercultural sensitivity.

This model can be a useful frame of reference for reviewing content and methods of training, for analysing the degree to which they contribute to the development of intercultural sensitivity. The model does not have to be strictly interpreted in terms of stages; it can also be viewed as different strategies to deal with difference that are applied according to circumstances and abilities.

The activity “The stages of intercultural sensitivity”, described in Chapter 4, is based on this model. The Pixar short film Day and night,16 which shows the stages of the Bennett model, is another good resource for pres- enting the model to participants in a creative way.

 

1. Introduction

Social sciences aim to understand human behaviour. However, they often fail to view it in its context: culture. Segall, Lonner, and Berry (1998) compare mainstream psychology to the fish that cannot notice the importance of water before it is out of the pond: ‘Any context for human behaviour that is so all-encompassing as culture is for the developing individual is likely to be ignored, or if noticed, to be taken for granted’ (1101). Cross-cultural psychologists like Segall et al. (1990) were precursors in advocating that ‘all social scientists, psychologists especially, take culture seriously into account when attempting to understand behaviour’ (Segall, Lonner, and Berry 1998; 1101). Failing to do so results in ethnocentric theories, which present context-specific observations as universally valid. Not surprisingly, unrecognised eth- nocentrism also affects educational sciences (Akkari and Dasen 2004). The awareness about the cultural situatedness of educational processes, as evidenced by Bruner, is still meagre: Culture, then, though itself man-made, both forms and makes possible the workings of a distinc-

tively human mind. On this view, learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural setting and always dependent upon the utilization of cultural resources. (1996, 4)

CONTACT Taniaogay tania.ogay@unifr.ch © 2016 association for Teacher Education in Europe

ARTICLE HISTORY

received 22 January 2016 accepted 18 february 2016

KEYWORDS

intercultural education; teacher education; culture; cultural differences

EuROpEAN JOuRNAL OF TEACHER EDuCATiON 389

The issue of culture has been introduced into educational sciences largely by intercultural education (in Europe, see e.g. Allemann-Ghionda and Deloitte Consulting 2008; Allemann- Ghionda 2011; Mecheril 2010; Rey-von Allmen 2011) and multicultural education (at first in the uS and then in other parts of the world, see e.g. Banks and McGee Banks 2004; Banks 2009). However, the focus of attention has been placed above all on the ‘cultures’ brought to school by pupils with a migrant or minority background. Yet, taking into account the cultural dimension in education implies more than attending to the individual cultural differences: it requires an understanding of the cultural embeddedness of education itself, as for example awareness of how much educators’ conceptions of normality are culturally related (Leutwyler, Steinger, and Sieber 2009).

After a first period where intercultural education resembled more a social movement (Dietz 2009), it nowadays enjoys a solid institutional recognition – at least in the Western countries – even if the implementation of policies reveals less satisfactory (Allemann-Ghionda and Deloitte Consulting 2008). On the European level for example, the European Ministers of Education issued a ‘Declaration on intercultural education in the new European context’ (Council of Europe 2003). On the international level, uNESCO (2006) has issued guidelines for intercultural education consisting of three principles considered to transcend regional and national differences. As a result, teachers are expected to demonstrate intercultural com- petence (portera 2014), and intercultural training is part of most initial as well as continuing teacher education curricula (OECD 2010). However, according to this report, policies and practices for the intercultural training of teachers vary greatly and lack conceptual clarity: ‘[...] cultural diversity and difference are conceptualised in various ways and the application of educational approaches – irrespective of being labelled multicultural or intercultural – varies depending on national and local school contexts as well as individual teacher prac- tices’ (56). The report also points the lack of rigorous evaluations about the effectiveness of teacher intercultural training programmes. Quite worryingly, an online consultation of teachers revealed that 66% of the respondents felt that they were ill-prepared to address diversity in the classroom, while almost all reported that diversity issues had been covered in their training.

in our view, a major cause of the lack of efficiency of intercultural training in teacher education is its unclear message, resulting from a lack of common understanding of what ‘taking culture seriously’ (in reference to Segall et al. 1998) means in the field of education. The foundation of this challenging issue is the enduring difficulty to capture the complexity of the concept of culture. As a consequence, intercultural training programmes risk to offer contradictory messages, advocating for colour-blindness and basket-making at the same time (in reference to the title of an article by Cochran-Smith [1995] reporting on a teacher training programme in the united States). it is not a surprise then that practitioners such as teachers hesitate between praising and minimising – or even ignoring – culture and cultural differences (Edelmann 2007, 2009; Ogay 2000).

it is our ambition in this article to present a concept of culture that provides the oppor- tunity for intercultural education to take culture seriously, but in a reasonable way. Hereby, we intend to offer an alternative to the abandonment of the concept of culture called for by other scholars, in anthropology (Abu-Lughod 1991) as well as in intercultural education (Abdallah-pretceille 2006; pretceille 2012). We first describe culture as an essential but also misleading concept, often misused. Then we present a dialectical understanding of inter- culturality that we developed, which gives experts and practitioners a model to question

390 T. OGAY AND D. EDELMANN

their position towards cultural difference. Finally, we suggest three metaphors of culture that favour a reasonable understanding of culture, allowing one to take culture seriously but without exaggerating its importance.

2. Culture: essential, and misleading

Culture is an indispensable concept: as Cuche (1996) stated, it makes it possible to conceive humanity in its diversity: human groups are different not because of genetic differences, as racist theories contend, but because they live in different environments to which they have to adapt. Therefore, human groups develop worldviews and ways of doing things, which are shared by the members of the same group, and which may differ from what other groups have developed. Culture is to be understood as an everyday, socially symbolic practice. it is a way to understand how individuals in their specific social conditions of life symbolically acquire their own lifestyle and attribute a unique meaning to their own life. There is culture in any practice (see Mecheril 2010, 96).

Although a central concept of anthropology, ‘culture’ remains extremely difficult to define and quite different understandings are encountered. Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) iden- tified at least 160 definitions, and some 50 years later, Baldwin et al. (2006) found another 313. if we had to choose only one, we would use the following definition by Camilleri (1989), which addresses most of the themes in definitions of culture (structure, function, process, product and group membership) identified by Baldwin et al. (2006), and is therefore in our view useful to refer to in training:

Culture is the ensemble, more or less linked, of the most persistent and shared acquired mean- ings that members of a group, by virtue of their affiliation with the group, are led to attribute most commonly to the stimuli coming from the environment and from themselves, inducing, with respect to these stimuli, attitudes, representations, and socially valued behaviours of which they attempt to assure the reproduction by non-genetic means.1 (Camilleri 1989, 27)

The ‘shared acquired meanings’ that constitute culture are references that make it possible for a community of individuals to live together in a given ecological context. As formulated by the eco-cultural theoretical framework (Berry 1971), culture results from an effort of a group of humans to adapt to their ecological context. Culture is therefore dynamic and not static because it would then no longer be able to fulfil its adaptive function. Ting-Toomey (1999) isolates four more functions of culture, showing how indispensable the concept of culture is in order to understand human relations and behaviour. First, by providing individuals with a frame of reference (e.g. values and norms that define how a ‘good’ person is supposed to act), culture enables individuals to define and maintain their identities. Secondly, shared culture fosters a feeling of inclusion into a group, which satisfies the human need of belonging and enables one to feel secure and accepted. At the same time, to identify oneself with a group reveals differences in relation to the other groups: culture also serves to regulate the borders between groups and orients the perceptions of in- and out-groups. Thirdly and as a consequence, if culture comforts the