Adriana Diaz

Engaging with diversity: the construction of policy for intercultural education in Italy

Italy has become a destination for immigration, and this has had an impact on the linguistic and cultural diversity of school populations. In response to this changing profile, Italy has developed a series of language‐in‐education policies for meeting the needs of immigrant children. This paper traces the development of these policies and examines the ways in which the linguistic and cultural education of immigrants has been conceptualized. It traces a movement from policies relating to language and integration to intercultural education with a focus on developing the intercultural abilities of the entire population. At the same time, Italy’s language‐in‐education policies, while responding to the changed social profile resulting from immigration, have marginalized some aspects of immigrant children’s educational needs. L’Italia è diventata una destinazione per l’immigrazione e questo ha avuto un impatto sulla diversità linguistico‐culturale della popolazione scolastica. In risposta a questo cambiamento, l’Italia ha sviluppato una serie di politiche linguistico‐educative per soddisfare le necessità dei bambini immigrati. Quest’articolo traccia lo sviluppo di queste politiche ed esamina il modo in cui l’inserimento linguistico‐culturale dei bambini immigrati è stato concettualizzato nell’ambito scolastico. Inoltre, traccia la loro evoluzione partendo da politiche riguardanti gli aspetti linguistici e l’integrazione scolastica all’educazione interculturale, focalizzata nello sviluppo delle abilità interculturali della popolazione intera. Le politiche linguistiche italiane in materia di istruzione hanno cercato in questo modo di rispondere al nuovo profilo sociale risultato dall’immigrazione, ma hanno, allo stesso tempo, emarginato degli aspetti riguardanti i bisogni educativi dei bambini immigrati.

Developing Critical Languaculture Pedagogies in Higher Education: Theory and Practice

Despite widespread agreement about the need to develop interculturally competent graduates, there is a lack of agreement about how this goal may be achieved in practice. This is significant as universities around the world, particularly in English-speaking countries, have espoused an interculturally-aware vision for their future graduates and turned to language education, as an inherently intercultural activity, to expose students to a world which is linguistically and culturally different from their own. This book focuses on narrowing the gap between the often conflicting theoretical and practical imperatives faced by language teachers in an internationalised higher education context. It does so by providing comprehensive conceptual discussions of emerging critical intercultural language pedagogies as well as empirical accounts and case studies from the frontline.

Challenging dominant epistemologies in higher education: the role of language in the geopolitics of knowledge (re)production

The unprecedented rise in multilingual, heterogeneous, so called ‘super-diverse’ societies around the world has been met by an equally unprecedented rise in dominant monolingual ethos, practices and ideologies. This is particularly evident in the current Anglophonic/Eurocentric domination of the knowledge economy which characterises internationalisation of higher education worldwide. Indeed, the current higher education landscape is characterised by a strong ‘Anglophone asymmetry’ in which four English-speaking countries (the US, UK, Australia and Canada) are destination to over 50% of the students studying abroad. While universities in these countries market their campuses’ population diversity as a key point of attraction, they turn a blind eye to their linguistic diversity when it comes to engagement with scholarly discourses (e.g., academic writing) and different ways of knowing (e.g., canon of research and research methodologies). Against this backdrop, research challenging the current hegemonic, epistemologically imbalanced, monolingualising ideologies in higher education around the world is gaining momentum. In this chapter, I critically review this emerging body of research to articulate the ways in which a focus on language and language policies may illuminate different understandings of internationalisation processes and enable us to consider potential reconfigurations of epistemologies. While several examples pertain to the Australian higher education context, these may be easily transposed to cognate contexts around the world. I conclude by posing a number of questions that point to the ongoing struggle we face in the process of pluralising linguistic and epistemological practices in higher education.

The critical turn in language and intercultural communication pedagogy: theory, research and practice

This edited research volume explores the development of what can be described as the ‘critical turn’ in intercultural communication pedagogy, with a particular focus on modern/foreign language education. The main aim is to trace the realisations of this critical turn against a background of unequal power relations, and to illuminate the role that radical culture educators can play in the making of a more democratic and egalitarian social order. The volume takes as a starting point the idea that criticality draws on a number of intellectual traditions, which do not always focus on social and political critique, and argues that because ideological hegemony impacts on the meanings that people create and share, intercultural communication pedagogy ought to locate itself within wider socio-political contexts. With reference points drawn from critical and transnational social theory, critical pedagogy and intercultural theory, contributors to this volume provide readers with powerful ways that show how this can be achieved, and together assess the impact that their understanding of criticality can make on modern/foreign language education. The volume is divided into three major parts, namely: ‘theorising critically’, ‘researching critically’ and ‘teaching critically’.

Developing Interculturally-Oriented Teaching Resources in CFL: Meeting the Challenge

This chapter critically examines the challenges faced by teachers of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) as they endeavour to develop and implement interculturally-oriented pedagogical practices. These challenges are examined in the under-researched context of higher education and concentrate on the selection, adaptation and use of authentic teaching resources – transcultural/translingual ‘migratory’ autobiographies, oral history accounts and language learning memoirs. The chapter explores the strategic integration of these resources in a CFL university program, specifically, within a first year cultural context course offered to both specialist and non-specialist university students. The integration of these resources is underpinned by (1) critical pedagogical strategies that go beyond the ‘cultural’ to explore the ‘individual’; and (2) the introduction of a dynamic, (inter)subjective Chinese perspective that may be unpacked and problematised. Examples of three learning activities are used to illustrate the ways in which learners can be engaged in the critical exploration of this perspective to support suspension of judgement and critical deconstruction of stereotypes, all considered key aspects in the development of learners’ critical intercultural awareness. The discussion of these examples suggests that while selecting, adapting and using interculturally-oriented teaching resources are likely to remain a trying challenge, it is a challenge that cannot be overcome without a paradigmatic shift in the way we conceptualise our task as language educators. The chapter concludes by outlining practical strategies to help CFL teachers make the most out of resources available and, most importantly, take the steps necessary to address their widened educational mission.