ELTWeekly Vol. 5 Issue#5 | February 11, 2013 | ISSN 0975-3036
The ‘Intercultural versus Multicultural Education: The End of Rivalries?’ international conference is organized by Taylor’s University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland and Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.
CALL FOR PAPERS
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it
means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many
different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’Lewis Carroll, Through the looking glass
Our contemporary “fractured” (Moghaddam, 2008) and “accelerated” (Pieterse, 2004) worlds are leading to more encounters between people but also and especially to more inequalities and power gaps between the haves and have-nots. In education, many notions are used to talk about ways of tackling these issues: cross-cultural, meta-cultural, polycultural, multicultural and intercultural – but also global and international (Dervin, Gajardo & Lavanchy, 2011; Grant & Portera, 2011). According to Henry (2012), social justice education seems to be “increasingly preferred” to e.g., multicultural education in the USA. All these “labels” often appear interchangeably – without always being defined or distinguished. This has been problematic in both research and practice.
The multicultural and the intercultural seem to be the most widely used notions worldwide. They have been discussed extensively in education scholarship and practice: many researchers and practitioners have attempted to define their specific characteristics by establishing borders and boundaries between them, through which they have often tended to be opposed, namely in geographical
terms (the US vs. Europe, Northern Europe vs. Southern, etc.).
Some researchers have even demonized the ‘multicultural’, asserting that multicultural education celebrates only cultural differences and ignores similarities, individuality, and the importance of relations and interaction – as the ‘intercultural’ is said to operate. Others are critical of the fact that intercultural education tends to ignore power discrepancies. Henry (2012) claims that multicultural education is a bit démodé; Moghaddam (2012) a ‘‘politically correct’’ policy; and Mclaren & Ryoo (2012) that it is “under egregious assault”.
But even if multicultural education and intercultural education have different origins (Abdallah-Pretceille, 1986) – the former is related to Civil Rights Movements while the latter to mass immigration in Europe, amongst others – Holm and Zilliacus (2009) argue that today multicultural and intercultural education can both mean different things: “it is impossible to treat and draw conclusions about intercultural and multicultural education as if there was only one kind of each since there are several different kinds of both
multicultural and intercultural education” (ibid.: 23). As any social category, the multicultural and the intercultural represent many and varied perspectives that need to be discussed as perspectival and historical approaches, which are disrupted by the movement of people and re-constitutive of the phenomena they seek to describe (Gillespie, Howarth & Cornish, 2012: 392).
This series of conferences wishes to investigate this claim and allow researchers working on these two “fields” to get together and discuss their differences and similarities and to put an end to rivalries. The fact that the conference sites are located on different continents allows widening the debates as these two notions are not only driven by research traditions (local and transnational) but also by political contexts.
The conferences will bring together international researchers and practitioners from a range of backgrounds and institutions to discuss the following topic strands (amongst others):
- With the birth and spread of critical and more “political” approaches to such education worldwide, accompanied by an increasing move away from “deficit framework”, does this mean that the dichotomy inter-/multi-cultural education has lost much of its relevance? Have the enduring rivalries between the two notions been finally put to rest? Are the conceptual and structural distinctions similar today locally and internationally?
- What do people mean when they say “intercultural” and/or “multicultural” education? Researchers? Practitioners? Decision-makers? Students? Parents? The media? Etc.
- What has happened to contested – and yet central – concepts used by both ‘multiculturalists’ and ‘interculturalists’ in education: culture, identity, community, communication, ethnicity, etc.? How are they used today? (How) do researchers and practitioners take into account the criticisms addressed in other fields to these concepts?
- Have problematic dichotomies and binaries such as individualism vs. collectivism, East/ west, etc. disappeared from the fields? Have they been replaced by new ones?
- What have alternatives to multi-/inter-cultural education brought to the field, e.g. social justice education, omniculturalism (Moghaddam, 2010), Humanism of the Diverse (Abdallah-Pretceille, 2003), Actionable Postcolonial theory (Andreotti, 2010), etc.?
- What about research methodology and methods? Do they differ in the two fields? Are researchers’ reflexivity, feelings and experiences more shared in their research now? Is “objectivism” gone? Are we really moving towards researching with rather than researching on?
- The importance of language has often been ignored in research on multicultural and intercultural education: the language(s) used by research participants but also the researcher’s language (and power) – for example in the way s/he labels a child as an L2 speaker of a language and when s/he translates data. Is there now a serious place for taking into account language ideologies in researching intercultural/multicultural education (Risager, 2007; Blackledge, 2005)?
Proposal Submission
We invite scholars and practitioners to submit proposals by 15 March 2013.
Types of Presentations
Individual paper presentations: Duration is 30 minutes including a twenty-minute presentation, with an additional ten minutes for discussion
Colloquia: Duration is a maximum of 3 hours with five participants including conveners and discussants.
Length of Abstracts
Abstracts for individual presentation proposals should not exceed 300 words while for colloquia proposals, the colloquium concept abstract should not exceed 200 words and 200-300 words for each paper
Abstracts will be reviewed by the scientific committee for originality, significance, clarity and academic rigour.
For further details, please visit www.taylors.edu.my/msiec.