This article explores an international week in a Norwegian primary school from the perspective of the different participants in the arrangement. International week is typically organized in connection with the United Nation's day and is to contribute to the school's aim of inclusion and social justice. Whereas the research literature has been critical towards such weeks, using terms such as 'exotification' and 'hall-way multiculturalism', there has been scarce research on international weeks from the participants' perspectives. Our case study of a single international week is based on interviews with the school's management, and a selection of teachers, parents and students. The study both confirms and challenges the research literature's critical stance towards international week. Whereas these weeks may appear as 'happenings' communicating an essential view on cultures, they also show potential for critical reflection and for leaking into its surroundings, for example connecting school and the local community.
The idea that intercultural understanding should be based on in-depth knowledge about the other continues to capture the imagination of policy makers, practitioners, and researchers. According to this line of thinking, intercultural understanding is about creating a secure way of reducing cultural complexity, aiming to overcome what is perceived as the strangeness of the other. While this approach to intercultural understanding has been highly influential, a growing body of work has raised fundamental questions about its adequacy. This article contributes to this discussion by exploring the metaphorical expression, bridge-building, as a way to describe teachers' work with intercultural understanding. The article relates the bridge-building metaphor to the ability to develop and integrate targeted knowledge, skills, and attitudes. It also explores how the bridgebuilding metaphor allows us to use our cultural and social experiences to facilitate an understanding of others.
This article explores young people's experiences and meaning-making at a multicultural festival. Multicultural festivals aim to promote inclusion and challenge problem-oriented discourses in current debates on diversity and migration. Listening to youth voices from such a festival gives a sense of how young participants perceive representations of cultural difference, and how they relate these representations to their own identity and sense of belonging. The participants in our study are 86 young people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds between the ages of 12 and 20. They recorded answers to our questions about what they did at the festival as well as the memories that participation evokes using a specially developed app. Interpreting the broad spectrum of their reflections in the light of theories about intercultural learning and citizenship, we found that the young people were eager to learn about the Other by experiencing cultural differences and engaging with traditions different to their own. In addition, they experienced the festival as an inclusive space, open for transnational identities, and evoking a sense of safety and belonging. We conclude by arguing that the young participants take with them experiences and memories of diversity as the norm rather than the exception.
In this article, we explore how minority parents construct and promote cultural identities through a multicultural school event in Norway. Such events respond to the call for diverse and inclusive initiatives to facilitate learning, belonging, and cohesion in schools. Schools see these events as helping further inclusion. Prior research on the subject has criticised such events for promoting essentialist understandings of cultural identities, hence regarding them as counterproductive to the aim of promoting inclusion. This research has directed scarce attention to the participant perspective, among them minority parents. Inspired by a broad understanding of linguistic landscaping, we documented the displayed representations at the stalls. Subsequently, using the Kurdish stall as an example, we encouraged the Kurdish parents to reflect on the meaning of the representations in semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that the Kurdish parents involved view the event as an important space for creative construction of transnational and diasporic identities, as well as an opportunity for a minority group to strive for acceptance for its cause. We end the article by reflecting on the pedagogical potential of representations in multicultural school events.
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