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Witold F. Tulasiewicz (University of Cambridge) Intercultural Awareness in the Linguistic Contact Zone AERA New York 2008 Abstract In response to the cultural and linguistic diversity within its member states, the European Union has encouraged development of programs to foster intercultural dialogue. Now intercultural dialogue has become a priority, and there are intensive efforts to find and develop promising educational approaches. Whereas multiculturalism may be viewed as a “fact” that has existed widely from times immemorial, interculturalism is an attitude that can be developed (Author, 1998, 2000). Interculturality is a response to problems between groups, including miscommunication, misunderstandings, prejudices, and intolerance; and intercultural dialogue can be fostered via education that emphasizes intercultural awareness. This paper reviews illustrative projects the author has developed to help people to communicate and to understand each other. Emphasis in this paper is on a recent international program, conducted in Bialystok, Poland, site of the famous Bialystok Ghetto Uprising in World War II and home today to a diverse population, including a Belarusian minority. The Bialystok program was developed to accord with the new European Union’s priorities in primary- and secondary-school education emphasizing relations between nationals of the older and more recent EU member states, inside and outside their original home countries. Among the aims was the establishment of a discrete part of the curriculum specifically dedicated to intercultural education. The program was developed for language teachers, teachers of history and citizenship having a language component in their qualifications, teacher-educators, lecturers in these disciplines, language-planners, supervisors in the fields of foreign-language, mother-tongue, and history and citizenship teaching, and those responsible for the implementation of the new media. The main concern in the Bialystok project was culture as expressed in and through language--a theme already been developed in pilot school-lesson programs taught. The program featured the following: a critical survey of multicultural and multilingual curricula initiated in several EU member states, submission of participants’ ideas for the curriculum, development of ideas in multinational groups, interviews, and visits to schools and ethnic centers. This AERA paper will provide illustrations from all these sources, including excerpts from Intercultural Education syllabi that participants developed, showing similarities and differences across subject areas, across languages, and across the international groups preparing them. |