Intercultural Communication Pedagogy and the Question of the Other: Speaker Abstracts
Speaker abstracts for the Intercultural Communication Pedagogy and the Question of the Other event, taking place to celebrate the Institute for Language Education, Moray House School of Education and Sport.
Gert Biesta
At one level the task for the pedagogy of intercultural communication is entirely clear: it is that of equipping students for communication between or, if one wishes, across cultures. Such a pedagogy can be seen in more traditional terms, such as providing students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions they need for communicating effectively across cultures. Or it can be conceived in slightly more contemporary and holistic terms as that of providing students with the competencies needed for such communication. Along both lines the image is that students being provided with the equipment that will allow them to operate successfully in the field of intercultural communication, not dissimilar to how soldiers are being kitted out before they go to the battlefield. In my contribution I will make use of this image to raise a number of questions about the assumptions that seems to play a role in the pedagogy for intercultural communication. I will explore whether pedagogy is a matter of empowering students so that they are prepared for the encounter with other cultures, or whether pedagogy should rather be seen as an act of disarmament, of removing the shields between self and other. I will explore whether it makes sense to use culture as a noun, that is, as a description of a particular reality, or whether it makes more sense to see that any use of the world culture always involved a particular explanation of difference, and that in the very act of explaining the difference that is encountered is actually eradicated. And I will explore whether what emerges from behind these deconstructions of pedagogy and culture can and should be understood in terms of ethics, responsibility, and responsiveness, or whether we rather encounter communication without ethics and beyond culture – communication that brings the ‘I’ of self and other ‘into play’ and for precisely that reason is intrinsically pedagogical.
Giuliana Ferri
The discourse of ethics and equity (Nair-Venugopal, 2013) has been a major preoccupation of critical interculturalism in recent years. Scholarly engagement with the ethical underpinnings of interculturality has been influenced in particular by the notion of absolute alterity in Levinas and the need to preserve this alterity while finding dialogic spaces for interaction (Gehrke, 2010; Ucok-Sayrak, 2016; Ferri, 2018). However, the ontological binary between self and other (Ferri, 2020) and the aporia between relativism and ideological totalism (O’Regan & MacDonald, 2007) still underpin the discourse of interculturality. Due to this ideological totalism, intercultural learning and pedagogy are still reliant on the idea of a universal, totalising consciousness.
Placing the relation between self and other in the notion of corporeality, or the perceiving ‘I’ implicated in the world of flesh (Butler, 2015), the paper investigates the potential of embodiment to unravel the ideological totalism that is still embedded in the self/other binary. It is argued that deterritorialising the notion of interculturality (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) expands the scope of intercultural pedagogy beyond fixed and mechanistic notions of a linear process of teaching and learning (Cooks, 2001; Biesta, 2015), totalising claims of critical consciousness in critical pedagogy, and intercultural responsibility towards ‘the other’.
References:
Biesta, G. (2015). Freeing teaching from learning: opening up existential possibilities in educational relationships. Studies in philosophy and education, 34(3), 229-243.
Butler, J. (2015). Senses of the subject. New York: Fordham University Press.
Cooks, L. (2001). From distance and uncertainty to research and pedagogy in the borderlands: implications for the future of intercultural communication. Communication Theory, 11(3), 339-351.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ferri, G. (2018). Intercultural communication: critical approaches and future challenges. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ferri, G. (2020). Difference, becoming and rhizomatic subjectivities beyond ‘otherness’. A posthuman framework for intercultural communication. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20(5), 408-418.
Gehrke, P.J. (2010). Being the Other-to-the-Other: justice and communication in Levinasian ethics. The Review of Communication, 10(1), 5-19.
Nair-Venugopal, S. (2013). Introduction: the discourse of ethics and equity. Language and Intercultural Communication, 13(1), 1-9.
O'Regan, J.P. & MacDonald, M.N. (2007). Cultural Relativism and the Discourse of Intercultural Communication: Aporias of Praxis in the Intercultural Public Sphere. Language and Intercultural Communication, 7(4), 267-278.
Ucok-Sayrak, O. (2016). Attending to the “face of the other” in intercultural communication: Thinking and talking about difference, identity, and ethics. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 9(2), 122-139.
Katja Frimberger
With the aim to respond to the critique of ego-centric connotation and rationalist aporias in theorisations of intercultural communication pedagogy, I will approach the question of how to think the self-other relation as an irreducible alterity from an existential and aesthetic perspective. What would it mean if we conceptualised intercultural encounters as art? Drawing on German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (2013) and educational theorist Klaus Mollenhauer's (2008), I will argue that an understanding of the mode of being of art will shine some light on the incompatibility of those notions of social and political emancipation that are at the heart of critical pedagogical models (e.g. Freire, Boal), and the aesthetic emancipation that Gadamer and Mollenhauer would posit sits at the heart of our aesthetic experiences - in life and art. The meaning of art and other cultural phenomena (like our intercultural lives) unfolds in our encounter with them, within the world of which they speak; a world which we are of course already part of. If art is knowledge, and encountering an artwork means sharing in that knowledge, how do we do justice to the truth that is revealed within this dialogue (with art, the world as other and ourselves) - beyond the mere subjectivity of the person? Aesthetic experience cannot be easily narrated in terms of rational and ethical action, expressed in words, or guarantee that the possibility for transformation - that was felt in the realm between identity and fiction (when encountering art) - will manifest in everyday reality afterwards. Aesthetic effects pose a provocation for education and intercultural communication pedagogy tied to episteme and praxis. Mollehauer suggests that the utopian territory of aesthetic emancipation is the (contingent) 'I's self-image, which becomes accessible to others only in the (retrospective) description of aesthetic experience. What happens to intercultural communication pedagogy when it has to theoretically capitulate in the face of intercultural encounters as art?
References:
Gadamer, H. G. (2013). Truth and Method. London: New York: Bloomsbury.
Mollenhauer, K. (2008). Vergessene Zusammenhänge: Über Kultur und Erziehung. Weinheim und München Juventa Verlag.
Itamar Manoff & Claudia Ruitenberg
Ethical-political concerns have been raised about language education and intercultural communication, more generally. These include the assimilation of the Other into a normative language and the reduction of Otherness recognizable categories of cultural difference. In response, scholars have turned to the work of Emmanuel Levinas, emphasizing the interruptive nature of the intercultural encounter and the ethical demand it poses on educators (Kostogriz & Doecke 2007; MacDonald & O’Regan, 2013; Pinchevski, 2005).
We argue that, while Levinas’s work makes important contributions to our understanding of language education in an intercultural setting, it has a number of pitfalls.The first is the lack of recognition of the inevitable asymmetry of the language learning situation. The second is that a Levinasian approach does not necessarily translate into any particular political (e.g., emancipatory) framework. The third is the “unsatisfying” character of Levinas’s ethics, which does not prescribe action and underestimates the approval or agency needed to respond to the Other (Critchley, 1999, 2015).
Recognizing that Levinas’s work does not solve the ethical and political problems of language education, we argue that, ultimately, it is the accuracy of his phenomenological description of the educational encounter that compels educators and scholars to return to the particularity of the encounter, to the Other, and to his work.
References:
Critchley, S. (1999). Ethics, politics, subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and contemporary French thought. London: Verso.
Critchley, S. (2015). The problem with Levinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kostogriz, A. & Doecke, B. (2007). Encounters with ‘strangers’: Towards dialogical ethics in English language education. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 4(1), 1-24.
MacDonald, M. N., & O'Regan, J. P. (2013). The ethics of intercultural communication. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(10), 1005-1017.
Pinchevski, A. (2005). The ethics of interruption: Toward a Levinasian philosophy of communication. Social Semiotics, 15(2), 211-234.
Michalinos Zembylas
This paper analyses the affective ideology underlying the OECD global competence framework as outlined in two policy documents: Preparing our Youth for an Inclusive and Sustainable World: The OECD Global Competence Framework (OECD, 2018) and a supplemented document for teachers and educators titled Teaching for Global Competence in a Rapidly Changing World (Asia Society/OECD, 2018). Drawing on theories of affect, the analysis shows how various concepts related to ‘global’ and ‘intercultural competences’ are invested with affective rhetoric and normative discourse that treats competences as individualized and psychologized skills. The questions that drive my analysis are the following: How is affect mobilized in these OECD policy documents to make certain political and pedagogical ideals (e.g. interculturality) appealing? In which ways are particular concepts (e.g. global competence) and pedagogical ideals (e.g. teaching for global competence) invoke certain affective dispositions (e.g. empathy)? What are the implications of the ‘affective ideology’ of these policy documents for teachers and educators, particularly in relation to teaching intercultural communication? Critical intercultural communication pedagogy is suggested as a conceptual framework of teaching and learning in intercultural education that problematizes how global and intercultural competences invoke affective dispositions and ethical responsibilities that may unwittingly undermine social justice globally and locally.