Intercultural Learning

Intercultural learning is an important topic for the priorities of both the European Commission and the Council of Europe, and of their partnership in the field of youth. Intercultural learning is an educational approach that can lead to social transformation, so that people from different cultural backgrounds can develop positive relations based on the values and principles of human rights and on seeing cultural differences as positive things. It is a form of political and social education that needs to pay attention not only to intercultural relations, but also to different understandings of culture and diversity, power relations, distribution of resources, political and social context, human rights, discrimination, history and daily interactions among different groups. This T-Kit was developed for the context of youth work and non-formal education with young people, both of which support the personal development, social integration and active citizenship of young people. Educators and youth workers have an important role in addressing intercultural learning in their work with young people. They can stimulate young people’s learning in their daily lives, so that they can question and extend their perception, develop competences to interact positively with people from different cultural backgrounds and embrace the values of diversity, equality and dignity. In today’s Europe, these values and skills are fundamental for young people and for society as a whole in order to continue building peace and mutual understanding.

The ability to recognise and understand your own cultural context is a prerequisite to understanding and interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds. An intercultural learning approach encourages us to develop an understanding of culture and cultural difference, through reflecting on our own context and experience.

This book provides a contemporary and critical examination of the theoretical and pedagogical impact of Michael Byram’s pioneering work on intercultural communicative competence and intercultural citizenship within the field of language education and beyond. The chapters address important theoretical and empirical work on the teaching, learning, and assessment of intercultural learning, and highlight how individual language educators and communities of practice enact intercultural learning in locally appropriate ways. The book offers comprehensive, up-to-date and accessible knowledge for researchers, teachers, teacher-trainers and students.

T-Kits ( = Training kits) are a product of the Partnership Agreement on European Youth Worker Training run by the CoE and the European Communities Commission

The need for new approaches, methods, and techniques in cross-cultural training and intercultural education are virtually insatiable, especially for experiential activities. The emphasis in this book is on activities that foster the development of intercultural awareness and cross-cultural sensitivity, helping learners understand some of the principal dimensions of intercultural communication, cross-cultural human relations, and cultural diversity. The selections include simulations, case studies, role plays, critical incidents, and individual and group exercises. A number address relatively complex workplace issues; others focus on intercultural dynamics in educational contexts. Some are printed here for the first time; others are culled from less accessible sources. They range from basic introductory activities to those that facilitate the exploration of intercultural issues in significant depth. In an introductory essay, Sheila Ramsey, an experienced scholar and trainer, examines the nature of intercultural training and lays out a conceptual framework for assessing its effectiveness. The rest of the book is made up of activities organized around six facets of intercultural contact: cultural differences for beginners, understanding oneself as a cultural person, the intercultural perspective, working across cultures, cross-cultural "foul-ups," and returning home. Each section opens with an introduction, followed by activities. Each activity includes, at a minimum, objectives, audience, materials required, setting, time required, and procedure for facilitation. Many of the activities include handouts or illustrations. This book will be especially valuable for trainers and educators who want to further ground their work in a solid theoretical base and at he same time augment their resources to expand heir repertoire.

Indigenous peoples around the world are calling for control over their education in order to reaffirm their identities and defend their rights. In Latin America the indigenous peoples, national governments and international organisations have identified intercultural education as a means of contributing to this process. The book investigates education for and by indigenous peoples and examines the relationship between theoretical and methodological developments and formal practice. An ethnographic study of the Arakmbut people of the Peruvian Amazon, provides a detailed example of the social, cultural and educational change indigenous peoples are experiencing, an insight into Arakmbut oral learning and teaching practices as well as a review of their conceptualisations of knowledge, pedagogy and evaluation. The models of intercultural education being promoted by Latin American governments are, nevertheless, biliterate and school-based. The book analyses indigenous and non-indigenous models based on different conceptualisations of culture and curriculum in the context of the Arakmbut search for an education which respects their dynamic oral cultural traditions and identity, provides them with a qualitatively relevant education about the wider society and addresses the intercultural lives they lead.

This handbook deals with the question of how people can best live and work with others who come from very different cultural backgrounds. Handbook of Intercultural Training provides an overview of current trends and issues in the field of intercultural training. Contributors represent a wide range of disciplines including psychology, interpersonal communication, human resource management, international management, anthropology, social work, and education. Twenty-four chapters, all new to this edition, cover an array of topics including training for specific contexts, instrumentation and methods, and training design.

The issue of intercultural learning has been tackled, amongst others, in the fields of education, language education and applied linguistics. In spite of the extensive literature on the subject, there is still much which needs to be done to address the ways in which linguistics itself can contribute to intercultural education. The 8 chapters by internationally-renowned scholars highlight different ways of using it both in the classroom and in researching intercultural education. The following approaches are covered: Critical Discourse Analysis, Énonciation, Conversation Analysis and Pragmatics. The introduction to the volume also offers a useful and comprehensive survey of the debates around the polysemic notion of the ‘intercultural’. The book will appeal to an international readership of students, scholars and professionals across a wide range of disciplines, interested in making intercultural education more effective.