The ‘intercultural field’: interrogating context in intercultural education

ABSTRACT

Research on the intercultural is challenged by the contextuality of the object of the research. While theories on intercultural learning generally acknowledge that the ‘context’ of the individual learning experience plays an important role for intercultural learning processes, a detailed understanding of what it is we call ‘context’ in the twenty-first century is mostly missing – as are studies that focus particularly on the role of out-of-class learning environments for intercultural encounter. The contextuality of intercultural learning experiences is demonstrated by the role locations play for intercultural learners while forming complex and interwoven networks, involving human actors, practices and objects. As such, the contribution context makes to intercultural practice, often remains unnoticed, with context representing merely a backdrop of the researched activities. In order to make the locality of context and its highly networked, dynamic nature more accessible to research in the intercultural education field, the ‘intercultural field’ metaphor is revisited and discussed on the basis of a mobile methods study and three emerging themes: the role of relationality, the production of the ‘intercultural field’ and the relevance of spatial–global transformations.

Forschung, die sich mit interkulturellem Lernen beschäftigt, tut sich schwer mit der Kontextualität des jeweiligen Forschungsobjektes. Obwohl Theorien des interkulturellen Lernens die Relevanz von ‘Kontext’ für individuelle Lernerfahrungen von Fremdpsrachenlernern betonen, fehlen detailierte Studien, die sich sowohl mit dem Begriff ‘Kontext’ im 21ten Jahrhundert als auch mit ‘Lernen im Kontext’, ausserhalb des Klassenzimmers beschäftigen. Der ‘Kontext’ von interkulturellem Lernen wird hier als ein Netzwerk verstanden, welches sich aus Orten, Akteuren, Handlungen und Objekten zusammensetzt. Häufig jedoch wird Kontext als Kulisse oder Hintergrund von Forschung im interkulturellen Bereich betrachtet und der Beitrag den Kontext in situ – vor Ort – zur interkulturellen Praxis liefert bleibt unbemerkt. Um die ‘Örtlichkeit’ von Kontext, seine Dynamik sowie seinen Netzwerkcharakter noch stärker hervorzuheben und in Forschung über Interkulturalität mit einzubeziehen, wird hier die ‘Interkulturelles Feld’ Metapher wieder aufgenommen und anhand von drei Charakteristika besprochen: a) das Prinzip der Relationalität’ b) die ‘Produktion’ des Interkulturellen Feldes und c) die Rolle von global-räumlichen Veränderungen.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural learning
• intercultural field
• context
• place
• space
• relationality

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Malcolm MacDonald for their generous feedback and constructive suggestions on multiple drafts of this paper. Any inconsistencies that remain are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ulrike Najar, lecturer in LOTE (Languages Other Than English) and TESOL at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia, is an experienced researcher and teacher who has taught languages for more than 10 years in a range of educational institutions throughout Europe, Australia and Arabic-speaking countries. She has education degrees from University of Leipzig, Germany, and University of Glasgow, Scotland, in the fields of language education and cultural studies. Her research focuses on intercultural learning and embodiment; interdisciplinary, ethnographic and mobile methods research designs as well as the use of spatial theory in intercultural education research. As part of her PhD, Ulrike conducted an ethnographic study on processes of intercultural learning and analysed ‘context’ in relation to learning and teaching languages out of class.