Session Information
07 SES 12 A, Global Teaching: Southern Perspectives on Working with Diversity
Symposium
Contribution
Intercultural competence is an important contributor and precursor to effective teaching for and with diversity, and as such has assumed high importance for teacher education programs. International experiences embedded within pre-service teacher education have the potential to enhance pre-service teachers' intercultural competence by providing opportunities to consider cultural identities and reflect on socio-political aspects of education (Marx & Moss, 2011). However, questions remain about whether international experiences can really transform teacher dispositions, or whether they simply reinforce deficit discourses and produce an ‘aid’ orientation which valorises Western views, values and practices at the expense of reciprocity and collaboration. This presentation describes and critically analyses international experiences undertaken by pre-service teachers at four universities in NSW, Australia. These experiences take place in the ‘global south’ (i.e. predominantly developing countries) with the aim of developing pre-service teachers’ capacity and ability to acknowledge, and intelligently and empathically make sense of, local knowledges and pedagogies, and to incorporate these into their teaching. However, it is a constant concern that ‘Southern forays’ arguably serve the needs of pre-service teachers more than those of the communities in which they teach. Over a period of two years, four coordinating academics of international experience programs met to discuss and critique the impact of their own and each other's programs. The aim of this study was to identify characteristics of best practice that optimize the potential for international experience programs to promote intercultural competence and the ability to teach for and with diversity. Our analysis was guided primarily by an established evaluation framework for such programs, the PEER Model (Holmes and O’Neill, 2012) as a heuristic to inform and improve international experiences. The four elements of the PEER model are: Prepare, Engage, Evaluate and Reflect. These stages were examined alongside Bennett’s five attributes of intercultural experiences: attitude, knowledge, interpreting/relating, discovery/interaction and critical cultural awareness.
References
Bennett, J. M. (1993). Toward ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In R. M. Paige (Ed.), Education for the intercultural experience (pp. 21-71). Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural. Holmes, P., & O’Neill, G. (2012). Developing and evaluating intercultural competence: ethnographies of intercultural encounters. International Journal of intercultural Relations, 36, 707-718.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.