Silent Partners In Multicultural Education

This volume aims to stimulate interest in the under?researched role of silent partners (SPs) in multicultural education. Silent partners include formal and informal places?spaces in schools (e.g. architecture, classroom facilities, libraries, corridors, playgrounds, canteens), objects (e.g. teaching aids, furniture, wall decorations and overall interior design), interactive technologies (use of devices and applications) but also often taken?for?granted and not immediately visible patterns of thought, ideologies and assumptions. People involved in education all engage and work with a number of SPs that contribute to the delivery of curricula, but also to social life and well?being in and out of schools. The way places?spaces, objects and technologies influence the school community’s experiences of learning, well?being and social justice is rarely observed and problematised in education – hence the adjective ‘silent’ in the term ‘silent partners’. This book not only fills a significant empirical gap, but it can also inject public debate over future working environments in schools for multicultural education. It will be relevant to both researchers interested in developing their knowledge on these issues from a different perspective but also educators in search of inspiration for multicultural education. Praise for Silent Partners in Multicultural Education: “How to organize your classroom’s configuration in such a manner that all pupils feel welcome and comfortable? While most of those invested in multicultural education focus on the optimization of various linguistic aspects, Itkonen, Dervin and their colleagues give voice to the non?verbal aspects of education. In this book they elaborate how formal and informal places?spaces in schools can unintentionally reflect ideologies and cultural assumptions. They illustrate this perspective with telling examples that come from what is widely perceived as one of the best educational systems in the world. This book is an important, innovative contribution to the question of inclusion of all pupils in our school systems. It provides an eye?opening perspective to researchers in the field, teachers, principals and stakeholders willing to work for social justice in their schools”. ~ Emmanuelle Le Pichon, Vorstman, Researcher and Assistant Professor, Languages, Literature and Communication Department, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics “Congratulations are in order for this ground breaking and significant book. As the editors and authors convey convincingly and often poignantly, multicultural education is an increasingly politicised phenomenon that needs all the friends and allies that it can garner. The book's coverage of silent partners in education ? objects and technologies operating in specific places and spaces ? is therefore timely. Yet, as the book also highlights, these silent partners can exert negative power as well as positive influence on educational outcomes. The book presents a compelling account of the fundamental ambivalence framing these partners and formal educational provision more broadly. Rendering these silent educational partners visible and open to scrutiny is a significant scholarly achievement by the Education for Diversities Research Group in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Helsinki, Finland, building on their well?deserved reputation for exploring the implicit and tacit and yet impactful dimensions of intercultural education and understanding. The book is appropriately diverse and inclusive in its concerns, with attention being directed at education in Finland, France, and the United States. Likewise the coverage traverses international and national schools, higher education, teacher education and productive methodologies for researching silent partners. This innovative and thought?provoking volume is highly recommended for its originality in helping us to see education for diversities in a new and powerful light.” ~ Patrick Alan Danaher, Professor in Educational Research in the School of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist Education, Associate Dean (Research and Research Training) in the Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts, Toowoomba campus of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia; Adjunct Professor in the School of Education and the Arts, Central Queensland University, Australia. “Silent partners do not only reflect the ways we conceive of education but they also influence our practices as educators. Being silent, they are often taken for granted. The strength of this book lies in its critical questioning of the notion of silent partners. The chapters enlighten about the untold and the effects they have in an educational environment. The readers, especially in the fields of education and social justice, will definitely acquire a more sensitive perception of how silent partners affect our approaches to multicultural education.” ~ Dr. Regis Machart, Senior Lecturer, Universiti Putra Malaysia; Adjunct Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland

This edited collection advances the call for continued multicultural dialogues within education. Dialogue and education are the two most essential tools that can help tackle some of the biggest problems we are facing across the globe, including fanaticism, chauvinistic nationalism, religious fundamentalism and racism. The contributors to this book explore the necessity of sustained dialogue within the wider social and political sciences alongside in national and international politics, where more multicultural voices need to be heard in order to make progress. The book builds on existing evidence and literature to advocate in favour of this movement, and highlights how important and significant multiculturalism and multicultural education remains. It will be essential reading for students and academics working in the fields of education and sociology, particularly those with an interest in social justice and multiculturalism.

This book focuses on Indigenous participation in postgraduate education. The collaborating editors, from the contexts of Australian, Canadian and Nordic postgraduate education, have brought together voices of Indigenous postgraduate students and researchers about strategies to support postgraduate education for Indigenous students globally and to promote sustainable solution-focused and change-focused strategies to support Indigenous postgraduate students. The role of higher education institutions in meeting the needs of Indigenous students is considered by contributing scholars, including issues related to postgraduate education pedagogies, flexible learning and technologies. On a more fundamental level the book provides a valuable resource by giving voice to Indigenous postgraduate students themselves who share directly the stories of their experience, their inspirations and difficulties in undertaking postgraduate study. This component of the book gives precedence to the issues most relevant and important to students themselves for consideration by universities and researchers. Bringing the topic and the voices of Indigenous students clearly into the public domain provides a catalyst for discussion of the issues and potential strategies to assist future Indigenous postgraduate students. This book will assist higher education providers to develop understanding of how Indigenous postgraduate students and researchers negotiate research cultures and agendas that permeate higher education from the past to ensure the experience of postgraduate students is both rich in regard to data to be collected and culturally safe in approach; what connections, gaps and contradictions occur at the intersections between past models of postgraduate study and emerging theories around intercultural perspectives, including the impact of cultural and linguistic differences on Indigenous students' learning experiences; how Indigenous students’ and researchers’ personal and professional understandings, beliefs and experiences about what typifies knowledge and research or adds value to postgraduate studies are constructed, shared or challenged; and how higher education institutions manage the potential challenges and risks of developing pedagogies to ensure that they give voice and power to Indigenous postgraduate students.

The volume 3 of this series is designed to present educators with current research and emerging issues in teaching, learning and motivation in a multicultural context. The book is separated into four sections. In the introduction section we have outlined some of the current issues and recent thoughts about the nature of learning, teaching, and school reforms from a multicultural perspective.

This book critiques models of intercultural competence, whilst suggesting examples of specific alternative approaches that will successfully foster intercultural competence in teacher education. Bringing together diverse perspectives from teacher educators and student teachers, this volume discusses the need to move beyond essentialism, culturalism and assumptions about an us versus them perspective and recognises that multiple identities of an individual are negotiated in interaction with others. Intercultural Competence in the Work of Teachers is divided into four sections: critiquing intercultural competence in teacher education; exploring critical intercultural competences in teacher education; reflexivity and intercultural competence in teacher education; and indigeneity and intercultural competence in teacher education, providing a methodological approach through which to explore this critical framework further. This book is ideal for teacher educators or academics of education specialising in global education who are looking to explore alternative perspectives towards intercultural competence and wish to gain an insight into the ways it can be utilised in a more effective and productive manner.

Since China proposed its “Belt and Road Initiative” in 2013 to boost its influence on international affairs and “cultivate international contacts who are friendly toward China”, the number of foreign students in China has surge exponentially. Yet global political changes have added tensions and challenges to the education of international students. This book is one of the first works to discuss the educational experiences of international students in China. Using survey research and qualitative studies to study participants in degree-bearing and language programmes at regular universities and Sino-foreign universities located in different parts of the country, the book covers a variety of topics across education, including international students’ intercultural experience, teacher–student classroom interaction, learning and teaching Chinese as a foreign language, academic adaptation and identity formation in higher educational contexts. This book is essential for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers of international student education in China. It can also benefit prospective international students considering pursuing higher education in China.

Offering a unique reading experience, this book examines the epistemologies of interculturality and explores potential routes to review and revisit the notion anew. Grounded in different sociocultural, economic and political perspectives around the world, interculturality in education and research bears a paradoxical attribute of 'contradictions' and 'inconsistencies', making it a polysemous and flexible notion that has no definitive diagnosis and requires constant unthinking and rethinking. The author provides a toolbox of 'out-of-box ideas' in the form of fragmental yet standalone writings and follow-up questions concerning stereotypes about the very notion of interculturality and conceptual and methodological flaws in the way it is used. Readers are encouraged to critically reflect about interculturality as it stands today in global research and education. In identifying the paradoxes of interculturality and proposing alternative directions, the book stimulates a diversity of thoughts about the notion that goes beyond the 'West'. The book will be an essential reading for scholars, students and educators interested in education philosophy, applied linguistics and the broad field of intercultural communication education. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by University of Helsinki

This book examines today’s central and yet often misunderstood and misconstrued notion of interculturality. It specifically focuses on one aspect of intercultural awareness that has been ignored in research and education: the presence and influence of things on the way we experience, do, and reflect on interculturality. This book provides the readers with opportunities to engage with interculturality by reflecting on how our lives are full of things and entangled with them. It urges teachers, teacher educators, scholars, and students to open their eyes to the richness that the more-than-human, with which we can reflect, has to offer for intercultural communication education.