This essay explores some of the areas in which language teaching and intercultural education overlap. We position language teaching as embedded within sociocultural practices and shaped by attitudes toward bilingualism and native vs. nonnative speaker status. Specifically, we question language practices that exclude or downplay the benefits of…

In England there are minority ethnic students with past family connections to the former British Empire, as well as recent Eastern European students, economic migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. One may wish to ask, do newly emerging racial identities conceptualise race and race relations in similar ways to existing minority ethnic communities?…

Since the 1990s, ethnic studies and other components of multicultural education have been criticized by neo-conservative and assimilationist scholars who maintain that school diversity initiatives weaken national identity and fail to help students attain the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in the national mainstream…

This article explores how the concept of reflexivity is used in intercultural education. Reflexivity is often presented as a key learning goal in acquiring intercultural competence (ICC). Yet, reflexivity can be defined in different ways, and take different forms across time and space, depending on the concepts of selfhood that prevail and how…

Immigration is increasing racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistics, and religious diversity in nations around the world, which is challenging existing concepts of citizenship and citizenship education. In this article, I challenge assimilationist conceptions of citizenship education and argue that citizenship education should be transformed so that…

In this essay I reflect on the role of intercultural education in an emerging global crisis. Education systems are characterised by both divergent and convergent impulses. Divergent impulses include tradition, nationalism and religion. Convergent impulses (isomorphism) include science and technology, culture (including the English language),…

In this paper, I reflect on my experiences as a Chinese educator, attempting to take my previous experiences into a new situation: teaching in the UK. These reflections take me down a path that shows how my Chinese cultural background and experiences created both challenges and opportunities for my teaching. I attempt to show how important it is…

Dehumanizing tendencies within the present neo-liberal era provide the backdrop against which the authors have developed an 11-year partnership in the Global South. The economic context encourages competition over community and, while portending to bring people closer together through technological advances, it only facilitates the flow of…

This essay examines education as a critical link to minority integration--one often lost in the debate over immigration on both sides of the Atlantic. It suggests that western European countries, in looking to the experience of the United States, should place the specific policies and practices in their historical context and sift through the…

Despite unquestionably good intentions on the part of most people who call themselves intercultural educators, most intercultural education practice supports, rather than challenges, dominant hegemony, prevailing social hierarchies, and inequitable distributions of power and privilege. In this essay I describe a philosophy of decolonizing…

This paper argues that using the notion of ambivalence in understanding ethnic hatred can be helpful to educators who struggle to address the pedagogical implications of students' feelings of hatred. It is suggested that, although hate feelings are difficult to change, unraveling the ambivalence in the affective politics of hatred creates…

This paper argues that the two national components of identity among Palestinian Arab students in Israel--the Arab component and the Palestinian component--are strong, while the civil Israeli component is very weak. This paper also argues that although social relations between Arab students and Jewish students are very limited, the readiness of…

In this article, the author shares the challenges she faced as a teacher who teaches "Understanding Islam: Religion and Politics." She shares that most of the strains she had experienced began to surface when her class came to the segments on jihad and Muslim women. She also relates that some of the tensions experienced by her students result from…

As a Turkish Muslim White woman teaching in Western Canada, the author relates how she struggled to convey to her students how these identities come together, and how they facilitate a pedagogy of anti-oppression in her practice. To disrupt Orientalist assumptions or stereotypes about Muslim women, the author relates that she developed the…

The imperial hubris, insecurities and indifference of our bloody new millennium pose profound challenges to feminist anti-racist and anti-colonial educators. For those of us who turn to literature education to create spaces of sustained moral reflection, there is a particular challenge to think through the kinds of reading practices which might…