Expanding ‘conceptual horizons’: a reflexive approach to intercultural pedagogies in higher education

ABSTRACT

Intercultural pedagogies are increasingly seen as affording opportunities for students to share perspectives, understandings and knowledge. In the shift towards such pedagogies, ways that language is conceptualised and the interrelationship between language, culture and knowing are often underexplored. This paper reports on an auto-ethnographic study that explores our experience as teachers of extending intercultural pedagogies beyond the context of language learning in higher education. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) The dialogic imagination: Four essays notion of dialogism and Derrida’s (1997) Of grammatology notion of translation, we describe and explain how our reflexive practice enables us to deepen our focus both on language, culture, and knowing as integral in creating and interpreting meaning, and the self.

Les pédagogies interculturelles sont de plus en plus valorisées aujourd’hui pour les possibilités qu’elles puissent offrir aux étudiants de partager leurs visions et leurs connaissances. Dans le cours de l'évolution vers de telles pédagogies, la façon dont la langue est conceptualisée et les corrélations qui existent entre la langue, la culture et les connaissances ne sont souvent pas suffisamment explorées. Cet exposé couvre une recherche auto-ethnographique qui examine notre expérience en tant que professeurs d'étendre les pédagogies interculturelles au-delà du contexte d’apprentissage de langues étrangères dans l’enseignement supérieur. S'appuyant sur la thèse de dialogisme de Bakhtine (1981) y de traduction de Derrida (1997), nous décrivons et expliquons de quelle façon notre pratique réflective nous permet d'approfondir l'accent sur la langue, la culture et les connaissances comme parties intégrantes de la création et l'interprétation du sens, et de soi.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural
• dialogism
• reflexivity
• translation

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Bakhtin (1981, p. 282).

2 (Li et al., 2016) English Language and Intercultural Learning Case Study 1: The English Language Project and (O'Neill et al., 2016) English Language and Intercultural Learning Case Study 2: The Intercultural Learning Project.

3 When we use the term ‘western’, we are largely referring to a European colonial perspective that tends to define itself in opposition to an essentialised non-western and non-European other. We do not consider settler colonial societies (Mamdani, 2020) such as Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America to be European or wholly western, but rather to be post colonizing societies (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) in which transcultural hybrid identities (Bhabha, 2012) from multiple normative centres may be accommodated.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fiona O’Neill

Fiona O’Neill is a Lecturer and Researcher in Applied Linguistics, and Member of the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures at the University of South Australia. Her research focuses on language, communication and interculturality in the professions, and involves working closely with industry to explore how language matters to people’s understandings and experiences of professional identities and participation. She is a Member of the International Applied Linguistics Association Research Network, Migrants in Working Life: Language and Im/mobilities.

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies, Screen Media Research Methods & English in the School of Creative Industries at the University of South Australia. Her research fields encompass literary and cultural studies. Her interest lies in explaining how communication occurs in contexts where language cannot capture all we want to say leading to a focus on applying aesthetic theory, post-colonial trauma theory, affect theory and theories of haptic visuality to textual and visual communication, especially in instances where language is inadequate to communicate meaning.