LLED565B – Interculturality in Language Education: Theories, Research, and Practice

Interculturality in Language Education: Theories, Research, and Practice | In education, intercultural understanding has been defined as navigating cultural differences or mélanges, as involving specific kinds of knowledge or savoirs, as developing the capacity for empathy, perspective taking, and adaptability, or as acquired dispositions for engaging with otherness. This course considers interculturality as a means of examining differences of understanding with others, across multiple frames of reference that engage diverse beliefs, values, assumptions, and actions to construct meaning within varying relations of power. The principal aim of the course is to provide teachers and teacher educators with resources to investigate, interrogate, and productively integrate ways of interpreting intercultural processes in their classrooms and beyond. Course content attends to theoretical conceptions of culture and language, historical beginnings of intercultural research, critical and non-Western orientations, and discourse approaches to interculturality. Intercultural learning, teaching, and assessment are considered in classroom and community contexts and digital environments. In keeping with the critical orientation of the course, readings and discussions are supported with examples from the local context with an emphasis on Indigenous knowledges and perspectives.