Theories of intercultural education - Joseba Arregi, Asier Barandiaran, Dmitrii Enygin, Venera Midova (free ebook reader for ipad txt) 📗

Teaching students how to develop themselves and how to interact intelligently in a multicultural and multimedia world does not require the same preparation and competence as teaching students in ways to acquire existing knowledge. The change in pedagogical model is not required for training students in mastering ICT tools, but it is becoming essential in training students for the new knowledge scene that results from the generalized access to information and with the development of new knowledge production and legitimating spheres in society. A traditional view of the learning process, - learning is a tedious solitary and linear process, based on identifying deficiencies and weaknesses in students, and on information transfer and reproduction – can be easily opposed to an emerging view – learning

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as an active social process, based on strengthening students abilities, interests and culture, an integrative, contextualized and versatile process.

What relationship to knowledge will foster personal growth, openness to others and society and relevant competence to intervene in the problems and issues of society? This is the challenge that teachers have to meet and for which a new pedagogical model is needed. This model will obviously result from reflective practice and an awareness of what is knowledge and what is learning.

The work on intercultural competence is probably much more innovative and in some ways revolutionary than has been acknowledged. For it clearly expands the pedagogical domain beyond intellectual goals to include cultural, affective and personal development. In so doing it brings about an inevitable shift of focus from the teacher to the learner, for the learner needs to become the pilot of the cultural, affective and personal transformative actions.

This new pedagogical model is needed to attend to the transformation of learning and teaching and can become the new horizon in an information/knowledge society. What this horizon consists of depends precisely on one’s epistemological understanding of what constitutes knowledge for learners today.

4 Intercultural dimensions of elearning: hidden pedagogical challenges

Hidden challenges are emerging as a result both of multiculturalism and of the development of digital information and knowledge and the propagation of their use in all segment of activities. New possibilities in accessing, copying and publishing information have brought forth differences in understanding and acceptance of long-standing evidences in the various cultures. Three critical cultural issues will be briefly outlined here: the “copy & paste” symptom, the collaborative learning incitement, and the evaluation mirage. For each of these problematic situations, practitioners seem unable to assess the newness of the stakes and continue to impose solutions, such as plagiarism detection software, that are at best irrelevant.

1) Originality and plagiarism

This first issue concerns the question of authorship, copying and plagiarism, and raises questions concerning the very understanding of scholarliness. There is today in the academic community a dominant consensus to condemn a developing practice of openly copying information found on the web, whether it be a music piece, a film or a dissertation. These practices are denounced because they deprive authors of their rights and because they result in plagiarism, which contravene moral values associated with authorship, such as integrity, authenticity and honesty.

The “booming industry” of digital plagiarism has given rise to a no less important “control industry” of plagiarism detection devices offered to teachers. Even if the educational community could succeed in detecting all plagiarism, is this the only alternative possible to the select and paste practices? Is it not time to question what are the educational goals involved in this situation? With the new services provided by digital networks, with information easily accessible, with the exponential growth of available information in quantity and quality, can the goals of creative writing that motivate essay assignments still hold? Students find all the information they need, expressed in much better terms than they what they could produce and cannot understand that they will be better learners in handing in lower quality essays.

Is it not time to review the learning goals associated with essays, for example, and appreciate if there are not more pressing goals to be tackled, such as identifying the most relevant information, summarizing it and presenting it in different contexts. There could be as much creativity in doing this as in imposing to assemble from scratch a paper. This does not do away with training students on how to present quotes and references. Surely, knowing how to collect and synthesise information requires as much intellectual abilities as inventing text. More

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importantly, evaluating will become much easier because based on more specific and measurable outcomes. Even though everybody knows that evaluating a personal essay is a very qualitative process and that the marks given will vary tremendously from one corrector to the other, writing personal essays is still the most used evaluation procedure.

With IC technology, accessing large quantities of information has brought about the development of new skills for finding the correct information, sorting out amongst a vast array of heterogeneous material the information one is seeking. Almost all the writing tasks that are being asked of undergraduates have already been accomplished by someone and most probably can be found on the web. Students are therefore inclined to look for the existing answers, essays or writings that correspond to the tasks that have been given to them. Most students will explain that they think it is better to present a quality paper, even if largely inspired – and even copied- from somebody else’s paper, that to hand in an approximate and poorly written version. Does not this correspond to a change in skills needed: the capacity to find the relevant information, to synthesise existing documents, to offer overviews and critical analysis, now corresponds much more to the required pertinent cognitive skills.

2) Individual work and collaborative learning

Most educational policies today recommend group work and collaborative learning. Such an approach is deemed to be in line with the practice that young people have of the web, with online social networks and connectedness being rated as very popular. However there is something awkward in this situation, as schools and university continue to evaluate individuals and not groups. Educational institutions are nowhere near developing an acceptance of team and group production as a basis for a formal and final evaluation. Individual responsibility and credit are still the norm.

Schools and universities do not seem to be disturbed by the paradox of having students learn collaboratively but evaluating them individually. In some cultures, there seems to be more coherence, collaborative learning leading to evaluations based on collaborative tasks.

3) Reflective critical thinking.

With the shift from a transmission pedagogical model to a lifelong reflexive learning, reflective critical thinking becomes a crucial dimension of learning. Along with basic thinking skills, such as problem solving, making decisions, or concept building, and meta-cognitive regulating skills, the critical thinking skills are strategic skills, that actively investigate situations, problems, information and formulate hypotheses, judgements or conclusions based on an appreciation of the available information. Critical thinking is based on the same capacities as those aimed at in learning philosophy, but reflective critical thinking includes self-reflection and self-awareness of the learner.

Some educational cultures place less emphasis on a critical approach than others. In Western education, developing a critical mind has been an educational goal for several decades now. The role of the press in the first half of the 20th century was crucial in insisting on the need to develop a critical approach in order to maintain one of the basic threads of a democratic society, that is freedom of speech and beliefs.

However critical thinking is not a universally approved attitude. In some cultures, being critical is equivalent to disapproving or dissenting and one does not voice publicly one’s disapproval or opposition. Politeness and social etiquette requires one to be respectful of existing institutions and persons in power status. Voicing one’s opinion about a well-known and respected author, for example, can be interpreted as ill-mannered, insolent or even scandalous behaviour. What could be welcomed as audacious or simply impertinent in one culture can be offensive or even illegal in another.

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There is also a trend with the new ego-literature (blogs, SMS, forums) that is more favourable to expression than to critical thinking. As anyone can decide to become author on the web and as evaluation criteria need to be reviewed in a multicultural context, it is becoming very difficult to maintain qualitative criteria and critical appreciations. As the web facilitates a new experience of democratic expression, the temptation is to consider all things equal and to put aside critical thinking as the obsession of elites who need to distinguish themselves from the common man.

It is therefore necessary to develop a deep understanding of what critical thinking involves and how it has become an essential dimension in the new approach to learning, where the learner is in command of a lifelong engagement in critical reflection on one’s assumptions, in freeing oneself from coercion, in negotiating one’s own meanings and values, and in looking for new horizons.

5 Perspectives

Next year, 2008, has been proposed by the European Commission as the year of intercultural dialogue. This is but one sign of the growing awareness of the need to reflect on the multicultural dimensions of our society and work actively at overcoming the gaps and fear that often exist between people of different cultures. This paper is an invitation to go beyond existing practices in elearning and take into account, within professional pedagogical practices, the intercultural dimensions of learning in a multicultural knowledge society. The development of intercultural competence, already present in language education, can lead the way to an enhanced experience of learning and teaching. Students and teachers can empower inasmuch as they develop a new culture of education, based on intercultural competence, critical thinking, awareness and self-regulated practices.

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