An analysis of the use of autobiographical narrative for teachers’ intercultural learning

Abstract

The currency of intercultural education has risen worldwide in response to increased diversity within societies resulting from migration and global flows of populations. As intercultural education becomes a core responsibility of schooling, critical, detailed analysis of pedagogies for teachers’ own intercultural learning is largely absent in education research, in contrast to attention to developing students’ intercultural capabilities and theoretical and policy analyses. In beginning to address this limitation, this article offers a critical, reflexive analysis of our use and the efficacy of using autobiographical narrative for teachers’ intercultural learning. Framing theories include interculturality, autobiographical narratives for teachers’ professional learning, reflexivity, and the effects of silence and silencing in relation to diversity and intercultural relations in schools. Three instances of teacher autobiographical narrative elicited as part of a large-scale, longitudinal study of intercultural education in Australian schools are deconstructed to elucidate their explicit and hidden meanings and effects. The analysis reveals that while autobiographical narrative has productive potential as a strategy for stimulating teacher reflexivity about cultural identities and intercultural relations, it also contains hidden dangers and traps that caution against viewing it as a pedagogical cure-all in the development of teachers’ intercultural knowledge and skills.

Keywords:

• Intercultural learning
• autobiographical narrative
• teacher reflexivity

Disclosure statement

Neither the authors nor their employers have any financial interest in or a financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project Scheme [LP120200319] with partners including the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development Victoria, Together for Humanity, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, and Pukunui Technology.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project Scheme [LP120200319] with partners including the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development Victoria, Together for Humanity, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, and Pukunui Technology. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of the teachers and students from the participating schools and Catherine Hartung, Fethi Mansouri and Yin Paradies for their comments on an early version of this paper.

Notes

1. School names are pseudonyms.

2. Figures from the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) reported on the MySchool website: myschool.edu.au. This is a national, public website that provides detailed demographic and performance data on each school in Australia.