Given how often the Center for Intercultural Dialogue publishes translations, it seems particularly appropriate to point out this article.
Words Without Borders, one of the few magazines in the world dedicated to literature in translation, is turning 20 at a fraught time: Around the world, wars are raging. Writers are being jailed, dissident voices silenced and books banned.
As the magazine’s staff considered its anniversary celebrations — a virtual gala on Nov. 2, following a live one on Oct. 25 — one question was pressing: How do you find words, let alone celebrate them, when bombs are dropping?
The answer, said Karen M. Phillips, the magazine’s executive editor and publisher, was right there, baked into their mission — to gather and celebrate international literature, and in doing so, strengthen the connection between readers and writers around the world. Given the current political climate, the need for such conversations has never been more vital.
“Words Without Borders does this heroic job of bringing the world close to us,” said Courtney Hodell, the director of literary programs at the Whiting Foundation, which presented one of their inaugural Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes to the magazine in 2018. “At times like this, that feels like an essential and fundamental human act.”
UNESCO created an e-platform for intercultural dialogue in 2018, which recent followers may not have noticed. It is designed to be “a global collaborative hub” intended “to promote good practices from all over the world, that enable to build bridges between people from diverse backgrounds in order to create more inclusive societies through mutual understanding and respect for diversity.”
One section presents a concepts glossary, explaining terms from intercultural dialogue to cultural identity to intercultural citizenship. These will be particularly familiar to all those who have previously read Intercultural Competences: A conceptual and operational framework from 2013, which I drafted for UNESCO (with many contributions by others named in the notes), as they all come directly from that publication.
Based on the experience of a citizenship project about the post-colonial condition and Afro-European interculturality, this essay reflects on digital storytelling, and co-creative practices as relevant literacy and education strategies for furthering interculturality in contemporary societies. The authors propose storytelling as a tool for intercultural dialogue, in the framework of media literacy.
…we need educational strategies and literacies that continue to provide the training of imagination required for intercultural dialogue in the information society (p. 302)
…manga can be a powerful cultural text for increasing intercultural understanding, breaking cultural stereotypes and potentially dispelling prejudices (p. 77)
Perry, Raihanah and Mohd Lazim investigate Japanese manga as a site for intercultural understanding and engagement. Their focus in this article is on “the Japanese manga Satoko and Nada Volume 1 by Yupechika, which narrates the friendship between Satoko, a young Japanese woman, and Nada, her Saudi Muslim roommate.” They analyze three themes: food, fashion, and faith. They see their reading as “a microcosm of the type of dialogue needed in the world today to overcome the acute racism and xenophobia” and conclude:
Culturally responsive teaching was one of the main themes in my second annual summer study abroad program on Intercultural Perspectives on Teaching and Learning at NYU London (July 3-17, 2023).
A defining measure of culturally responsive teaching is how, and the extent to which, teachers use “the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively. It is based on the assumption that when academic knowledge and skills are situated within the lived experiences and frames of reference of students, they are more personally meaningful, have higher interest appeal, and are learned more easily and thoroughly” (Gay, 2002, p. 106).
A class in session at Mayfair Primary School. (Photo credit: Mayfair Primary School)
This has been a useful concept to the graduate learners in my program this summer. Several of these learners are themselves in-service public-school teachers (from pre-K to middle school) in New York City with expertise in the like of music education, early childhood education, special education, etc. With from five to more than 25 years of teaching experiences among them, these learners have witnessed a steady influx of immigrant students from diverse national backgrounds and cultural heritages in their increasingly multicultural classrooms (e.g., Bardolf et al., 2023). While the diversity offers exciting possibilities for enhancing intercultural awareness among the students, it also presents a multitude of challenges in language teaching (e.g., ESL), intercultural adaptation, family support or engagement, professional development of the teaching staff, and so on. Hence, one of the course’s main learning objectives has been to identify the challenges facing their counterparts in London who teach in similarly multicultural settings, as well as how the latter address these challenges or take advantage of what these challenges may present.
In this regard, we visited two elementary schools and two secondary schools in London, Mayflower Primary School and St. Andrew’s (Barnsbury) CofE Primary School, as well as Parliament Hill School (an all-girls school) and William Ellis School (an all-boys school). These four public schools are in part defined by the multicultural and multilingual backgrounds of their respective student populations, while Mayflower Primary, located in the eastern borough of Tower Hamlets in London, has the distinction of enrolling about 90% of its students from multiple generations having Bangladeshi family heritage. While our field study did not uncover any one-size-fits-all curricular design or teaching method, we did discover that storytelling has been an effective culturally responsive pedagogy in these four schools.
Identifying itself as “a storytelling school,” for example, Mayflower Primary uses storytelling as a pedagogy throughout its curriculum, beginning with nursery school. Dependent upon the grade level, and with input from multiple sources (including teachers in the schools, students and their families, members from the school’s community, etc.), a number of stories are chosen to become an integral part of every class’s teaching and learning materials. Throughout the school year, teachers and their students engage in various reading, writing, discussion, interpretation, and re/telling of these stories, some of which are culturally relevant to the heritage backgrounds of the students. According to Heba Al-Jayoosi, Mayflower Primary’s Assistant Headteacher and Inclusion and Research Leader, storytelling has been an effective tool in helping students promote their skills in reading, writing, language development, communication, and so on.
Equally important is that storytelling can also promote students’ intercultural competence (Arasaratnam, 2014) which can, in turn, help facilitate intercultural dialogue (Leeds-Hurwitz, 2014) in the long run. In a special presentation on “Storytelling and the Early Years” to my students in the summer program, Alice Jones Bartoli of King’s College London spoke about how storytelling plays an important role in helping facilitate young children’s social and emotional development. Through dialogic reading, sustained shared attention, and re/telling of stories, especially those relevant to their heritage backgrounds, students come to develop their reading and writing or literacy skills, their self-confidence or self-image, as well as their creative expression abilities. Storytelling in such a teaching and learning context also enhances students’ exposure to stories with cultural or heritage elements that are at first unfamiliar to them, as they gain opportunities to listen to, reflect upon, and comprehend or understand cultural narratives other than their own.
All the learners in the program expressed in their individual final field research reports that they plan to utilize what they learned in London this summer either in furthering their graduate studies in social work or world language education or in acting as agents of change when they return to teach in their public schools in New York City. Of course, it is quite early to tell how and to what extent their experiences and the wonderful work of our professional colleagues in London can be applied to the New York context. But I hope to report on such impact in a future update.
Casey Man Kong Lum, Associate Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue
In a few locations within Germany, interfaith cooperation is leading to Christian/Muslim or Christian/Jewish/Muslim kindergartens.
Gifhorn – a small town in Lower Saxony – started Germany’s first Christian/Muslim kindergarten in 2018, after several years of planning and organization.
The vision fostered by local religious leaders sees kindergarten as a novel form of institutionalised dialogue, producing “conflict mediators” and “resilient children” who are “less prone to violence”.
An opposition campaign by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) backfired, and actually ended up increasing enrollment in the school. For a well-balanced report, and links to information about several other interfaith kindergartens in Germany, see the Emmerich article.
Wiki Education is asking that faculty consider assigning students to write articles for Wikipedia. Wikipedia has limited entries on intercultural dialogue-related topics. The two seem a natural fit.
In Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program, college and university instructors assign students to write Wikipedia articles, empowering them to share knowledge with the world. Students research course-related topics that are missing, underrepresented, incomplete or inaccurate, synthesize the available literature, and use free tools and trainings to add information to Wikipedia. They are now accepting submissions for the Fall 2022 term.
I’ve not used Wikipedia assignments in courses because I retired before this became a thing. However, I learned the process in order to create a page for the Center for Intercultural Dialogue, and later was asked by a colleague to please create an entry for intercultural dialogue as a topic, as there was not yet anything available on the site. So I know it’s not difficult, and I also know that there is not as much content on related topics as there might be. Therefore, I suggest that anyone looking for a new and interesting type of applied assignment might want to consider the creation of Wikipedia pages as a possibility as a way to ensure that Wikipedia has the most up-to-date content relevant to intercultural dialogue topics.
For students, one benefit is that it is possible to check how many times anyone has viewed an entry. The ICD entry has been available for under two years, but has already had over 5000 views. Having that kind of impact should help motivate any student to do their best work.
First published on November 27, 2014, by the UK’s Department of Education under the 2010 to 2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, the guidance “aims to help both independent and state-maintained schools understand their responsibilities in this area. All have a duty to ‘actively promote’ the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs” and to ensure young people leave school prepared for life in modern Britain (GOV.UK).
A big poster display with a highlight on British values in St. Andrew’s (Barnsbury) CofE Primary School in London. (Photo credit: Casey Lum)
Indeed, a great deal of what we witnessed during our co-curricular field study visits of four state-funded primary and secondary schools in London attested to the schools’ curricular efforts for nurturing multicultural sensibilities among their students. However, the notion and the government-mandated promotion of “British values” has not gone without attracting diverging interpretations or reactions since the guidance’s initial announcement and implementation (see for example “The problem with teaching ‘British values’ in school“).
During a semi-formal interview, a high-ranking administrator at St. Andrew’s (Barnsbury) CofE [Church of England] Primary School (himself a veteran teacher) observed that many of his contemporaries were unsure what the concept really was when it was introduced; many others continue to be weary about it today. Given the country’s colonial history, for example, questions have been raised about whether these values were nationalistic in nature or not. But over the years, our host added, many educators in the UK have come to appreciate what those values entail and can do in promoting what we would call intercultural competence among the young. In fact, Mayflower Primary School in Towers Hamlets, another of the schools we visited, maintains a dedicated web page to showcase the school’s interpretation of and approach to promoting British values.
Casey Man Kong Lum, Associate Director
Center for Intercultural Dialogue
If you are interested in translating one of the Key Concepts, please contact me for approval first because dozens are currently in process. As always, if there is a concept you think should be written up as one of the Key Concepts, whether in English or any other language, propose it. If you are new to CID, please provide a brief resume. This opportunity is open to masters students and above, on the assumption that some familiarity with academic conventions generally, and discussion of intercultural dialogue specifically, are useful.
(We are reprising the series of posters, because it has been several years since they were originally created, and they are much too wonderful to let them not be noticed by newcomers to the site!)
This is the next of the posters designed by Linda J. de Wit, in her role as CID intern. The quote is intended to clarify the concept of intercultural dialogue by showing how it relates to an older, more frequently used concept, intercultural competence. The photo of water used as background is Linda’s own. The citation for the quote is:
Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (2016). De la possession des compétences interculturelles au dialogue interculturel: Un cadre conceptuel [Moving from having intercultural competencies to constructing intercultural dialogues: A conceptual framework]. Les Politiques Sociales, 3/4, 7-22.
Just in case anyone wants to cite this poster, the following would be the recommended format:
As with other series, CID Posters are available for free on the site; just click on the thumbnail to download a printable PDF. They may be downloaded, printed, and shared as is, without changes, without cost, so long as there is acknowledgment of the source.
As with other series, if you wish to contribute an original contribution, please send an email before starting any work to receive approval, to minimize inadvertent duplication, and to learn about technical requirements. As is the case with other CID Publications, posters should be created initially in English. Given that translations of the Key Concepts in Intercultural Dialogue have received so many views, anyone who wishes to translate their own poster into another language (or two) is invited to provide that as well. If you want to volunteer to translate someone else’s poster into a language in which you are fluent, send in a note before starting, to receive approval and to confirm no one else is working on the same one.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 