LLED521

In language education, interculturality is often seen as a competence to be acquired abroad, beyond national borders. Culture is conceived as an object of teaching, as a set of skills or attitudes to be learned and as a celebration of diversity. This course proposes a different understanding of interculturality. It guides class participants in a critical analysis of how culture functions to produce inequity in institutional, racial, linguistic, and epistemological terms. It does so by examining how we encounter difference in our daily lives within our communities. The focus is on interculturality through an engagement with difference that involves confronting otherness across multiple frames of reference, including the diverse beliefs, values, practices, and actions we rely on to construct meaning within varying relations of power. The course offers resources and tools to investigate, interrogate, and integrate intercultural learning in language classrooms. Course content aligns with a decolonial orientation and many of the readings and activities are supported with examples from local contexts with an emphasis on local Indigenous knowledges and perspectives.