Abstract
As societies face unprecedented challenges that are global in scope and “more-than-wicked” in nature, educators and educational policy makers emphasize the importance of deepening knowledge about the causes of these problems, creating policies to address them more efficiently, and offering more compelling moral arguments that might persuade people to change their convictions, and ‐ as a consequence ‐ their behaviour. These concerns shape how policies on the study of interculturality are approached in contemporary teacher education in our contexts in Canada and the UK. Our research, however, positions these as problems that cannot be solved with improved information, enhanced cross-cultural skills, or moral claims, because they are rooted in modernity’s systems, which structure the possibilities for co-existence on the planet. We see these problems as ontological challenges of being that emerge from a modernist ontology rooted in colonial violences. Our approach therefore explores an orientation to intercultural education which enables student teachers to expand their understanding of cultural and ecological relationships beyond existing frameworks of modernist knowledge, politics, and economic systems. In this paper, we share some of our current learning about the affordances and limitations of dominant approaches to intercultural education, and then explore how the method of “social cartography” can enable engagement with ontological problems in teacher education in a way that generates possibilities for imagining decolonial learning futures, beyond modernity.
Highlights
As societies face unprecedented challenges that are global in scope and ‘more-thanwicked’ in nature, educators and educational policy makers emphasize the importance of deepening knowledge about the causes of these problems, creating policies to address them more efficiently, and offering more compelling moral arguments that might persuade people to change their convictions, and, as a consequence, their behaviour
We conclude by illustrating how using methods of ‘social cartography’, and the posture of the ‘gesture’, can help educators in our contexts embrace a kind of ontological openness that gestures beyond modernity’s harms and violences, and towards forms of interculturality that cannot yet be imagined
The remainder of this paper explores a methodology – ‘social cartography’ – that we argue can catalyze movement towards ‘decolonial’ modes of intercultural teacher education
Summary
‘Despite unquestionably good intentions on the part of most people who call themselves intercultural educators, most intercultural education practice supports, rather than challenges, dominant hegemony, prevailing social hierarchies, and inequitable distributions of power and privilege’ (Gorski 2008, p. 515). This method, we argue, creates possibilities to engage with the complexities of modernity, intercultural relationships and ‘more-than-wicked’ social and global challenges in ways that are not pre-determined, but emerge from examining their own lived subjectivities and complicities (Martin & Pirbhai-Illich, 2016) It invites direct engagement with the cognitive, affective and relational dimensions of everyday educational practices that perpetuate the systemic harms of modernity, and offers a generous range of entry points to this work for teacher candidates who come to it with differing levels of openness. We argue that such a tool can support teacher candidates to ‘learn to dive’ into (rather than ‘drown in’) the complexities of global power in their everyday practices through working generatively with affective investments throughout the journey
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