Composing Lives Alongside

Drawing on a broader narrative inquiry into the curriculum making of participants who compose identities dissonant with dominant stories of gender and sexuality, this article explores the shaping influence of the social (relationships, communities, and contexts) in one participant's life story around sexuality from a curricular perspective. The term curriculum making represents an ongoing process through which individuals make sense and meaning of experience, position curriculum broadly as a course of life, and shift notions of curriculum and curriculum making beyond the bounds of school. Individuals engage in identity making as they make sense of themselves in relation to their curriculum making, narratively understood as the composition of stories to live by. This inquiry highlights the ways that life stories are composed alongside, connected to, and shaped by other people and draws the attention of educators to the complex lives unfolding in schools.

Plurilingual STEAM and School Lunches for Learning?

In Japan, where there is a bias toward English-only in foreign language education, there are also grassroots efforts to introduce greater plurality in the classroom. However, introducing diverse languages and cultures into the classroom can lead to folklorization, the delivering of essentialized information in pre-packaged formats, which can potentially delegitimize other languages and cultures. This contribution examines a collaborative integrative plurilingual STEAM practice at an elementary school in Western Japan. In the ‘school lunches project,' the children experience various international cuisine, leading up to which they would engage with related languages and cultures through collaboratively produced plurilingual videos and museum-like exhibits of cultural artifacts. The interdisciplinary, hands-on, experiential learning within this project helped the children to develop an investigative stance toward linguistic and cultural artifacts, nurture a deeper awareness of languages and openness to diversity, foster reflexivity, and encourage interdisciplinary engagement.

Doppelganger-Inspired Change Effect Model of Faculty Global Cultural Competency

Our student populations' diversity now includes more than just African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos. We are now more representative of a wider range of cultural backgrounds. This shift brings fresh challenges of educator unpreparedness to identify with the unique cultures of international students. The cultural dissonance that international students face compounds this challenge. The cultural unawareness and misconceptions may be generated from both educators and students. The DICE model is inspired by an extensive review of the literature and a qualitative case study methods application. It is a process of fostering global cultural empathy and preparedness of educators by linking such preparedness to evaluating negative attitudinal influences that may block people from changing their thinking, which in turn will negatively impact global empathy preparedness. This is a valid linkage given the influence culture has on attitudes and vice versa and is true in the context of developing global empathy.

Discourse Analysis for Intercultural Competence Development

This article aims to explicate the connection between discourse analysis and interculturality in intercultural-communication education. Although communication researchers and students have been using discourse analysis as a method to investigate conversations in intercultural situations for decades, interculturality as a concept has been largely untapped in analysis and applications. Drawing from interdisciplinary insights, this article will discuss how the concept of interculturality and the lens of discourse analysis contribute to the study and teaching of intercultural communication. As examples, two different types of intercultural-communication courses serve to illustrate how educators can apply discourse analysis to facilitate development of intercultural competence. Learning outcomes of the two tested courses indicate that cultural discourse analysis, along with critical discourse analysis and ethnography of speaking, promises to be a useful pedagogical approach for facilitating the development of the competence required for dealing with interculturality.

Interculturality in Interfaith Dialogue

The study of interfaith dialogues stands to gain from a discourse analysis approach towards interculturality, given how, as a concept, interculturality emphasises non-essentialist identities and cultures in deep inter-subjective engagement. Such an approach allows researchers to examine interfaith dialogues as activities where the melding and blending of identity and cultural resources are actions directed towards various accomplishments, constrained by the institutional expectations of how dialogues are done. This article proposes using an analytic tool which draws upon 'membership categorisation devices' (from ethnomethodology) as specific 'mental space' conceptual packages (from cognitive linguistics), and takes a more telescopic view of how as conceptual packages, these devices interact in 'mental space conceptual integration' or 'conceptual blends' (from cognitive linguistics). One excerpt of a short conversation between a facilitator of an interfaith seminar and a Muslim Imam (religious teacher) is analysed in-depth.

The Dispositive of Intercultural Communication

This article presents the concept of dispositives as it has been introduced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The concept will be contrasted with competing approaches from discourse analysis, and it will then be explored in its potential as a basis for empirical analysis. Dispositive analyses provide insights into how discourse, power, and knowledge shape society on a very general macro-level. Instead of linguistic, textual analyses, dispositive analysis helps to re-read the emergence, the development, and, as an example here, the inner composition of academic fields. This article sketches insights from a dispositive perspective into the field of intercultural communication research that is then interpreted as maintaining the dispositive of intercultural communication even if recent debates primarily aim at transcending old cementations of the discipline. The article will close with a discussion of shortcomings of the method that culminate in the challenge of argumentative circularity.

What Does Using a Shared Franco-German Toolbox Reveal About the Discourse of Teacher Trainers on Interculturality?

From 2011 to 2015, the Franco-German Youth Office (FGYO – Office franco-allemand pour la Jeunesse [OFAJ]/Deutsch-Französisches Jugendwerk [DFJW]) conducted a major research project entitled La Valisette franco-allemande/Die deutsch-französische Kinderkiste. The aim of the project was to explore teacher trainers' conceptions of language and interculturality through the use of a pedagogical and cultural “toolbox.” This article explores the nature of interculturality in the specific context of early childhood education. It theorizes interculturality as both a polysemic and polemic notion and navigates between “renewed interculturality” in a “liquid approach” and an essentialist framework in a “solid approach.” The study argues that analysing the discourse and meta-discourse of teacher trainers (called “multipliers”) during focus groups on the shared toolbox is an effective way to explore the notion of interculturality.

Questioning Questions in Autobiographies of Intercultural Encounters

In this article, the author analyzes the discursive forms of the Autobiographies for Intercultural Encounters Young Version (AIEY), which has been developed by the Council of Europe (COE) to encourage young learners to become aware of their intercultural experiences. She tried to analyze both AIEY's questions and 100 ten-years-old children's answers. The aim is to understand the kind of discourse that the AIEY encourages about intercultural encounters and the extent to which it could have affected the pupils' answers.

The Incongruence of Internationalisation Policy in Japanese Higher Education

Exploring how policymakers construct policy texts by recontextualising aspects of previous polices can provide evidence of whether a present internationalisation project in Japanese higher education provides a holistic understanding of the importance of deeper critical cultural awareness to support a comprehensive approach to internationalisation agendas. In some respects, these present policies are closely aligned to previous initiatives that were by design limited by narrow culturalist and socioeconomic conceptualisations of internationalisation. Applying the critical tools of discourse analysis will contribute to both a theoretical and practical interpretation of higher educational policy planning. This approach will provide both a historical and contextual relational analysis of policy texts to support a critical problematisation approach for interrogating policy in respects of socioeducational factors that support, or hinder, higher educational approaches to interculturality in Japanese higher education.

Plurilingualism and STEAM

This contribution attempts to clarify the relationship between the practice of plurilingual education and STEAM (interdisciplinary pedagogy that incorporates science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) through the lens of peace learning at an elementary school in Japan. Japan has a rich history of peace education, although it has received limited focus in the international literature, whereas plurilingual education remains relatively unknown in the country. Within this context, the article examines a teacher-initiated plurilingual and intercultural project focused on a multidisciplinary approach to peace learning. Analyses of multimodal data, including video recordings, photographs, researchers' field notes, learners' journals, and semi-structured reflective interviews, will demonstrate how even within a highly homogenous context, practitioners can promote transferable skills and nurture a deeper awareness of language and openness to diversity, foster reflexivity, and encourage multidisciplinary engagement through plurilingual education, dialogue, and storying.