This article contributes to the debate on what form of preparation and support can enhance the intercultural student experience during a Year Abroad. It presents a credit-bearing and multi-modal module at a UK university designed to both prepare students prior to departure through a series of workshops and activities on an e-portfolio and help them engage in meta-reflection on intercultural issues during their stay. The presentation of the curricular components of the course and instances extracted from student blogs are contextualised within theoretical considerations on intercultural education and a holistic approach to student development. The longitudinal evolution of the module is presented in the context of an iterative approach leading to a cycle of revisions and amendments. With its pragmatic stance, this article aims to address one of the concerns recently expressed about intercultural education, namely that although intercultural theories are suitably incorporated in the latest thinking on communicative competence, there is a lack of evidence-based practice.
In this article, we examine an oft-observed ‘interaction problem’ in the internationalising classroom for adding some reflections on universities’ internationalisation-interculturality praxis. Drawing on existing research and examples, we scrutinise the ‘path’ (multicultural interaction) and the ‘goal’ (intercultural learning) entailed in the ‘problem’ through the theoretical lenses of dialogicality, space and boundary. Our exploration suggests that the ‘interaction problem’ is possibly rooted in educators’ discursive construction and runs the risk of promoting an interculturality premised on closure. Students’ experiences show that they may indeed engage with organic processes of intercultural learning whilst interacting with cultural Others, but the knowledge they consciously take away may remain confined to givens. For intercultural learning to be transformative, we suggest that it is crucial for educators to recognise themselves as intercultural actors (rather than experts) and reflexively engage with situated knowledge about interculturality emerging from local practices.
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