Conceptualizing interculturality in multicultural teacher education

Abstract

This study examined student teachers' and teacher educators' discourses about multiculturalism in an international English-medium teacher education programme in Finland. An analysis with discursive pragmatics of semi-structured interviews revealed four positioning strategies for initial responses to multiculturalism: stereotyping and othering, distancing oneself, verbalizing experiences, and downplaying multiculturalism. Although the same strategies were present to a large extent among both student teachers and teacher educators, these have different implications. The teacher educators' lack of a shared critical understanding of interculturality created uncertainty when considering multicultural issues and can lead to a situation where the coherence between the objectives, implementation methods and assessment in the programme suffers. The student teachers had difficulties transferring their immediate experiences of multiculturalism into reflections of how these may contribute to their future work as teachers. Student teachers seemed dependent on teacher educators' support in recognizing challenges with diversities as learning opportunities. Teacher educators should be provided with opportunities to compare and contest their conceptions of interculturality so that they would be able to guide student teachers in reflecting on theirs.

Untitled

“…The debrief is also space where teacher educators may sort out any conceptual misunderstandings and encourage critical thinking using a "Pedagogy of Discomfor" (Zembylas & Papamichael, 2017) to ask TCs reflective questions about race, gender, class, and sexual orientation to reflect on personally-held ideological values and beliefs. Reflection is a powerful tool to analyze a teacher's understanding of culture and their experiences working with CLD students (Hahl & Löfström, 2016). Reflective practice provides a mechanism for teachers to address, reconsider, or change negatively held assumptions or attitudes about working with CLD students (Wyatt, 2017).…”

Approaching culture, negotiating practice: Finnish educators’ discourses on cultural diversity

“…They made an effort not to use any xenophobic language and to stress similarity between their students, but also struggled to deal with the deviance of the students wearing hijab, revealing a lack of reflection on their own cultural assumptions. In Hahl's and Löfström's (2016) study, student teachers and teacher educators in an English-medium teacher education programme used four different strategies, all of which were problematic in some sense: stereotyping/othering, verbalizing experiences, distancing, and downplaying multiculturalism. The interviewees were inconsistent in that they constructed both sustainable and unsustainable positions towards interculturality.…”

“…Leeman and Ledoux 2005, 15;Nieto and Bode 2012, 159). Apart from the dynamic nature of culture, another noteworthy aspect of it is that each individual belongs to multiple different cultural and social groups simultaneously (Hahl and Löfström 2016). Moreover, many researchers have started to avoid culture as a key concept in tackling diversity because of its risks; instead, approaches like intersectionality, questioning normality, and social justice or anti-racist education have been introduced (Mikander, Zilliacus and Holm 2018).…”

Essentializing vs. non-essentializing students’ cultural identities: curricular discourses in Finland and Sweden

“…Talk about multicultural students is often vague and includes stereotyping particular student groups. In Europe there has been a strong focus on immigrant students as representing the 'multicultural', whereas in the US multicultural discourses have also traditionally been linked to ethnic minority students (Hahl and Löfström 2016;Holm and Zilliacus 2009).…”