An argument for love in intercultural education for teacher education

Abstract

This paper proposes rethinking intercultural education in teacher education, arguing that any discussion of student teachers' intercultural education should be connected more explicitly to a theoretical conceptualisation of love. The first part of the paper focuses on identifying discursive boundaries in engaging with intercultural education in teacher education. It is established that if we are to develop intercultural education, we need consciously to move away from some discourses in teacher education, namely instrumentalism, performance-orientation, emotionlessness and seeing the relationship between teacher and learner as static. The second half of the paper develops a theoretical alternative by engaging with the concept of love as a basis for intercultural education in pursuing an alternative to the instrumentalist, performancebased, non-emotional fixed-relationship ethos of intercultural education in teacher education.

Boundaries as a coping strategy: emotional labour and relationship maintenance in distressing teacher education situations

“…Boundaries have been depicted as a discursive tool that focuses on instrumentalism, performance orientation and emotionlessness (Lanas 2017). As object constructions, the discursive boundaries evolve over the course of the teacher education (Jahreie and Ottesen 2010).…”

From ambivalent spaces to spaces of reciprocal encountering: developing classroom culture in an intercultural story exchange

“…Further theoretical reading on the dimensions took place at this point (e.g. Aro, 2012;Foucault 1977Foucault /1995Freire 1970Freire /1996Hännikäinen and Rasku-Puttonen 2010;Kaikkonen 2004;Lanas 2017;Layne, Trémion, and Dervin 2015;Tornberg 2013). Their theoretical strength was tested by returning to the data to reanalyse the coded patterns, which were renamed learning spaces, and by revising the findings table and the written descriptions.…”

Pedagogical love in Finland and Australia: a study of refugee children and their teachers

“…Loverhetoric has also been criticised for carrying colonialist overtones (Drexler-Dreis 2019). In school contexts, it is seen as being at odds with what counts in contemporary educational systems, with their instrumentalist ethos and performance orientations (Darder 2017;Lanas 2017). In response to these points, the word love is often replaced with words such as engagement, emotion, positive school climate, or perhaps most often, with the concept of 'care' (see, for example, Goldstein and Lake 2000).…”