Decolonising Intercultural Education

Colonial differences, the geopolitics of knowledge, and inter-epistemic dialogue

Robert Aman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317205685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

At the centre of Decolonising Intercultural Education is a simple yet fundamental question: is it possible to learn from the Other? This book argues that many recent efforts to theorise interculturality restrict themselves to a variety of interpretations within a Western framework of knowledge, which does not necessarily account for the epistemological diversity of the world.

The book suggests an alternative definition of interculturality, framed not in terms of cultural differences, but in terms of colonial difference. It brings analysis of the Latin American concept of interculturalidad into the picture and explores the possibility of decentring the discourse of interculturality and its Eurocentric outlook, seeing interculturality as inter-epistemic rather than simply inter-cultural.

Decolonising Intercultural Education will be of interest to educational practitioners, researchers and postgraduate students in in the areas of education, postcolonial studies, Latin American studies and social sciences.

1 Introduction

Interculturality for whom?

At the centre of this book is a simple yet fundamental question for education: is it possible to learn from the Other? If we confine ourselves to biblical allusions, the possibility of even speaking of a capitalised Other in relation to education is the result of one single historical moment: Babel. A tower made of bricks to reach the topmost heaven, a tower so high that its pinnacle is face to face with Jehovah, is blasted to punish the overweening pride of its architects. As the eleventh chapter of Genesis makes clear, the punishment for defying God is confusion; a certain disorder deriving from a sudden multiplication of tongues: ‘Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth’ (Genesis, 11:7–8).

In the myth of Babel difference grows out of geographical displacement and linguistic separation as people are scattered to various parts of the world and, due to their lack of a common language, are unable to reunite. A foreshadowing of the great multicultural capitals to come, the fall of Babel not only created different languages, it also generated a language of difference, as the word ‘like’ as in ‘I am like you’ stemmed from ‘like’ as in the likeness of one’s own race, ethnicity or culture. While God’s wrath may have irredeemably transformed the world, explanations of more recent vintage for infusions of diversity tend to point to technological advancements, economic globalisation, and the ever-increasing blending of populations. Without ignoring those reactions to current global transformations that are sceptical or even downright hostile – from the Right’s ethnocultural arguments for closing borders, to the Left’s emphasis on the capitalist logic underlying global inequalities – Perry Anderson (1998, 93) argues that the period we live in ‘is not one of delimitation, but intermixture, celebrating the cross-over, the hybrid, the potpourri’.

Directed as we all are towards an Other and others, education must keep up with the times as social relations and processes transcend borders, thereby making it impossible to restrict teaching and learning to the nation-state. As keeping cultures neatly hived off from each other no longer seems to be a serious option, there is now a proliferation of interculturality in education, a paradigm whose global relevance reveals itself in public and social policy, anti-discriminatory and anti-racist intervention, and international security. Projecting transcendence, a cross-cultural dimension, interculturality appears to be based on the view that we have obligations to others, a certain responsibility that stretches beyond those with whom we share the formal ties of a common passport, religious affiliation or citizenship. Additionally, the same notion holds that we have to take seriously the value of specific human lives, to have similar standards for other people’s children, by taking an interest in beliefs and practices that lend those lives significance (Appiah, 2006). According to its advocates, interculturality can provide the basis for new democratic projects working for the mutual thriving of all humanity. This is because, as Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood (2012) argue, it is allegedly able to reconcile universal values and cultural specificities.

Interculturality, as a rallying point of educational policies and the academic humanities, became increasingly prominent from the mid-1980s on. To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the International Association for Intercultural Education (IAIE) in 2008, Jagdish Gundara and Agostino Portera edited a special issue of the journal Intercultural Education, in which interculturality was cast as the most important educational initiative for addressing problems of inequality – racism, xenophobia, socioeconomic marginalisation – throughout the world (Gundara & Portera, 2008). As anthologies, educational literature and the considerable number of academic courses devoted to interculturality propagate its importance, citing the Sage Handbook of Intercultural Competence (2009, xiii), as a means ‘to better understand others’ behaviours to interact effectively and appropriately with others and, ultimately, to become more interculturally competent’, the disciplinary construct has secured its foothold in both the academy and mainstream publishing.

The IAIE is not alone in its promotional efforts; its anniversary year was also marked by the European Union and its institutions, which in the very same year, 2008, celebrated the year of intercultural dialogue. Without claiming any direct causal connection, it was also around the time the IAIE was founded that interculturality made its broader entrance into the vocabulary of supranational bodies, including, besides the EU, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the Council of Europe (CE). It has been suggested that a key moment came when the European ministers of education unanimously passed a resolution for the schooling of migrant children in 1983, in which the importance of promoting interculturality was strongly underlined (Portera, 2008).

If the endorsement of interculturality was initially justified as a revolutionary new way of facing the challenges created by the increasing heterogeneity of pupils in various member states, the concept is framed in such a way that it still occupies the same discursive space as the term ‘multiculturalism’. In Central and Northern Europe – but also elsewhere, such as in Quebec – much ink has been spilt by proponents of interculturality to argue that the term, in contrast to multiculturalism, offers a different approach to the negotiation of cultural difference by and within liberal democracies. Consequently, wherever interculturality is primarily used it tends to be employed distinctively from multiculturalism: the latter is seen as a descriptive term for the factual co-existence of people of diverse cultures in a given space, whereas the former is said to characterise actual interaction between people once impediments to relations have been removed (Camilleri, 1992; Gundara, 2000). Hence, where multiculturalism both begins and ends by making a diagnosis, advocates of intercultural education suggest that it offers a cure: ‘learning to live in an ethnically and culturally diverse society’ (Leeman, 2003, 31).

Without dwelling further on this on-going debate, while at the same time remembering Meer and Modood’s (2012) conclusion, from their meticulous analysis of the various arguments on both sides of the aisle, that the standard assertions of the distinctiveness of interculturality and its superiority to multiculturalism are fairly unconvincing, the discussion itself may be seen as a reflection of how interculturality has gained widespread currency and has been ascribed importance in educational debates. The term has found a home in places as diverse as Russian teaching on world cultures (Froumin, 2003), German and Greek education programmes (Luctenberg, 2003, Gropos & Triandifillidou, 2011) and business communication (Bargiela-Chiappini & Nickerson, 2003). The rapid ascension of interculturality in the educational sphere becomes less surprising in light of the fact that UNESCO has singled out education as the primary arena for understanding interculturality and generating the skills necessary for everyone living in today’s culturally diverse and globalised world: ‘Intercultural Education provides all learners with cultural knowledge, attitudes and skills that enable them to contribute to respect, understanding and solidarity among individuals, ethnic, social, cultural and religious groups and nations’ (2006, 37). In viewing education as an instrument for interculturality, however, there is a tendency to read interculturality as a problem of knowledge. That is to say, interculturality is often framed in educational terms as what we need to know in order to eradicate the borders that grew up between us after our separation at Babel. Thus, the question of interculturality gets rerouted along an epistemological path. Determining what constitutes the right kind of knowledge now becomes highly significant to teaching and learning, since the basic premise of such a stance is that the more we know about them, the easier it is for us to approach them, to respond to them, to integrate them. While the focus inevitably is on the Other as the object of our knowledge, it must be remembered that knowledge, from this point of view, is conceived as available to everybody everywhere, regardless of place of birth, skin colour, belief, educational trajectory, gender and sexuality.

Against this background, the present work seeks to map and explore what constitutes such allegedly intercultural knowledge: what does one need to know in order to become intercultural? Treating the issue of what it means to be intercultural as an open-ended question, an inquiry into a concept that is epistemologically loaded in many ways, seems inevitable given the broad range of debates on interculturality, spanning from peace studies to translation theory, and from multicultural policy-making to teacher training. Comprised of seven chapters in total, Decolonising Intercultural Education interrogates the different ways in which intercultural knowledge is negotiated and defined on distinct yet interrelated levels: Chapter 3 inquires into policy writings on interculturality with a focus on education at the level of supranational bodies; Chapter 4 draws upon interviews with students who have completed a university course on interculturality in Sweden; Chapter 5 examines academic literature on interculturality; and, finally, Chapter 6 shifts geopolitical focus to the Andean region of South America where interviews were conducted with students and teachers in a pan-Andean educational initiative run by indigenous movements. In that part of the world the notion of interculturalidad – translation: interculturality – is not only a subject on the educational agenda, but has also become a core component of these social movements in their push for decolonisation.

Unlike much previous research and writing on the subject, this book thus brings other translations of interculturality into the picture. Even if interculturality acts as code for a fluctuating and unbordered world brought about through a commitment to inclusiveness, it seems unlikely that it would have the same signification and equal appeal to all of us. Essentially, this book asks whether it is possible to have respect for the many faces of humanity while concomitantly expecting everyone to become intercultural in a particular prescribed way. What I am pushing for is to open up the possibility of other ways of thinking about interculturality depending on where (the geopolitics of knowledge) and by whom (the bodies politic of knowledge) (Mignolo, 1999) it is being articulated.

The key contention of this book is that the on-going effort to turn interculturality into a globally oriented educational theme must be accompanied by a profound consideration of its conceptual and terminological premises, and that a critical gaze must be turned on the geopolitics of knowledge from which interculturality draws legitimation. By bringing together several threads of interculturality, this book explores the risks of failure within Intercultural Education to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and give meaning to their existence. A primary argument of Decolonising Intercultural Education is that many recent efforts to revive interculturality restrict themselves to a variety of interpretations within a Western framework of knowledge that does not necessarily account for the epistemological diversity of the world. As a result, the ways in which Western domination has profoundly marginalised knowledges and wisdom in existence elsewhere is insufficiently built into its pedagogy. These theoretical insights into global relations of power in the terrain of knowledge production are pivotal to the school of thought commonly referred to as the Modernity/Coloniality Group (Dussel, 1993; Mignolo, 2005; Quijano, 1989). What these philosophers underline is not merely the centrality of a geopolitics of location to any academic endeavour, but also the need to consider what those geopolitics allow to be known and how. The key issue is not only that epistemology is not ahistorical, but also that epistemology has to be geographical in its historicity. These philosophers deem such an approach essential due to the ways in which epistemological, historical and political discourses are interwoven and work together to sustain an order that allows European cultural patterns and ways of knowing to universalise themselves.

In other languages, or the language of the other

In taking the hierarchies within epistemologies as a point of entry, I seek to wean interculturality from its comfort zone of flat substitutability between sameness and otherness by pressing the question of how cultural difference is determined in light of Europe’s colonial past. For all the seductive possibilities it offers in term of bridging cultural specificities, it must be remembered that interculturality, relying on its root-word, ‘culture’ and recognising it as a force in the world, with the added prefix of ‘inter’ suggesting movement across borders of various kinds, is a perspective that demands, as does any other theory, assimilation to its own point of view. Given the significance of historical factors in forming ethnic, racial and cultural relations, what must be taken into consideration are the structural, as well as the wider social, political and economic, forces at work in all cultural relations.

To speak of a hierarchical approach to culture, however, is not to dispute the existence of different conceptions of culture; that there are prevalent strains in contemporary intellectual debates that derive from either anthropology, where ‘culture’ generally refers to ‘ways of life’ inclusive of common beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours; or from literature, music and art, where ‘culture’ is frequently associated with the sum of achievements related to what are perceived as refined features of ‘civilised life’ (Chow, 1998). Rather, what I am questioning here is the presumption that the movement of history is always a progression from one or another unified past to a more diverse and pluralistic future (McDonald, 2011). It is necessary to emphasise that such scepticism should not be confused with ethnocultural arguments for the coherence and homogeneity of national cultures. Quite the opposite: what I want to suggest is that all cultures, including dominant ones, are less unified and more blended than is often believed to be the case or than the governing ideology of a particular moment may presuppose. What might prove tricky, then, is to distinguish between self and Other by way of culture. The arbitrary nature of cultural relations can be concretised by drawing attention to a complex issue seldom explored in relation to the Babel myth: where is the border drawn between vernaculars?

Although states legitimise themselves through official languages, it is practically impossible for someone standing at the border to say exactly when and where Catalan begins and Spanish stops, where Swedish starts and Norwegian ends, especially considering that languages in themselves are products of flows and encounters that leave their marks in, for instance, vocabulary, syntax and proverbs. ‘What is French but bad Latin?’, Marcel Proust famously asked in In Search of Lost Time, drawing attention to the fact that languages are both time sensitive and inherently transnational, every vernacular carrying traces of other languages.¹ Such examples of linguistic diversity can seamlessly be extended to cultural diversity. If, as Abdelkébir Khatibi (1993, 10) suggests, nations tend to mask the fact that they are in themselves ‘a plurality, a mosaic of cultures, if not a plurality of languages and genealogies’, others have gone to great lengths to emphasise the sheer hybridity of all cultures.² Edward Said (1994, 261) writes: ‘The history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowing’, and Stefan Jonsson (1993, 224) adds: ‘All cultures are not only multicultural; they are also transcultural’.³ Without denying that there are powerful forces eager to repudiate or resist this, a trait we all – both us and them, same and Other – share, one might say, is the fact of already being intercultural before making any commitment to the paradigm carrying this name (Aman, 2015b).

Additionally, as a practice that lends itself to pedagogy, interculturality poses questions not only about who the radical Other is, and what to teach and what to learn about – essentially, what is defined as intercultural knowledge – in encounters with that Other, but about the language in which the Other is approached and called upon. With this question in mind, it may be fruitful to remember that Michel Wieviorka (2012, 225) has criticised research on interculturality for being Anglocentric as he questions the possibility of writing sincerely about interculturality ‘relying exclusively on authors who write in English or by referring to historical experiences that are only accessible through this language’. Without disputing the need to move towards an understanding of interculturality that does not restrict itself to the English palette, it seems equally fair to enlarge the scope to other colonial languages where metropole and periphery are geographically distant but politically integrated; languages in which the very act of speaking immediately connects the postcolonial subject to a history of violence and subjugation.

The Andean context – in common with many other regions that have been subjugated to colonial violence – reveals the inseparability of language and power. In the first book dedicated to the grammar of a modern European language, Antonio de Nebrija (2011[1492]) alerts his readers to the inseparability of power and the word, the weapon and the letter. Aptly published the very same year that Christopher Columbus initiated the expansion of not merely Europe’s collective geographical consciousness but also the exportation of the Spanish language, de Nebrija underscored the fact that the one is unable to expand without the other, as ‘language has always been the perfect instrument of empire’ (siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio). In conjunction with Wieviorka’s critique of what he perceives as an elevation of English as the lingua franca of interculturality, I would like to add the importance of opening up several linguistic avenues to such pedagogical practice so as not to allow the focus on a single language to cloud the interconnection between language and epis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: interculturality for whom?
• 2 Epistemological privilege in intercultural education: from cultural differences to a colonial difference
• 3 The construction of a European identity in European Union policies on interculturality
• 4 Intercultural studies and the commitment to bridging otherness
• 5 The double bind of interculturality in academic textbooks
• 6 Interculturalidad, or voices from the underside of the colonial difference
• Conclusion
• References
• Index