Four ‘moments’ of intercultural encountering

ABSTRACT

Teaching a graduate course focused on critical understandings of interculturality offers an opportune space in which to explore decolonizing pedagogical practices. In this short paper, I examine my own attempts at decolonizing students’ experiences of intercultural learning by incorporating non-Western knowledge systems to draw attention to dominant cultural perceptions, authority structures, and power relations. Using extracts of students’ texts and multimodal representations of cultural discourses, I focus on four ‘moments’ of intercultural learning: (1) the importance of connecting to history on one’s own terms; (2) how knowledge and experience shape our relationship to the land; (3) the need for uncomfortable and vulnerable spaces as potentially facilitating anti-racist/decolonial pedagogy; (4) the tensions around cultural appropriation in relation to teaching resources. In sharing these practical realizations of teaching in higher education I hope to contribute to the larger discussion of the possibilities and challenges of a decolonizing praxis.

KEYWORDS:

• Interculturality
• decolonizing approaches
• language teaching
• anti-racism
• cultural appropriation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the students who have taken this course, who have contributed in such meaningful and enriching ways to the discussions and many moments of intercultural learning. I thank them for the thoughtfulness, enthusiasm, courage, vulnerability, and the immense knowledge that each one has been so willing to share.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).