Session 7: Interculturalism and Education

Session 7: Interculturalism & Education
Chair: Leonart Skof

Interculturalism and the Crisis of Value Advocacy in Education
Mark Brasher
TransPacific Hawaii College, USA

A lot has been written about the practical problems governments and educational systems, in particular, face when serving people of differing cultures. In this paper I will address some of the underlying theoretical issues that may give rise to many of these problems. Culture could be described as the medium through which values are expressed and communication and understanding are made possible. But when, for example, a college or university is charged with educating students, how can it best deal with the differences of value and communication practices represented within a diverse student body? In other words, is any set of values normative or is none? The “status quo approach” to discussing values treats the dominant host culture as normative, relativizing others to a secondary or non-essential status. The global “egalitarian approach” disregards differences in status and leaves participants bewildered about the relevance of any or all of them. When asked, most students would respond that values are relative to the person. This makes nonsense of traditional culture and undermines social and political stability.
How, then, can transpersonal values be described in an intercultural environment? I propose different approach that attempts to preserve the benefits of the other two approaches described above, while limiting their shortcomings. An impossible alternative often sought is a “culture-neutral” set of universal human values. While rights may be universal and the necessary apparatus to protect them may be created anywhere, this only postpones, not solves, the question of cultural differences because rights must still be expressed to some extent within each particular culture. At best, these rights may be advocated universally, within each different culture, but they will never have a “culture-free” form. In this paper, I will instead describe a non-universalist advocacy of particular, culturally expressed values.

Decolonizing Methodologies; Intercultural Research Ethics at Stake
Eleonore Wildburger
University of Klagenfurt, Austria

This paper will investigate interculturally appropriate, post-colonial research processes. I will examine the implication of ethnicity on research processes and I will ask if there is a space for non-exploitative methodology in post-colonial research.
In this context I will investigate processes of intercultural encounters as to their interrelationship between knowledge, socio-political power strategies and representations of the “Other”. I will argue that constructions of a stereotyped”Other” are produced in political acts which shape socio-political realities and, as a consequence, I will analyse racism as a socio-political phenomenon.
I will point out that stereotypes form imaginative concepts of the “Other”, thereby producing conditions that cause conflicts whose existence are explained by these very non-differentiated concepts. I will argue that there are common strategies how to deal with “Otherness”: on the one hand, “Otherness” justifies political actions to “unify” a nation-state; on the other hand, “primitive” and/or “economically efficient” “Otherness” are deliberately created for prospective markets. In this context I will draw attention to language used as a discriminatory tool when constructing the stereotyped”Other” .
In the end, I will argue that racism must be made unacceptable as a standard on all levels of human encounters and I will point to interculturally appropriate encounters as contact zones where the participants re-assess their concepts of the “Other/s” in intersubjective learning processes. I will conclude that education and knowledge, generated in interculturally sensitive encounters, will support processes in which participants articulate their racial/cultural identity as an innate feature of transparent diversity, which constitutes the basis for mutual respect and understanding.
I will draw attention to an internationalisation of principles of Indigenous research methods and I will emphasize the implication of non-exploitative epistemologies in intercultural research processes. I will point to borderlines and open spaces within intercultural contact zones and I will mention pitfalls of monoculturally determined research practices. In this context I will argue that new languages of imperialism and/or globalisation create virtual cultures which de-humanise the Other in a process of mental neo-colonisation. As a consequence I will argue that intercultural cooperation needs to operate within well-balanced power strategies that relate, on a fair basis, to the diversity of “Otherness”.

Intercultural Education in a Divided School System
Tony Gallagher
Graduate School of Education, Queen’s University Belfast, Ireland

Northern Ireland is a society in which religious, political and national identities have interacted to promote community conflict. Religious divisions have been reinforced by high levels of residential segregation and separate schools for Protestants and Catholics. The present paper examines the role of separate schools and considers possibilities for an intercultural agenda through education.
Mass schooling generally acts as a mechanism for social integration, although often excludes minorities through assimilationist assumptions. In reaction, some minorities seek separate schools as a bulwark for maintaining identity and culture. This argument has been deployed in Northern Ireland to justify separate schools for Protestants and Catholics, both historically and in the present: currently, there are just over 1,100 schools, but only 50 of these are religiously integrated and only an additional 40 have a diverse student body.
When violence developed in the late 1960s many questioned whether separate schools had contributed to community divisions, and looked to the schools to promote reconciliation and tolerance. The paper will review policies implemented since that time and will examine the limited gains that have been achieved. The paper will argue that past ameliorative measures have been based on a poorly articulated cognitive model in which the goal is some ill-defined attitudinal change. The paper will go on to argue that, in order to promote an intercultural agenda in education, it is necessary to more directly address the implications of diversity in and between schools. This might involve creative ways of challenging institutional divisions among schools and training teachers better to deal with diversity. An intercultural agenda should not just be about the legitimation of difference, a goal which has perhaps been over-emphasized in the Northern Ireland peace process, but also the establishment of shared space and identity.