An Intercultural Orientation to Languages Education: Expanding Identity Repertoires

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.200804.001How to use a DOI?

Keywords

intercultural orientation, language education, identity repertories

Abstract

With the rapid and wide reaching movement of people, ideas, products, and practices, we are more interconnected and interdependent than at any other time in history. While there may be some critique of this phenomenon, globalization will remain a pervasive force and education systems around the world are asking how they might best prepare their young people for the challenges of the future. Indonesia is no exception and it too is considering its place and identity in the region and the world, and how education may empower young generations to participate globally, without surrendering their local identity and values. An intercultural orientation in education means understanding communication, knowledge creation and the acts of teaching and learning themselves as linguistically and culturally situated and mediated practices. These practices necessarily involve meaning making and meaning exchange within and across diverse linguistic and cultural systems (Kramsch 2008). It involves recognizing learners’ knowledges and their diverse lifeworlds as the starting point for teaching and learning (Liddicoat & Scarino 2013) and it entails actively building on this diversity to participate in and reflect upon phenomena in the world, and through reflexivity, expand learners’ identity development. In this paper, I will outline why an intercultural orientation is warranted in education and offer contemporary understandings related to how it may be conceptualized. I will then explore how an intercultural orientation may be realized in practice using a range of examples drawn from a long-term program of research with teachers in a range of educational contexts. The paper concludes by asking how an intercultural orientation may be relevant for education in Indonesia and considering some of the implications for how it might be realized.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Michelle Kohler
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/08/05
TI  - An Intercultural Orientation to Languages Education: Expanding Identity Repertoires
BT  - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Language, Literature, and Arts Education (ICLLAE 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1
EP  - 9
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.200804.001
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.200804.001
ID  - Kohler2020
ER  -