Understanding of Multicultural Sustainability through Mutual Acceptance: Voices from Intercultural Teachers’ Previous Early Education

The objective of this article was to examine multicultural sustainability with reference to appropriate manners suitable for creating an atmosphere of mutual acceptability. The focus was on previous early education among the intercultural teachers. The participants included ten teachers, five Muslims and five non-Muslim, with intercultural backgrounds, who were selected to be involved in this study. A structured interview was employed, and a thematic analysis was performed on the basis of the research findings. The findings revealed that there were several themes resulting from conducted interviews that were centered around understandings of multicultural sustainability based on learning experiences in previous early education. When evaluating the intercultural awareness of mutual acceptability within the context of a multicultural background, among the themes operating as key strategic elements for achieving multicultural sustainability through mutual acceptance were situational experience, mutual understanding, mutual trust, and awareness of mutual responsibility with a view to maintaining intercultural relations. This study contributes to the expansion of strategies employed by intercultural teachers in a modern context, with respect to a meaningful concern for acceptance in ensuring the achievement of multicultural adaptability.

Research on the Image Narrative Strategy Based on the Digital Vision — Thinking about the Creation of the Illustration Book “Yuxiang Yarn Factory”

With the transformation of media technology and social context in the new era, image provides auxiliary strategies for the diversified manifestations of culture in the process of communication. Traditional design drawings are increasingly unable to meet the new context requirements of modern architectural culture communication in terms of expression mode and acceptance by the public. As a new form of cultural dissemination or another way: digitization, imagery, narrative, and popular expression have begun to arouse discussion and thinking. With the help of digital technology as an expression of visual media, this paper tries to explore the potential of “image” as a medium to depict space, which brings about spatial situational experience and narrative expression. In addition, through montage and axonometric space operation, we explore the theory and practice in the narrative strategy of images, so as to build a bridge of communication between spatial experience of spatial consciousness and images. To be more precise, it emphasizes the connection between the image using digital technology as the medium and the spatial experience, and then uses the key of “imagine” to sort out the context of spatial awareness and emotional cognition.

Subjectobject and Movementmaterial: A Diffractive Reading of the Becoming of Dance through the Subject

With this study, which is linked to the research topic of ‘choreography’, I wish to contribute to our understanding of how internal and external factors are involved in the becoming of dance through the subject. I want to increase our understanding of the multilayered relationships that are ongoing in the becoming of dance and provide and develop understandings for didactical and pedagogical contexts. By studying my own praxis in a teaching context, I want to understand what is involved in the becoming of dance through the subject. In the article, I use post-humanist theories, with an emphasis on materialists such as Rosi Braidotti and her concept of the nomadic subject. The nomadic subject is fundamental for this study because it uses materialistic understandings of the world without renouncing the subject’s previous situational experience and embodied knowledge. In addition to the nomadic subject, I use concepts such as diffraction, intra-action and agents. These concepts have their roots in the theories of Karen Barad, also a post-humanist. I am interested in what agents are entangled in the process of becoming and what hierarchies are at work within my practice. I want to determine how they figurate and whether it is possible for these hierarchies to reach positions that are more anti-essential.

The interplay of prior experience and actual situational context in intercultural first encounters

The study aims to investigate how prior experience of interlocutors interacts with actual situational context in intercultural interactions when the latter is represented by a well-known frame: getting acquainted with others. It attempts to demonstrate how the cultural frame of the target language is broken up and substituted with an emergent frame that is co-constructed from elements from prior experience with the target language, the first language and the actual situational experience. Getting acquainted with others is a closed social situation, a cultural frame in which interlocutors usually have to follow a behavior pattern dictated by the requirements of the socio-cultural background in a given speech community. There is a ‘skeleton’ of these ‘getting to know you’ procedures that can be considered universal but is substantiated differently in every language. In each conversation in any language, ‘flesh’ is added to the ‘skeleton’ in a dynamic and co-constructed manner. However, there is a difference between how this happens in L1 and in intercultural interactions. While in L1 the ‘flesh’ on the skeleton is predetermined to a significant extent by requirements of core common ground in the given language, in intercultural encounters this ‘flesh building’ process in the target language (in this case English) is not set but is co-constructed by the interlocutors as emergent common ground relying on their prior experience with their own L1 culture, limited experience with the target culture and the assessment of the actual situational context. In this study the co-construction process, i.e. emergent common ground will be analyzed by examining the use of formulaic language and freely generated language in several discourse segments.

Cross-Cultural Assessment of Situational Experience

Cross-cultural psychology can benefit from the incorporation of psychological situations and the investigation of how cultural influences are manifested in our daily lives. In this chapter, we review the current literature on cross-cultural assessments of situations under the framework of cues (objective attributes of a situation), characteristics (meaning or interpretation of cues), and classes (groups of situations based on cues or characteristics). Cultural situational cues, such as the weather or population density, vary both in frequency and in interpretation across countries. Characteristics of situations differ in the meaning individuals ascribe to cues, the affective response to situations based on culture socialization, and the amount of agency or autonomy perceived in situations. Lastly, classes of situations (e.g., education settings, the workplace, romantic relationships), provide a useful method of grouping common situations for understanding cultural differences.