Critical Moments Of Intercultural Learning In Young People’s Lives

Author(s):

Christine Halse(presenting / submitting)Brandi Fox Caroline Mahoney

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

07 SES 04 A, Transition and Intercultural Learning

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

09:00-10:30

Room:

W3.09

Chair:

Sofia Santos

Contribution

Research questions and objectives

Schools and schooling systems across Europe and in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere have developed intercultural policies and curricula for schools to promote cultural knowledge, foster positive relations between different racial, ethnic and religious groups, and build cultural cohesion. Researchers have examined efforts to foster students’ interculturality in schools (e.g. Coulby, 2006; Perry & Southwell, 2011; 2010; Taylor 2014; Walton et al. 2015).

Less frequently considered is how young people experience and learn interculturality beyond the formal boundaries of the classroom and curriculum. Attending to this research gap, this paper examines how critical moments in young people’s lives create formative instances of intercultural learning. It draws on data from a qualitative, longitudinal (3 year) life history study of interculturality among ethnically, socially and religiously diverse primary (n=40) and secondary (n=40) students in Melbourne Australia. Our paper addresses the following overarching question:

What sort of critical moments in young people’s lives stimulate intercultural learning and shape positive attitudes, value and behaviors towards individuals and groups they regard as different from and ‘other’ to themselves?

This question arose from a striking pattern pattern across the full body of our life history data. Namely, that students only identified events beyond the curriculum and classroom as instrumental in shaping their intercultural attitude and practices. Thus, the objectives of our paper are to:

i) elucidate the phenomenon of critical moments in young people’s intercultural learning and the formation of an intercultural subjectivity; and to

ii) consider the potential implications for school curricula and pedagogies that aim to nurture primary and secondary students’ intercultural capabilities.

Theoretical framework

The concept of the critical moment is a well-established theoretical framework in intercultural communications, narrative and life history, psychology, and sociology, although it often appears under different guises and labels, such as fateful moments, epiphanies and critical incidents (e.g. Giddens, 1991; 2000; Larson, 1997; Moen, 2006; Polkinghorne, 1988; Riessman, 1993; Thomson et al 2002; Savin-Baden & Nierker, 2007).

In broad terms, a critical moment is an ‘unplanned, unanticipated and uncontrolled’ event (Webster & Mertova 2007, p. 77) that takes on particular significance for the individual involved because it stimulates a personal discovery that changes how individuals constitute themselves and their relationships with others and society. In effect, it is a change that alters the meaning structures of a life and ways of being in the world (Denzin 1989, p. 70). Thus, the substantive and theoretical importance of a critical moment lies not in the character of the event but in the changes it stimulates (Webster & Mertova 2007).

Critical moments and related theories have been used to analyse students’ subjective formation (McLeod & Yates) and how young people construct a sense of self and identity over time (Holland and Thomson 2009). This paper, we believe, is the first to combine life history methods and the theoretical tool of critical moments to elucidate the intercultural learning among students of primary and secondary school age beyond the formal structures of the classroom.

Method

Our paper draws on data from a longitudinal, life history study that was embedded within a larger, multi-method ethnography of intercultural education in ethnically diverse primary (n=6) and secondary (n=6) schools in Melbourne, Australia. The study was funded by the Australian Research Council, in partnership with the Victorian Department of Education (DET), Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) and an inter-faith NGO, Together for Humanity (Halse et al 2015). The larger study involved repeated surveys, focus groups and interviews with students, teachers and principals about their intercultural attitudes and behaviours, practices in their schools, and relations between different ethnic, religious, cultural and social groups. Visual and observational ethnographic data were also collected about the socio-cultural dynamics in each schools. Given the study’s longitudinal nature, a key focus was on identifying and accounting for temporal changes across participants and schools, and how these related to wider social, cultural and political developments during the life of the study. Participants in the life history strand comprised 40 primary students, commencing in Yr 4 (approximately 9 years old), and 40 secondary students, commencing in Year 1 (approximately 12 years of age). Multiple elicitation techniques and forms of data were collected. These comprised: demographic data; relationship maps (Hollingworth & Mansaray, 2012); life story spirals (Hewes 2013; Stokes 2012); and the use of visual stimuli, such as photographs, drawings and videos (Punch, 2002; Weller, 2012). Data were collected during annual (audio-recorded and transcribed) life history interviews. The interview process involved an informal conversation that focused on eliciting students’ personal experiences of and views on ethnic, religious, social and cultural diversity, their perspectives on social justice, equity and equality, and how and why these changed over time. From these data, diachronic narrative biographies were developed for each student. The biographies documented how and why temporal changes occurred in each student’s sense of self, identity, and attitudes, values and behaviours in relation to ethnic, cultural, religious and social ‘others’. For this paper, each biography was scrutinized to identify transformative critical moments of intercultural learning in young people’s lives. We present four illustrative critical moments from four different students. These critical moments, we propose, demonstrate the centrality of reflexivity in intercultural learning and the formation of an intercultural subjectivity.

Expected Outcomes

Our four critical moments range from seemingly mundane, inconsequential, everyday events through to life changing events. Each is embedded in the student’s past life and current circumstances. Each involved engaging with alterity that, with one exception, was generalized and emblematic rather than a face-to-face encounter. What made these moments critical is that they stimulated reflexivity-the deeply personal, self-referential act whereby a particular way of thinking or acting affects the instigator of the thoughts or actions. The effect of this ‘rethinking the self’ (Henderson et al, 2007 p.21) was to trigger intercultural learning that changed how students’ construct themselves, others and their lives. These critical transformations involved the realization that: how you clean your teeth marks you as different from cultural ‘others’ and challenges other phenomenon in your life you presumed was ‘normal’; the challenges of cultural adjustment to metropolitan Melbourne are to be embraced when set against to hardships of life in your former homeland of Sudan; overcoming your resistance to learning your mother tongue is necessary to reap the joys of belonging to large, ethnic family; and learning that a thoughtless moment of racial stereotyping can almost destroy a friendship. Each of these very different critical moments stimulated a reflexivity that lead each young person to redefine themselves and others, and to translate this into more positive intercultural modes of action and interaction. We are wary of sweeping generalizations but our analysis affirms individuals’ capacity for self-inquiry, adaptation and agency, and the importance of social experience in the formation of intercultural subjectivities and intercultural relations. It cautions against curricula and pedagogies that essentialise differences between cultural groups, and suggests that pedagogies that enable reflexive thinking on personal, critical moments have the potential to translate into concrete intercultural actions and interactions.

References

Coulby, D. (2006). Intercultural education: theory and practice. Intercultural Education, 17(3): 245-257. Denzin, N. K. (1989). Interpretive Biography. Newbury Park, CA, SAGE. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and self-identity. Stanford, LA: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. (2000). The trajectory of the self. In P. Du Gay, J. Evans, & P. Redman (Eds.), Identity: A reader (pp. 248-266). London: Sage. Halse, C. et al (2015). Doing diversity: Intercultural understanding in primary and secondary schools. Melbourne: Deakin University. Henderson, S., Holland, J., McGrellis, S., Sharpe, S., & Thomson, R. (2007). Inventing adulthoods: a biographical approach to youth transitions. London: Sage. Hollingworth, S., & Mansaray, A. (2012). Conviviality under the cosmopolitan canopy? Social mixing and friendships in an urban secondary school. Sociological Research Online, 17(3), 2. Larson, C. L. (1997). Re-presenting the subject: problems in personal narrative inquiry. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(4): 455-47. McLeod, J., & Yates, L. (2006). Making Modern Lives: Subjectivity, Schooling, and Social Change. New York: State University of New York. Moen, T. (2006). Reflections on the Narrative Research Approach. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(4): 56-69. Perry, L. B., & Southwell, L. (2011). Developing intercultural understanding and skills: models and approaches. Intercultural Education, 22(6): 453-466. Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany, NY, State University of New York. Punch, S. (2002). Interviewing strategies with young people: The ‘secret box’, stimulus material and task-based activities. Children & Society, 16(1): 45-56. Riessman, C. K. (1993). Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Savin-Baden, M. and Nierkerk, L. van (2007). Narrative Inquiry: Theory and Practice. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 31(3): 459-472. Stokes, H. (2012). Imagining futures: Identity narratives and the role of work, education, community and family. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Taylor, S. (2013). Globally-minded students: defining, measuring and developing intercultural sensitivity. Part 2. The International Schools Journal, 33(1): 26-34. Thomson, R., Bell, R., Holland, J., Henderson, S., McGrellis, S., & Sharpe, S. (2002). Critical moments: choice, chance and opportunity in students’ narratives of transition. Sociology, 36(2): 335-354. Walton, J., Priest, N., & Paradies, Y. (2013). Identifying and developing effective approaches to foster intercultural understanding in schools. Intercultural Education, 24(3): 181-194. Webster, L. and Mertova, P. (2007). Using Narrative Inquiry as a Research Method. An Introduction to using critical analysis in research on teaching and learning. Oxon, Routledge. Weller, S. (2012). Evolving creativity in qualitative longitudinal research with children and teenagers. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15(2): 119-133.

Author Information

Christine Halse (presenting / submitting)

Education University of Hong Kong

International Education and Life-long Learning

Hong Kong

Brandi Fox

Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Caroline Mahoney