Art matters in languages and intercultural citizenship education

ABSTRACT

This introductory paper briefly discusses the pressing need for intercultural citizenship education in a human world made small, currently shut down due to a pandemic. We further argue for a renewed relationship between the arts and intercultural citizenship education that explores sustained imagined worlds; stimulates empathy; promotes the critical development of languages towards dialogue; inspires social, cultural, and political action; and demands transformation. Lastly, we present the six papers that comprise this issue and document, illustrate, and examine art matters in languages and intercultural citizenship education.

Este artigo discute a necessidade cada vez mais premente da educação intercultural para a cidadania num mundo humano tornado pequeno e presentemente parado devido a uma pandemia. Defendemos uma relação renovada entre as artes e a educação intercultural para a cidadania que explore mundos imaginados sustentáveis; estimule a empatia; promova o desenvolvimento crítico das línguas para a construção do diálogo; inspire para a acção ao nível social, cultural e político; e exija mudança. Por último, apresentamos os seis artigos que constituem esta edição especial e documentam, ilustram, e analisam relações entre as artes e as línguas no âmbito da educação.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship education
• interculturality
• arts
• intercultural dialogue
• literature
• poetry

Introduction

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

(J.F. Kennedy in a 1963 eulogy for Robert Frost)

At the time of writing the human world is shut down to face a global, powerful, and invisible enemy identified as COVID-19. A few immediate facts subsist, dramatically highlighted by the action of this global virus and the containment measures taken at planetary scale: how humans are globally interconnected; how global communications become dominant and crucial media to allow for our subsistence, beyond fear and isolation; how humans must assume individual responsibility to preserve the Other, the collective We; how humans have so seriously damaged and destroyed our common house, putting humanity in peril.

This is a time for difficult questions, and reflection. One global question floating in our collective minds repeatedly asks: how will we be transformed by this crisis? What will the future look like? These questions are also educational. A devastating crisis is forcing us to face many issues, whilst being aware of a defiant reality that will leave very little space for concessions. This current reality has laid bare unsustainable, diverse systemic failures. On an equal footing with these, it is also allowing us to gain more insightful perspectives on basic principles such as cooperation, solidarity, adaptability; as well as teaching us to redefine priorities. We live in an increasingly more global and interconnected ecosphere, yet it is also a more divided and polarised world, socially and politically. Ours is a super-complex, polarised world, where manifestly the economy has colonised all the other domains of our lives, including the educational and public health spheres. Superimposed on this crisis, social and political events in Europe and elsewhere in the world, such as Brexit and subsequent press reports of xenophobic and generational incidents; the refugee crisis fuelling a highly disputed debate in many European countries; a growing nationalist, racist, anti-immigration discourse being openly mouthed and stimulated by political leaders, demagogues, and dictators, across the world; media manipulation and dissemination of science denial conspiracy theories, are just a few other examples that call for the pressing need to promote active and meaningful intercultural citizenship experiences and learning.

This Special Issue argues for a place for the arts in language and intercultural citizenship education. We believe intercultural citizenship education has perhaps never seemed more urgent and, together with Phipps and Lagegaard (2020), advocate that our current social, political, educational, ecological issues should be more strongly addressed in education, while undertaking some form of social action and transformation, from primary education to higher education and throughout lifelong learning. The arts can help us find ways to look through the complexities of current issues and problems and (re)build a sustainable future, together. In our view, the arts can be an entry point to citizenship education practices because they invite learners, as citizens, to read critically the world around them, not just the written word. By considering art forms as texts deeply connected to social, economic, cultural, and political realities, it becomes possible to explore how learners-as-citizens can be affected intellectually and emotionally through languaging (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004) and by engaging with issues such as race, class, difference, domination, national identity, and climate change, amongst others.

How these three areas – the arts, interculturality, citizenship education – may be combined and the intersections explored is the subject of the six papers that comprise this Special Issue. This introductory article will briefly consider some major tenets supporting the proposition of a role for the arts in the development of intercultural citizenship education, both as means to promote it and to research it (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015).

A humanistic dimension of language and intercultural citizenship education requires the exploration of meaningful, relevant, and challenging texts (e.g. Juchler, 2018; Matos & Melo-Pfeifer, 2020, inter alia). In this paper, we will refer more specifically to this artistic medium – literature – over our thinking on art matters in languages and intercultural citizenship education and borrow from the words of poets, with particular attention to two poets, women, and activists, who by the labour of weaving words, social, environmental, and political matters, fittingly illuminate and reflect on how art can be a tool to help us make sense of the world around us and a catalyst towards change. The first emblematic writer of our choice, who took on words to make us reconsider the relationships between art and social justice is Addrienne Rich – an influential poet, essayist, scholar and activist, whose remarkably lucid vision continues to vigorously remind us of the need to promote self-reflection against ignorance and prejudice. We further draw inspiration from Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts, and Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is also a poet, and her most recent poetry publication is co-authored with Tawona Sitholé, a Zimbabwean writer and musician, co-founder of Seeds of Thought, which promotes creative writing and performance. The Warriors Who Do Not Fight (2018) is the embodied creation of intercultural dialogue between two friends, one black, one white; one from the North, one from the South; one man, one woman; across countries, war, grief, resistance, refuge, languages, life, suffering, and hope.

Detox

Our current public space seems to be heavily characterised by constant noise around polarised positions. Living immersed in such a universe constantly bombarded by contradictory voices and information does not favour the development of actions such as listening, reflecting, imagining, observing, decentring, questioning, mediating, engaging. These verb forms are integral elements of intercultural citizenship education. In order to exercise them, to discern the essential from the trivial; facts from ‘alternative facts’; scientific analyses from subjective opinion; certain conditions should be met.

To aptly consider the structural issues and challenges our societies face it is not sufficient to hurriedly skim through our worlds and look for recipes. Intercultural citizenship education demands that we, as citizens, are able to grasp complexity but in order to do so, we need to take the time, and silence, to practise deep reading and thinking, reading between the lines, critical reading, constructive reading. Artistic texts, or works of art as texts that have several layers, densities, and challenge the shallowness of instant opinions may offer learning opportunities to educate intercultural citizens, instead of training mere global consumers (cf. Kramsch, 2019), while critically re-assessing how we have been passively consuming and (re)producing words, images, habits. Promoting the development of ‘detox’ may, as consequence, entail self-cultural awareness and trigger a process of recalibrating our connections with ourselves, with each other, and with the natural world. Robert Frost, who focussed his writings on the beauty of nature and on the essence of meaningful details from our common lives, is evoked, in epigraph, celebrated through this remarkable assertion by a politician, John F. Kennedy, 57 years ago. When power corrupts, language can also become polluted, corrupted, as ‘the space between words and their true meanings is vast and filled with the fog of confusion’ (Rich, 2018, p. 327). This depreciation of language can reduce complexity into a shallow iconography for fast consumption. To detox, in search of the luminous clarity of basic human truths, we turn to art. In order to be able to discern this cognitive and emotional dissonance affecting language, contaminating words, we will keep the company of poets. Alison Phipps, writes:

[…] A diet

of words that nourish

and nurture the only

art that matters,

the art of living

and loving.

(Phipps & Sitholé, 2018, p. 15)

Recalibrating requires awareness of this emotional and affective dimension that characterises interculturality, to which most educators pay lip service to but is seldom consciously addressed in actual language classrooms. Interrogating the value and the place of the written word becomes, therefore, one means of agency towards intercultural citizenship education.

Silence

One powerful element that has been amplified by our forced quarantine during the COVID-19 epidemic is silence. Locked inside our homes for weeks, and months, this gesture of confinement (sought after by others, voluntarily, in other times, for meditation and reflection) has caused an extraordinary response, to our eyes, from our natural world. A natural world that we – specifically those of us leading more urban lives – tend to forget we are part of, despite the overwhelming evidence of how much and how deeply we have hurt, damaged, destroyed it – to the point of menacing our own survival. Scientists have reported on significant improvements of the ozone layer; on the improvement of air quality in densely polluted cities around the world (very high levels of pollution dropping dramatically). Other animals (we seem to ignore we are animals) such as deer, goats, foxes, jaguars, kangaroos, and many more, daringly roam through our deserted streets and resting vehicles, looking curious and amused by this reversal of roles. Humans, the dangerous Others, turned into fearful animals, trapped inside their own homes as cages. This year, Spring was announced by a lovingly, thoughtful, and hopeful message by 82-year-old David Hockney: ‘Do remember they can’t cancel the spring’, a representation of daffodils in a field. And our look and thoughts turned outwards to reassess the simple, ordinary pleasures of the natural world around us.

Our societies are powerfully marked by acceleration and rapid change. It may, therefore, have become more demanding to train our minds to slow down, focus and notice the abundance of meaningful details around us. The gesture of slowing down becomes necessary when we read poetry, when we draw, or when we listen to certain musical parts, because we want to understand further and, in our minds, we may pause, go back, reviewing reflectively in an effort while trying to elaborate meanings, going beyond the texts’ immediacy.

Addrienne Rich, who was engrossed by the study of silence, thought of it as a space for connection and conversation (2018, pp. 313–344). This is not the type of silence imposed externally, that results from oppression. It is not the silence that results from invisibility but rather the opposite, it is the silence that enables the viewer, as listener, to notice, and see. For Rich, the substance of a poet’s work is meant to address the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the ‘invisible holes in reality’ (p. 329), as ‘[e]very real poem is the breaking of an existing silence’ (p. 329).

From the reader’s perspective, uncovering these invisible, unnoticed, unformulated layers of meaning also requires a dialogue with the texts, and actively experiencing new perceptions. Rich already pondered on silence as an endangered species on the verge of extinction:

[Silence] can be fertilizing, it can bathe the imagination, it can, as in great open spaces – I think of those plains stretching far below the Hopi mesas in Arizona – be the nimbus of a way of life, a condition of vision. Such living silences are more and more endangered through the world, by commerce and appropriation. (pp. 329-330)

How aware have we been of this silence that is not the absence of something but the ability and the experience of noticing the presence of the world around us? How aware have we been of the imperative need to actually listen to understand other persons, other creatures, to read the context around them and their stories, beyond the use of words? Silence as ‘a condition of vision’ must be learned, and practised:

not meant for words

things not meant for words

are what they are

sights meant for eyes

sounds meant for ears

knowledge for the conscience

stories of the heart

(Phipps & Sitholé, 2018, p. 111)

We may be more capable of recognising ourselves in the others’ shoes when we develop the competences of listening, observing, inquiring, noticing significant details when looking others in the eye in actual intercultural encounters- both interhuman and interspecies – and when we read their stories, leaning forward to listening to them.

Deep

The power of ‘deep reading’ challenging texts in stimulating ethical responses such as empathy counters the critical-thinking deficit that we, as educators, often acknowledge in our current students. Wolf (2008) argues that we have become increasingly dependent on digital technologies and, based on her neuroscientific research, warns about ‘deep reading’ brain processes being under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading. To make clear, what is at stake is not the reading medium (book, tablet, iphone, and so on) but the reading mode. Reading as skimming does not allow us to perceive complexity, to notice beauty, or to experience, vicariously, another’s feelings. Moreover, research has shown that the human brain reading circuit is not a natural given, and needs an environment to develop, Wolf (2008) contends. Indispensable, key processes to intercultural citizenship education such as critical reading and analysis, building inferences, interpretation, and the development of empathy, all imply reading aesthetically, beyond the mere efferent reading exercises that tend to characterise foreign language classrooms, therefore employing slower and time-demanding deep reading practices. This significant finding means that it becomes imperative to stimulate ‘deep reading’, in order to notice, reflect and critically analyse demanding texts as art forms. Moreover, by critically analysing our realities, learners should increase their sensitivity to how texts, discourses, and images are constructed and to be able to understand and use languages more skilfully, to argue, persuade, debate, contest, propose, deliberate.

Hermeneutics and critical reflection can be considered central to understanding art, allowing for decentring, multiperspectivism and uncovering layers of complexity. These two tools operate across the proposed trilogy in this special issue: art, languages, and interculturality. We, therefore, are strong advocates of an epistemology of the particular and of deep ‘reading’, or listening to, detail and specific contexts. Art forms never cease to speak to us. Foreign language education as a meeting place and as a conversation with alterity should mediate the learners’ understandings of our societies’ economic, political, and ecological facets and provide for the construction of imaginary possibilities and realignments through languages. The universal dimension of humanism, as integral to languages learning and practice should, therefore, be developed as contingent to the, sometimes vast, differences between cultures as perceived from specific contexts and by specific actors. This involves the act of noticing, of giving attention to, of thinking about this noticing act and what emerges in the space where this kind of listening as seeing is enacted.

Imagination & empathy

Not only is (deep) silence needed to wash away the pollution adulterating language as it may be used to fertilise imagination, according to Adrienne Rich (2018). The arts make it possible to imagine and to experience other perspectives, developing empathy towards others. Moreover, engaging with other, different viewpoints communicated through art forms affects us cognitively and emotionally. This level of empathy activated in our minds and stimulating an emotional response also implies an ethical stance that matters in citizenship education, i.e. the fact that we are called on to be concerned by the lives of others, a process central in To Kill a Mocking Bird:

if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – […] – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. (Lee, 1997, p. 33)

Lanzmann, famously argued against the use of historical documents such as photographs, or visual archival images, to approach learning about events such as the Holocaust. He talked of those documents as ‘images without imagination’, as images that kill the power of evocation and petrify thought (cf. D’Arcy, 2008, pp. 138–157). By rejecting iconic or representational evidence, Lanzmann contended that only through the embodied subjectivity of the imagination would it be possible to place the Holocaust in the present tense. The film, Shoah, his work of art, shows a central concern with detail and demands that the audience participates by evoking what cannot be shown in the Nazi death camps.

We also argue for art as a means to make the imagination work at both the receptive and the production levels, and as a means to address issues of social, cultural, political, ecological responsibility while adopting an ethical, and humanistic stance.

If we consider our actual circumstances, literature, for example, illuminates how it is possible to virtually experience and understand the human responsibilities for pandemics, as in Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness) by Saramago (2014), or La Peste, by Camus (2010), two Literature Nobel Prize winners. In the former book’s backcover, Saramago resorts to an epigraph from the ‘Book of Advice’, a book that does not exist: ‘If you can see, look. If you can watch, notice’. The latter recently rediscovered classic seems to be leading ‘the surge of pestilence fiction’ (Willsher, 2020) during coronavirus lockdown, to the point of international sellers being out of stock and reprints not being able to meet demand. La Peste, The Plague in the English translation, focusses on the transformation of individual and collective identities in times of crisis, as well as on its ethical, ecological, social, and mental effects (Puga, 2020). Literature and other art forms will help us to reflect and understand how to face our ‘possible destinies’ as communities. Our readings of art forms are necessarily informed by our actual living circumstances.

The world will certainly look different after the pandemic. Yet, perhaps the biggest challenge to human survival lies ahead, as scientists have repeatedly warned: the climate crisis. What world will we build, together? Rich (2018, p. 323) argued eloquently that in continually (re)discovering the humanity of human beings, art is essential to the democratic project.

Deep listening to silence as ‘a condition of vision’ must be learned and practised, just as engaging in advocating for what we realise we care, love, and regard as indispensable. To imagine how to preserve the beauty of our common house, may not be easy, but has now become vital. Warnings have been issued, and humans cannot afford to continue unprepared for such a predicted event. As active citizens we must seize the opportunity to reimagine our relationship with nature, decentre, and redraw a better society to live in. Therefore, besides cultivating deep silence as a ‘condition of vision’ or as an increment of vision, we must nurture creativity whilst imagining different ways of living, of structuring priorities; alongside empathy embedded in action, learning to be engaged as an individual and a citizen.

Appadurai discusses this notion of imagination as a key resource in social processes and projects (2013, p. 287). This idea of imagination is not to be confused with dream-like phantasies, but rather as a quotidian energy present in our ordinary lives as common citizens. We could say, perhaps, that this is a form of sustainable imagination that could be transformed into maps for shaping and negotiating how our futures are going to be (re)constructed. The power of collectively imagining change, of the imagination of solidarity and of new connections with our natural environment, can galvanise a sense of collective hope.

Transformation

Education is still pointed out as key to changing attitudes. However, citizenship education programmes abound that do not necessarily have an impact on students or society. In order to translate theoretical principles, and discussions, into transformative social action, we believe an experiential dimension, even if virtual, should be an integral element to help students reflect, construct knowledge, imagine, and function as a catalyst to promote change. More than a century ago, Dewey remarked that a formal curriculum and children’s experiences are not separate entities, and insisted:

Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, […] see it [the child’s experience] as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. (1966, p. 11)

Teachers as educators, as intellectuals, should not wait for manuals, frameworks or more guidelines from our (diverse) national, and other, hierarchies. We already have the rationale, objectives, and the guidelines needed to integrate relevant citizenship education content in several disciplines, linguistic, and other; or to address citizenship education as a separate subject. UNESCO (Ratzmann, 2019; UNESCO, 2016, 2017, 2018a, 2018b, 2020) and the Council of Europe have published valuable studies, frameworks, guidelines, research. The three-volume publication, Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (CoE, 2018), represents a powerful tool that can be used by educators with all ages to promote and practice intercultural citizenship education, contributing to the development of the United Nation’s 2030 agenda that clarifies the concrete educational challenges ahead and citizenship education emerging as SDG 4.7, a central goal, no longer as a secondary aim. The actual exercise of responsible, engaged citizenship as a central educational matter requires the development of all the elements identified above: reflection, critical thinking, analysis of actual issues, interpretation, empathy, argumentative skills.

[…]

At times our conversation

will make our skins dissolve

and around us through the laughter

a new world may revolve

when the tears are all that join us

when the skin gives way to bone

and through the pain we’ll love again

and call this earth our home.

(Phipps & Sitholé, 2018, p. 48)

The disconnect between humans and nature has been growing and has become painfully visible in our present days. The widespread belief, in particular amongst some politicians, that the advancement of technologies and science will fix our current problems, including the environmental harm and destruction caused by humans, is extremely worrying and damaging. Prolonging this disconnection from reality has been preventing most citizens of becoming aware of their own contribution to such depletion and alienating them from engaging in concrete counter-actions to change their modes of life and living; of taking action, and of becoming advocates for transformative change to ensure a sustainable future, together.

About this volume

Phipps and Lagegaard (2020) put forth a significant challenge in their collection of papers presented earlier in this volume. Amongst a collection of important notes for future work, they refer to the following: ‘the elements of rhetoric, aesthetics, artistry and performance in language as vehicles for social action, as well as forms where social action is represented, will need to find a stronger place’ (p. 219). We believe the contributions to the present volume signal a very positive response to this challenge. We can trace the presence of the elements discussed in this exploratory paper – silence, deep listening, interpretation, imagination, empathy, experience, transformation, empowerment, dialogue, hope – words that regain their due value, pollution-free, in the texts that form this Special Issue. The six articles, in their quite different approaches, offer an understanding of the creative, demanding, methodological and interrelated possibilities of theory, practice, and research on interculturality and the arts in citizenship education, actually emerging from their respective local contexts. The different authors, from different geographies and contexts, do not shy away from facing difficulties and limitations while encouraging others to seek inspiration from their sustained approaches, to adapt, experiment in their own specific contexts, and renew the necessary reflection around the prospective possibilities for social action through the arts. The educational and humanistic objectives they pursued, in close association with languaging, are exceptionally important today, a time when democracy and harmonious living are threatened in several ways.

Lemaire’s innovative approach decentres Western pedagogical practices and entails a qualitative research project with preservice teachers who engage in the ‘blanket exercise’ and learn from Canadian Indigenous peoples how these experiential and embodied practices can be emotionally transformative. By listening to Indigenous peoples’ embodied pedagogy, a collaborative project explored learning activities that integrate ‘head, heart, and spirit’. Through roleplaying and adopting others’ voices and perspectives, this group of preservice teachers ‘climbed into another’s skin and walked around in it’, by connecting, questioning and translating the lived emotional experience. This project illustrates how listening to and valuing diverse individuals' and groups' perspectives can become a basis for the co-construction of knowledge through participatory practices. Moreover, it provides ethical, socially and environmentally responsible teacher training. Converting difference into reciprocity becomes an initial stage of cultural agency further explored through performativity.

Thibault turns to the techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed, in what is to be considered a reference to Paulo Freire’s work, as a means of supporting the development of communicative and intercultural competence of French as a Second Language university students in Ontario, Canada, where French is a minority language. The author reviews concepts such as experiential learning and social agency and examines the connection between language learning and theatrical practice. Developing team spirit, non-verbal interaction and semi-improvised performance generated meaningful dialogues between these FSL students and the teacher as researcher, as well as with the Francophone community. Once more, performativity elucidates how interculturality is to be found in the meanings produced and through embodied practice, or event.

Stratilaki reports on a study that, inter alia, explores the visual representations of the existing plurilingualism of allophone children and their families, in France. The author also argues for teacher education as key to changing teaching practices of French as a second language, or as the language of education. By decentring from the notion of the national language as the exclusive and sanctioned means of communication, the authors advocate that teachers of languages should listen to and acknowledge the legitimate existence of the children’s other languages as valid spaces of linguistic identity and self-assurance. The Council of Europe has produced research and recommendations that support this view of inclusion and diversity; however, in practice, teachers need support to translate these principles into their pedagogical practices.

In the context of the foreign language classroom Kalaja & Pitkänen-Huhta explore the potential of visual arts, specifically drawings produced by students, to raise awareness of multilingualism and multiculturalism as a subjective and lived experience, through self-reflection. The authors remind us of the importance of recognising and valuing difference in our multifaceted societies as a necessary step to promote the exploration of those differences in conceptualising the world.

Continuing in the higher education context, Porto investigates the use of pedagogies of discomfort and pedagogies of empathy and solidarity to handle difficult issues through arts and literary texts, with student teachers and student translators of English in Argentina. As these students engaged in action-oriented empathy and solidarity processes, their multimodal representations conveyed social criticism and allowed to raise social awareness.

Li & Moore return to our arguments, this time outside formal education contexts. Their study showcases the practice of dialogue, creativity and collective reflection and meaning-making, to empathise with the Other. The authors focus on a new engaging context which is very different from traditional formal learning contexts, and reveal how this festival mobilised citizens to collaborate and contribute actively. In this concluding paper, intercultural processes and action take place within an informal setting, embedded and performed in the course of daily life.

Hope

As Appadurai maintains, the political counterpart to the work of the imagination is hope (p. 293). A sustainable hope for a better world requires us to come together and build answers to the questions we mentioned above.

Who are we? Resorting to books, as intended in this paper, we could start with a visit to The British Library 2014, by Yinka Shonibare CBE (https://thebritishlibraryinstallation.com/). The interactive installation and exhibition raise awareness of the ongoing contributions made by immigrants to Britain and acknowledges dissent by incorporating protest voices against immigration. The artist’s invitation provokes discussion, debate and reflection on several aspects of British culture, contemplates notions of territory and place, cultural identity, displacement and refuge. The work’s relevance to contemporary debates, such as the impact of the refugee crisis is manifest. Moreover, it offers access to research and documents on immigration to the UK proposing the viewers to shape their own understandings of how the different waves of immigration from the 1500s onwards built the UK, and the political responses to them. Moreover, it invites visitors to contribute with their own stories. An artist who listens to you.

How should we live? Literature, as we understand it, does not have canonical borders. Picturebooks and graphic novels may well fall into this category and appeal to both younger and older audiences’ readings of our social issues. Tan’s Tales from the inner city (2018) is a timely artwork, moving, and a powerful means to engage in a reflection on the dissonance found between our current lives and (co)existence with other animals, and what we can learn about ourselves, decentering the human as the hub of reality. Oliver Jeffers’ The Fate of Fausto (2019) or the promising wording and cover of What we’ll build. Plans for our together future (2020), or yet Alain Serres & Zaü’s Je serai les yeux de la terre (2007), with a preface by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, could inspire deep reading processes and responses, while discovering how the arts can enrich our lives and how we are not trapped in the present.

The practice of reacting to, or creating art forms, implies conveying meanings through art, and this can be an empowering and transformative educational experience. In the context of modern language education, for example, when art forms are explored personally and critically in their plurisemioticity, their power is made visible, offering an occasion to develop multimodal voices who can become engaged in forms of participation in political, social, and civic life that move beyond words, fostering the still underrepresented intercultural dimension of Byram’s ‘savoir s’engager’ (2008), in and beyond the classroom.

The possibility exists of exploring the force, the energy of art forms, to destabilise our resistance to changing the status quo and, perhaps, for some, the comfort of our lifestyles, egocentric individualism; and to reinterpret the humanity of the human. This must now be a basic ontological starting point for the collective effort of imagining a sustainable future together, reinforcing the values of solidarity, integrity, kindness, resilience, empathy, as necessary pillars of citizenship and of sustained hope towards social and ecological regeneration. There is work ahead, to develop a more systematic effort to understand how the arts may inspire, connect, engage, and empower citizenship participatory learning, and how they may entail the capability to make us imagine new possibilities for public engagement, and of conceiving of language as self-awareness and languaging.

We share the vision of Rich, written in 1997. These words, written 23 years ago, could not be more appropriate, today:

In the long run art needs to grow organically out of a social compost nourishing to everyone, a literate citizenry, a free, universal, public education complex with art as an integral element, a society honoring both human individuality and the search for a decent, sustainable common life. In such conditions, art would still be a voice of hunger, desire, discontent, passion, reminding us that the democratic project is never-ending.

For that to happen, what else would have to change? (2018, p. 325)

Now is a good time to consider this question. How are we redefining priorities? What are the possibilities in the pursuit of a ‘decent, sustainable common life’? A life that is not meant to be lived cut off from our natural world, but should be ‘organically’ (inter)connected with other creatures and natural elements, and socially redesigned. How can we reinforce our connections to nature and engage in educating citizens of the Earth? Art can help us ‘listen as a condition of vision’, think about how we think, consider good questions to be asked, move us towards social action, and educate. Moreover, art can assist us in finding new research methods to old questions (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2015), reframing questions asked and answers provided, as well as in communicating the results of our research differently, making it possible to reach a broader audience for science. Art offers different perspectives and possibilities but it is up to us to build those perspectives and uncover the complex nexus between artwork, context, and citizenship practices. And, in times like these, we must listen.

of silence

speaking of silence is breaking it

better to observe

yet another movement

but some things remain still

and since the past cannot be altered

only disputed

let’s play

and since the other senses are alive

especially hope

let’s practise

[…]

(Phipps & Sitholé, 2018, p. 53)

In conclusion, as we finish writing this article, the world confronts another deadly virus, besides COVID-19. Systemic discrimination and racism as a lived reality is an archaic virus that should not have been allowed to endure. We are now well into the twentieth-first century and in hard-hearted need of anti-bodies. We also take the knee in solidarity with protesters and raise our voices against racism in any form, anywhere. We must open our eyes, and listen, as recovering racists, since our ancestors were white, and we were ‘born with this addiction’ (Phipps & Sitholé, 2018, p. 46). This peaceful protest must not be silenced. This silence must be broken. Let us start practising, reflectively, beginning with ourselves, becoming more self-culturally aware.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Malcolm N. MacDonald for his continuous encouragement and support, editing, and patience throughout the preparation of this Special Issue.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Ana Gonçalves Matos is Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Languages, Cultures and Literatures of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, NOVA University Lisbon. Two Erasmus Plus Projects she is currently involved with are: CANDIICE (Creative Approaches to New Democracy through Innovative Inclusive Citizenship Education) and ICEPELL (Intercultural Citizenship Education through Picturebooks in early English Language Learning).

Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer is Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She currently coordinates the Erasmus Plus Project ‘LoCALL – LOcal Linguistic Landscapes for global language education in the school context’.