In order for language learners to develop critical cultural awareness (Byram, 1997) and symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2006), they need to experience pedagogies that stretch their meaning-making potentials and repertoires (Kearney, 2016). Yet, language teachers often feel ill-equipped to address culture and interculturality at all in their classrooms (Sercu, 2006), and we know little about the interculturality of language teachers themselves and the processes through which it develops. In this paper, we propose and document ways to intentionally cultivate a critical intercultural pedagogy in language teachers, and analyze the processes through which teachers' critical pedagogies develop. We report on a qualitative study designed and conducted in two connected courses on interculturality, offered during a summer study abroad program for North American teachers of French, in Angers, France.
We first describe the context and curriculum for these courses, which focused on concepts in intercultural learning and teaching, such as meaning potentials and the relationship between language and culture. In these courses, teachers critically engage with concepts and practices related to critical cultural awareness, symbolic competence, multiliteracies, multimodality, intertextuality and design. During the program, teachers gathered and created texts, largely through design-based, place-based, and walking pedagogies that promoted intentional, sensorily-grounded and reflective exploration of the physical and social spaces that study abroad made possible. While in Angers, the participating teachers collaboratively and critically reflected on their own intercultural experiences, in light of these constructs and of their own embodied, sensory, and emplaced experiences. Collectively, we then explicitly connected these experiences to possibilities for language classroom teaching, mutating personal intercultural experiences into a shared repository of all types of texts as well as specific ideas for how these texts could anchor lessons and units in the teachers' K-12 classrooms in the U.S.
This qualitative research study investigates 1) how French teachers on a short-term study abroad program developed critical intercultural pedagogies; and 2) how they demonstrated applications to their own teaching contexts and practice. The data collected include video recordings of some class sessions; the text sets collected and created during the program; the lesson ideas the teachers generated and a pre- and post-course survey. Inductive coding, informed by our theoretical frames, was carried out by both researchers, and line-by-line interactional analysis was carried out on transcripts of classroom interactions. We share illustrative examples both from teachers' sense-making discussions and the teaching plans they created and implemented in their K12 classrooms in order to show how critical intercultural pedagogies can flourish as a result of language teachers' experiences abroad.
References
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural competence. Multilingual Matters.
Kearney, E. (2016). Intercultural learning in modern language education: Expanding meaning-making potentials. Multilingual Matters.
Kramsch, C. (2006). From communicative competence to symbolic competence. Modern Language Journal, 90(2), 249-252.
Sercu, L. (2016). The foreign language and intercultural competence teacher: The acquisition of a new professional identity. Intercultural Education, 17(1), 55-72.
