A transcultural approach to cross-cultural studies: Towards an alternative to a national culture model

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.The conventional tendency to identify culture as a delimited system of beliefs, values, and practices continues to capture the imagination of policymakers, educators, and practitioners. In particular, Geert Hofstede’s national culture model has become an influential and widely used tool to identify and compare cultural differences and similarities based on a presumed national identity that characterizes people living together within a geographic community. However, researchers have criticized Hofstede’s model for being static and deterministic, arguing that the framework should be supplemented with a more dynamic approach to cultural interaction. This article contributes to the discussion by proposing a transcultural approach to cross-cultural studies as an alternative. In the first section of this article, I examine Hofstede’s national culture model and critically address its shortcomings. In the second section, I present Wolfgang Welsch’s work on cultural transformation and demonstrate how Welsch’s concept of transculturality offers a convincing alternative to Hofstede’s model. Central to this approach is a nuanced and multidimensional understanding of the dynamic space in which cross-border social formation and identity construction operate. I conclude the article with a discussion of the relevance of a transcultural perspective for teachers working in an increasingly diverse classroom.publishedVersio

A Proposal to Incorporate Experiential Education in Non-Confessional, Intercultural Religious Education: Reflections from and on the Norwegian Context

© 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).In Norway, religious education (RE) is a non-confessional and common core subject that should be taught in an objective, critical, and pluralistic manner. As a primary school subject, students learn about a variety of religions and worldviews together in the same classroom. The inclusive framing intends to provide an intercultural space in which the students can enhance their understandings of the beliefs of people whose worldviews differ from their own. Consequently, the subject has privileged an outsider approach, wherein students should learn about religion in a non-partial way, that is, not from religion. However, the claim for objective, critical, and pluralistic teaching still calls into question the role of learning from religions. First, an outsider approach has been criticized for promoting a dated view on learning, ignoring pedagogical knowledge on how students learn. Second, the latest national curriculum states that RE should not only provide students with in-depth knowledge about world religions, but also foster personalized learning experiences. Against this background, the paper asks how the concept of experiential learning in the tradition of Freire, Dewey, and Vygotsky invites a reflection on the ways by which the Norwegian RE subject is passed on most meaningfully in a diverse learning context.publishedVersio

Revisiting studies of multicultural school events from the perspective of strategic essentialism

© 2021 Joke Dewilde & Thor-André Skrefsrud. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.The article discusses schools’ use of multicultural school events as a practice designed to enhance inclusion and to prevent prejudice and negative intergroup attitudes in school. While prior research has largely criticized such events for promoting cultural stereotypes and essentialist cultural identities, in this article we argue for a more nuanced way of perceiving such practices. Based on our previous empirical work, we apply the idea of strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1996) and discuss how multicultural school events may also represent an opportunity for minority parents to achieve certain objectives. The minority temporarily adopts the image provided by the majority and uses it in a strategic manner to act and pursue chosen political advantages. However, we also critically discuss possible limitations and pitfalls of the idea of strategic essentialism as the concept may in fact essentialize the minority group contrary to the intention of the multicultural school event. The contribution of the article is a theoretically informed discussion of how these events may ascribe agency to the participating families, reducing the way critics perceive them solely as victims of a majority-dominated and non-inclusive practice.acceptedVersio

Intercultural learning in diverse schools: obstacles, opportunities, and outlooks

This is an Open Access article published in the journal Problemy Wczesnej Edukacji/ Issues in Early Education The article can be found on publisher's pages by following this link: https://czasopisma.bg.ug.edu.pl/index.php/pwe/article/view/1999The emergence in recent years of the concept of intercultural learning has raised questions about how the notion relates to a pedagogy that fosters openness, exploration, and critical thinking. In this article, the author provides a critical examination of a conventional understanding of intercultural learning to clarify its construction and to elucidate its instructional implications. Taking inspiration from the work of Nussbaum, Dewey, and Freire, the article suggests a different way of thinking than that of the conventional approach. Central to this alternative is a pedagogy that acknowledges students’ former experiences and competencies without making cultural predictions. Instead of reducing the process of understanding to a technical issue, this paper advocates the integration of intercultural learning in schools by connecting the curriculum to students’ lives and identities. This paper ends with a consideration of the future prospects of intercultural learning, suggesting more research on how intercultural learning actually takes place in schools and society.publishedVersio

The reception of Vygotsky in pedagogical literature for Norwegian teacher education

© The University of Lower Silesia owns the proprietary copyright to all materials published in the journal. Articles are made available on the basis of non-exclusive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 licence.In this article, we study the reception of Vygotskian theory in pedagogical literature for Norwegian teacher education. The article analyzes three widely used textbooks for pre-service teachers in the five-year integrated master’s degree program, looking at how Vygotsky’s work is articulated and disseminated in the readings. Although Vygotsky’s ideas are an important frame of reference for the pedagogical thinking in the textbooks, the findings indicate that Vygotsky’s theory is presented in a fragmented way and is largely disconnected from the social and scientific context of its formation. The article argues that the tendency to interpret Vygotsky in a cultural and historical vacuum represents a concealed potential for making Vygotsky’s ideas applicable in the current educational debate.publishedVersio

Multicultural School Festival as a Creative Space for Identity Construction – From a Minority Parent Perspective

acceptedVersio

Multicultural school festivals as a creative space for identity construction – the perspective of minority parents

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any wayIn this article, we explore how minority parents construct and promote cultural identities through a multicultural school event in Norway. Such events respond to the call for diverse and inclusive initiatives to facilitate learning, belonging, and cohesion in schools. Interestingly, while schools see these events as helping further inclusion, prior research on the subject has criticized such events for promoting essentialist understandings of cultural identities, hence regarding them as counterproductive to the aim of promoting inclusion. This research has directed scarce attention to the participant perspective, among them minority parents. Using the stall of the Kurdish parents as an example, we conducted fieldwork applying the method of Linguistic Landscaping. In addition, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the parents asking questions about the festival and the meaning of the displayed representations in their stall. The findings indicate that the Kurdish parents involved view the event as an important space for creative construction of transnational and diasporic identities, as well as an opportunity for a minority group to strive for acceptance for its cause. We end the article by reflecting on the pedagogical potential in multicultural school events as tools for creating inclusive school practices.publishedVersio

Young people’s experiences and meaning-making at a multicultural festival in Norway

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.This article explores young people’s experiences and meaning-making at a multicultural festival. Multicultural festivals aim to promote inclusion and challenge problem-oriented discourses in current debates on diversity and migration. Listening to youth voices from such a festival gives a sense of how young participants perceive representations of cultural difference, and how they relate these representations to their own identity and sense of belonging. The participants in our study are 86 young people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds between the ages of 12 and 20. They recorded answers to our questions about what they did at the festival as well as the memories that participation evokes using a specially developed app. Interpreting the broad spectrum of their reflections in the light of theories about intercultural learning and citizenship, we found that the young people were eager to learn about the Other by experiencing cultural differences and engaging with traditions different to their own. In addition, they experienced the festival as an inclusive space, open for transnational identities, and evoking a sense of safety and belonging. We conclude by arguing that the young participants take with them experiences and memories of diversity as the norm rather than the exception.publishedVersio

A Proposal to Incorporate Experiential Education in Non-Confessional, Intercultural Religious Education: Reflections from and on the Norwegian Context

In Norway, religious education (RE) is a non-confessional and common core subject that should be taught in an objective, critical, and pluralistic manner. As a primary school subject, students learn about a variety of religions and worldviews together in the same classroom. The inclusive framing intends to provide an intercultural space in which the students can enhance their understandings of the beliefs of people whose worldviews differ from their own. Consequently, the subject has privileged an outsider approach, wherein students should learn about religion in a non-partial way, that is, not from religion. However, the claim for objective, critical, and pluralistic teaching still calls into question the role of learning from religions. First, an outsider approach has been criticized for promoting a dated view on learning, ignoring pedagogical knowledge on how students learn. Second, the latest national curriculum states that RE should not only provide students with in-depth knowledge about world religions, but also foster personalized learning experiences. Against this background, the paper asks how the concept of experiential learning in the tradition of Freire, Dewey, and Vygotsky invites a reflection on the ways by which the Norwegian RE subject is passed on most meaningfully in a diverse learning context

A transcultural approach to cross-cultural studies: Towards an alternative to a national culture model

The conventional tendency to identify culture as a delimited system of beliefs, values, and practices continues to capture the imagination of policymakers, educators, and practitioners. In particular, Geert Hofstede’s national culture model has become an influential and widely used tool to identify and compare cultural differences and similarities based on a presumed national identity that characterizes people living together within a geographic community. However, researchers have criticized Hofstede’s model for being static and deterministic, arguing that the framework should be supplemented with a more dynamic approach to cultural interaction. This article contributes to the discussion by proposing a transcultural approach to cross-cultural studies as an alternative. In the first section of this article, I examine Hofstede’s national culture model and critically address its shortcomings. In the second section, I present Wolfgang Welsch’s work on cultural transformation and demonstrate how Welsch’s concept of transculturality offers a convincing alternative to Hofstede’s model. Central to this approach is a nuanced and multidimensional understanding of the dynamic space in which cross-border social formation and identity construction operate. I conclude the article with a discussion of the relevance of a transcultural perspective for teachers working in an increasingly diverse classroom