FSW Summary and Reading Article Based on Diversity I need help summarize the article and I need help defining the vocabulary word Intercultural education.

FSW Summary and Reading Article Based on Diversity I need help summarize the article and I need help defining the vocabulary word Intercultural education. Also, What were the results of the study? European Journal of Teacher Education, 2014
Vol. 37, No. 2, 171–182, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2014.882310
Failing intercultural education? ‘Thoughtfulness’ in intercultural
education for student teachers
Maija Lanas*
Department of Education, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
This paper proposes a rethinking of intercultural education in teacher education,
arguing that discussion of the intercultural education of student teachers tends to
have the following two gaps: one, such discussion tends to overlook student
teacher education as a context for teaching intercultural education, and two, it
tends to ignore the self of the teacher educator. This paper aims to address both
gaps. In doing so, the ?rst task of the paper is to analyse student teacher education
critically, as a structural, ideological context for intercultural education; the
second task of the paper is to rethink the pedagogical relationship between a
student teacher and a teacher educator, considering the self of the teacher educator
in particular. The paper concludes by suggesting ‘thoughtfulness’ as a fruitful idea
for the intercultural education of student teachers.
Keywords: intercultural education; emotions; teacher education; post-structuralism;
education
Introduction
Intercultural education1 for teachers in the globalising world is usually perceived as
important by educators, students, teachers and policy-makers. Accordingly, much
research in the ?eld of intercultural education attempts to meet the needs of globalisation and intercultural societies. At the same time, public discussions about intercultural education remain frozen, at times, in the polarised positioning of ‘advocates
for interculturalism’ and ‘sceptics towards interculturalism’, and suffer from lack of
common ground for discussion. Many advocates for intercultural education feel frustrated from the lack of identi?able outcomes in societies, schools and individual
teachers’ or individual students’ lives. In this paper, I will try to expand the common
ground for discussions by critically examining the perceived problem of ‘unsuccessful intercultural education’.
There is a vast quantity of research literature concerning the intercultural
education of teachers. Such literature examines mainly pre-service and in-service
teacher perceptions of intercultural education (Kaplan, Abu-Sa’ad, and Yonah 2001,
289–307; Alviar-Martin and Ho 2011, 127–135), the goals of intercultural education
at individual and school levels (Banks 2002; Leonard and Leonard 2006, 30–62),
models of learning intercultural education (Garmon 2004, 201–213), and successful
models of teaching intercultural education (Phillion and He 2004, 3–9; Scoffham
and Barnes 2009, 257–270; Martin 2010, 530–539; Baskerville 2011, 107–115;
Laughter 2011, 43–50). Despite such efforts, and despite short-term positive
*Email: maija.lanas@oulu.?
© 2014 Association for Teacher Education in Europe
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impacts, teacher education programmes have demonstrated a general lack of
translation to school practices (e.g. Cochran-Smith and Zeichner 2005, 21–22; Mills
and Ballantyne 2010).
Researchers have found various explanations for this lack of demonstrated
success. Mainly, they have explained it in terms of the programmes themselves,
which often highlight and address celebratory rather than critical approaches to
diversity, employing ‘add-on’ or piecemeal approaches (Mills and Ballantyne 2010,
447–454; Schoorman and Bogotch 2010a, 1041–1048; Schoorman and Bogotch
2010b, 79–85), student teachers’ beliefs about their own colour-blindness and
neutral racial positions (Bell 2002, 236), a mismatch between theory and public
opinion (Martin 2010) or the predispositions student teachers bring with them,
which have a powerful socialising in?uence (Lortie 1975; Taguchi 2007, 275–290;
Green and Reid 2008, 17–31; Mills and Ballantyne 2010, 447–454). However, very
few studies look critically at: (1) the teacher education context (as if intercultural
education occurred in a vacuum); and (2) the relationship in which the self of a
teacher educator and the self of a student teacher ‘come into being’.
Firstly, the perceived problem of unsuccessful intercultural education is
commonly attributed to society, students and intercultural education programmes,
and does not present as relevant to the immediate context in which education occurs;
namely, teacher education. In teacher education, issues of diversity have generally
been separate from the rest of the curricula and programmes, and despite general
recognition of the importance of diversity issues, the rest of the teacher education
curriculum has tended to remain unchanged (Holling and Guzman 2005). This
pattern of attribution relates to lack of funds (Holling and Guzman 2005) and the
instrumentalist focus of teacher education: research on teacher education tends to
stress questions of ‘proper’ preparation, immediate use and apparent relevance
(Phelan et al. 2006, 161–179; Phelan 2011, 207–220). Such efforts often direct
researchers to seek to ‘solve the problem’ of unsuccessful intercultural education by
inventing new formulas or models instead of critically examining the context in
which the perceived problem appears and analysing the problem itself in a critical
manner. This paper aims to examine teacher education critically to identify the
possible structural and ideological challenges teacher education presents for
intercultural education. To achieve this, I compare the structures and ethos of teacher
education to the needs of intercultural education.
Secondly, in research as well as in the everyday practice of teacher education,
the self and emotions of an educator are often approached as a side note, as if a
teacher is a spectator to a process that occurs within students (Wang 2005, 45–60;
Wang 2008, 10–16; with a few exceptions: Keith 2010, 539–572). Exclusion of the
teacher educator’s self from accounts of intercultural education is a multilayered
ethical, pedagogical issue. As teacher educators in intercultural education, we ask
that our students rethink their identities – because one cannot overcome biases from
external imposition; transformation must happen within the self – and one must
engage in a process of ‘self-shattering’ (Pinar 2004). When a teacher educator asks
students to think and engage in this manner, her/his own sense of self cannot be
privileged (Wang 2005, 45–60): that is not pedagogically sensible or ethically
sustainable, for reasons this paper will explain. The second aim of this paper is to
rethink the pedagogical relationship in intercultural education between students and
teachers, opening up the categorical separation between teachers and learners, and
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placing educators into the ‘zone of discomfort’ (Zembylas 2010, 703–716) with
students. I see the zone of discomfort as a challenging but positive state.
This paper draws mainly from philosophies of education. The paper conjoins
accounts that view intercultural education, not as a body of knowledge to be transmitted, but as a ‘poetic experiencing of contradictions in order to invent new modes
of subjectivity for both teacher and student’ (Wang 2005, 59). One might openly
de?ne the goal of intercultural education as ‘facilitat[ing] conscientisation among
teachers that would inspire efforts towards changing (rather than preserving) the
status quo’ (Schoorman and Bogotch 2010a, 1042). Intercultural education is, in
those terms, a continuous process that entails acts of response to ‘dif?cult knowledge’ (Britzman 1998) and acts of endurance of dif?cult emotions for both educator
and student. In that continuous process, through acts of response and endurance,
those involved can imagine and invent new possibilities for democracy and social
justice.
The literature from which this paper draws originates mainly in Western Europe
and North America, and the discussions apply in these contexts. At the same time,
there is no one static teacher education in any context. Indeed, teacher education
comes into being in the pull of multiple, mutually contradicting factors, such as
teachers’ expectations, national policies, student intake and public discussion. Thus,
none of the arguments made in the literature can automatically apply to all teacher
educations, not to mention teacher educators. Rather, the purpose of this paper is to
identify and discuss some of the potential cumulative effects of some implicit
discourses with which teacher education institutes must negotiate.
What can be achieved in intercultural education is limited by an instrumentalist
focus on performance outcomes. Intercultural education in teacher education is not
simply a forum for teaching the skills needed to imagine new possibilities for social
justice, but a forum where that imagination can occur, where both teacher educators
and student teachers encounter multiple others, engage in dif?cult knowledge and
explore the zone of discomfort to reimagine the world in which they live. When one
perceives intercultural education simply as ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’, based on
empirically testable outcomes in teachers, students, or schools, and when one sees
intercultural knowledge as knowledge some have and others lack, intercultural education turns away from its greatest strengths: the beauty, painfulness and potential of
reimagining the world and one’s self in it.
Through this paper, I rede?ne the ‘problem of unsuccessful intercultural education in teacher education’, proposing that, instead of focusing on a failure to produce
measurable outcomes in students or in schools, one might focus on different forms
that ‘thoughtfulness’ can take during the process. I propose an emphasis on
‘thoughtfulness’ (Joldersma 2011, 441–447), rather than on speci?c competences,
and de?ne thoughtfulness as approaching each situation simultaneously with the
ethicality of a teacher and the humbleness of a learner. In the conclusion to this
paper, I discuss the possible meaning of thoughtfulness in a non-performative
intercultural education.
Performative teacher education
Teaching as learnt through teacher education tends to be performative in nature.
‘Performativity’, in this instance, refers ?rstly to Butler’s (2006) de?nition of the
term as something that functions to produce that which it declares. For example,
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teachers become teachers when assigned the role of ‘teachers’; similarly, students
become students when named ‘students’. A roomful of sitting bodies absorbed in
their own thoughts is considered one example of education simply if that situation is
named ‘education’. Secondly, one might view education as a performance in which
students acquire the roles of students, teachers acquire the roles of teachers, and
students and teachers pursue their roles as well as they can. Students may perform
learning and teachers teaching without the actual pursuit of learning or teaching.
This development has not decreased in the wake of the so-called ‘new professionalism’ of teachers globally (Zeichner 2010), and it is a problematic context for
intercultural education, for at least four reasons.
Firstly, in performative teacher education, student teachers learn not who they
are or could become, but whom they must be in order to teach (Green and Reid
2008, 27). A teacher is inaugurated into subject-hood through a ‘teacher-hood’
discourse and a teacher must continuously cite that discourse to remain intelligible
as a subject. A teacher must be ‘recognisably teacherly and master a convincing
practice of teaching’ (Green and Reid 2008, 27). The collective experience of
teacher identity has precedence over an individual consciousness of what it means to
be a teacher (Sumara, Davis, and Iftody 2008, 155–172, 160). In such a context,
student teachers learn to perform re?exivity rather than to re?ect (Atkinson 2012,
74–87). In other words, educators and students are stuck in ?xed roles in which their
possible selves are limited: the teacher does the teaching, the student the learning
and deviations from those roles bring the entire performance into question.
At the same time, one might argue that breaking the roles of teacher and learner
is a crucial requirement for the emotional process of engaging with dif?cult knowledge together. If selves are perceived as static, only the self of a learner tends to be
at play when building dif?cult knowledge; a teacher’s self can be hidden behind the
protective walls of professionalism. Wang (2005) notes – and I concur – that such a
position is untenable. Willingness on a teacher’s part to be in?uenced by communal
inquiry is required for a democratic process in which the voices of students are
heard without being judged, even when those voices bring the teacher anger, frustration and anxiety (Wang 2008, 15). Wang (2005) asks, how can an unsettling of
students’ socially, politically and culturally situated identities not be accompanied a
questioning of teacher educators’ selves.
Secondly, performative teacher education lacks the space to produce knowledge
that is open by nature. Teacher education remains a modernist project in which the
stress is on ‘producing and sustaining predictable, stable, and normative identities
and curricula’ (Phelan 2011, 214). In practice, student teachers, accustomed to the
modernist and instrumentalist discourse, imagine they will learn what truths to teach
and how to teach those truths truthfully (Taguchi 2007, 278–279; Phelan 2011).
Student teachers often feel that they have not learned anything if they are unable to
apply their ‘learning’ directly. Intercultural topics, on the other hand, tend to be
without clear-cut answers and easy applications. Re?ecting on intercultural topics
requires retaining complexities, accepting multiple voices, openness and the
questioning of ?xed truths.
Thirdly, normative expectations of professionalism exist as ‘ready’ instead of
‘becoming’, which creates an impasse; the assumption of professionalism as ?nished
and ‘ready’ prevents a teacher from engaging in the process of ‘becoming’. At the
same time, an instrumentalist belief in pre-existing solutions that simply need to be
‘found’ prevents a teacher from seeing the search process itself as a ‘solution’.
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Inherently, a teacher’s multicultural ‘competence’ can never be ‘ready’ and ?xed
(Jokikokko 2010) because it requires re?exivity, relearning and dialogical reseeking
with each new other. Such authentic dialogical-seeking can only occur as long as
one does not consider oneself already ‘?nished’.
Fourthly, in performative teacher education, emotions often remain separate from
rationality, and our intentional selves are forces that in?uence us from the outside
(Zembylas and Fendler 2007, 319–333) – something to be ‘managed’. Knowledge
remains commonly perceived as emotion-free and essentially painless. No structures
are in place to recognise, accept and work with dif?cult emotions or to accept the
painfulness of learning. In general, experiencing pain in connection with learning is
experienced as unjusti?ed (Wang 2008, 12); it causes a sense of alarm, and it may
be interpreted as a signal that something is wrong. Consequently, expressing
negative emotions tends to be inappropriate in education (Lanas 2011; Lanas and
Corbett, 2011). Intercultural education – on the other hand – constitutes an
emotional and intellectual process (Wang 2005, 58). Any conceptualisation of
intercultural education in teacher education must regard emotions as essential to the
learning process.
While we experience our emotions as personal, private and partly what make us
‘us’, those very emotions are socially constructed and shared with others (Game
1997, 385–399; Ahmed 2004a, 25–42; Ahmed 2004b; Gray 2008, 935–952).
Zembylas (2007c) argues that one can view emotions as embodied practices
performed in a class, practices that link our personal selves to broader societal
issues. According to Zembylas, emotions are, to some extent, products of previous
experiences, in?uenced by social, historical and cultural contexts. One can see them
as habitus (Bourdieu 1984), as embodied history internalised as a ‘second nature’,
and thereby, forgotten as history (Zembylas 2007b, 443–463). Therefore, emotions
re?ect societal power relations and are signi?cant in the actual formation and maintenance of social identities and collective behaviour (Zembylas 2007b, 443–463). In
other words, dif?cult emotions occurring in intercultural education do not reside
within students, but occur and are performed within intra-action in a broader societal
context. Rather than painting a simple negative or positive image of responses to
intercultural issues, categorising people in simplistic ways, one might more productively examine how emotions link to ambivalent discourses and inform actions when
negotiating the presence of the other and one’s sense of belonging (Zembylas 2012,
195–208). Deconstruction of emotional rules – speci?cally, who is allowed to
perform what emotions – is central when teaching dif?cult topics.
In summation, the performative framework of teacher education may not provide
student teachers or teacher educators with the conceptual, theoretical, philosophical,
emotional or personal space to ask dif?cult questions of historical, political, cultural
or social contexts. The possibilities for such negotiations may also be limited, on a
very practical level, by the teacher educator’s relations with the teacher education
institution and its openness to students and staff from minority cultures. While
students in teacher education acquire tools to construct knowledge, in general, those
students may lack the tools to analyse the knowledge construction in which they
engage. Yet, a pedagogical relationship for intercultural issues requires analysis of
knowledge production processes, retaining various and changing perceptions of the
self and other, and navigating challenges and changing emotions. What might a
non-performative pedagogical relationship in which this is possible look like?
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Education as responding
When a student teacher engages with dif?cult knowledge during the course of intercultural education, the teacher educator also enters a zone of discomfort. The teacher
educator’s self is at play because selves are ‘relational’, not possessed (Jackson
2004, 673–690); we all constantly come into being in different relations. The very
capacity for consciousness is based on otherness, but this otherness is not merely a
dialectical alienation on a path to a sublation and a higher consciousness. On the
contrary, consciousness is otherness, the differential relation between a centre and
everything not that centre (Holquist 1990, 18). Self is a relation; therefore, the self
is always at play.
In order to rethink intercultural education in teacher education to recognise the
‘relationality’ of the self, I will draw from the theories of Biesta (2003) and
Joldersma (2011), theories that see education as ‘coming into presence’ and as a
‘primordial way of being human’. My purpose is not to provide a directly applicable
model of education – in fact, such an attempt would go against the very basis of this
paper – nor to offer ‘complete’ pictures of the insights of Biesta or Joldersma.
Instead, my purpose is to explore less trodden pathways of thought on teacher
education and intercultural education within teacher education, with the aid of
Biesta’s and Joldersma’s thinking.
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