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Identity texts: an intervention to internationalise the classroom
Abstract
The growing number of international students studying at Canadian universities has exacerbated the need to address identity, cultural aspects of teaching, and the commonalities of different cultures through a transcultural lens. To explore these concepts, researchers conducted a qualitative study using a workshop format at a large university in western Canada with graduate students, postdoctoral students, and faculty members from multiethnic back- grounds (N = 9). Two questions were posed to precipitate the research: 1) What does being transcultural mean to you? 2) Have you experienced cultural dissonance as part of your professional life? In a series of three activities, participants explored how to use identity texts (written, spoken, visual, musical, or multimodal socio- cultural artefacts produced by participants) as an intervention to foster transculturalism and reduce tension and dissonance in a cross-cultural educational setting. Results indicated that using identity texts increased self-awareness, built trust, enhanced belonging, and revealed common humanity, thus creating opportunities to develop a successful professional identity in a multiethnic milieu.
Studien undersøker hvordan to flerspråklige elever på mellomtrinnet utøver aktørskap i elevtekster og fagsamtaler i naturfag. Begge elevene har bakgrunn fra innvandrerfamilier der det snakkes henholdsvis burmesisk og arabisk. Elevene lærer norsk som sitt andrespråk. Den ene eleven er født i Norge, mens den andre har gått to år i norsk skole. I ordinære naturfagklasserom har flerspråklige elever som er i prosess med å lære norsk, ulike måter å delta på, og mulighet til å utøve aktørskap har vist seg betydningsfullt for hvordan de involverer seg i faglige interaksjoner. Denne studien undersøker to forskerinitierte aktiviteter som har til hensikt å gi innblikk i hvordan de to fokuselevene som er i prosess med å lære undervisningsspråket norsk, tar i bruk språk- og hverdagserfaringer for å kunne opptre som betydningsfulle bidragsytere i fagfellesskap. I den første aktiviteten fikk hele klassen i oppdrag å uttrykke seg skriftlig om et faglig definert tema. De ble oppfordret til å ta i bruk hverdagserfaringer og opplevelser, og valgte selv om de ville skrive, tegne, lage figurer eller uttrykke seg ved en kombinasjon av flere uttrykksformer. Disse elevproduktene betegnes som identitetstekster. Deretter deltok de to fokuselevene hver for seg i til sammen fire fagsamtaler med en medelev og forskeren, der samtalen tok utgangspunkt i identitetstekstene. Begge aktivitetene fant sted ved oppstart og avslutning av utforskende undervisningsopplegg om lyd og økologi. Elevenes utøvelse av aktørskap ble analysert ved å kategorisere initiativ gjennom turtaking i fagsamtalene i kombinasjon med en etnografisk-inspirert tolkning av identitetstekster og elevenes involvering i samtalen om fagstoffet. Forskningsspørsmålet som blir undersøkt, er: Hvordan utøver to flerspråklige elever aktørskap i fagsamtaler om identitetstekster i naturfag? Funnene indikerer at en åpen inngang til fagstoffet legger til rette for at de to elevene tar i bruk ressurser i form av språk og opplevelser. Identitetstekstene bidrar til at elevene kobler erfaringer til fagstoffet. Videre viser studien at taushet ikke er synonymt med passivitet når fokuselevene deltar i faglig interaksjon med medelever. Funnene illustrerer at flerspråklige elever som lærer fag og undervisningsspråket norsk parallelt, har behov for en inkluderende undervisningspraksis som legger til rette for at de kan utøve aktørskap i faglige diskusjoner.
This article draws out the implications for school and classroom practices of an emerging consensus about the science of learning and development, outlined in a recent synthesis of the research. Situating the review in a developmental systems framework, we synthesize evidence from the learning sciences and several branches of educational research regarding well-vetted strategies that support the kinds of relationships and learning opportunities needed to promote children’s well-being, healthy development, and transferable learning. In addition, we review research regarding practices that can help educators respond to individual variability, address adversity, and support resilience, such that schools can enable all children to find positive pathways to adulthood.
Background
Sociocultural theories state that learning results from people participating in contexts where social interaction is facilitated. There is a need to create such facilitated pedagogical spaces where participants can share their ways of knowing and doing. The aim of this exploratory study was to introduce pedagogical space for sociocultural interaction using ‘Identity Text’.
Methods
Identity Texts are sociocultural artifacts produced by participants, which can be written, spoken, visual, musical, or multimodal. In 2013, participants of an international medical education fellowship program were asked to create their own Identity Texts to promote discussion about participants’ cultural backgrounds. Thematic analysis was used to make the analysis relevant to studying the pedagogical utility of the intervention.
Result
The Identity Text intervention created two spaces: a ‘reflective space’, which helped participants reflect on sensitive topics such as institutional environments, roles in interdisciplinary teams, and gender discrimination, and a ‘narrative space’, which allowed participants to tell powerful stories that provided cultural insights and challenged cultural hegemony; they described the conscious and subconscious transformation in identity that evolved secondary to struggles with local power dynamics and social demands involving the impact of family, peers, and country of origin.
Conclusion
While the impact of providing pedagogical space using Identity Text on cognitive engagement and enhanced learning requires further research, the findings of this study suggest that it is a useful pedagogical strategy to support cross-cultural education.
The aim of this Guide is to support teacher with the responsibility of designing, delivering and/or assessing diversity education. Although, the focus is on medical education, the guidance is relevant to all healthcare professionals. The Guide begins by providing an overview of the definitions used and the principles that underpin the teaching of diversity as advocated by Diversity and Medicine in Health (DIMAH). Following an outline of these principles we highlight the difference between equality and diversity education. The Guide then covers diversity education throughout the educational process from the philosophical stance of educators and how this influences the approaches used through to curriculum development, delivery and assessment. Appendices contain practical examples from across the UK, covering lesson plans and specific exercises to deliver teaching. Although, diversity education remains variable and fragmented there is now some momentum to ensure that the principles of good educational practice are applied to diversity education. The nature of this topic means that there are a range of different professions and medical disciplines involved which leads to a great necessity for greater collaboration and sharing of effective practice.
In How People Learn, Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (2000) synthesized research regarding the optimal conditions that foster learning; a follow-up volume edited by Donovan and Bransford (2005) examines the application of these learning principles to teaching history, mathematics, and science. Bransford and colleagues emphasize the following three conditions for effective learning: engaging prior understandings and background knowledge, integrating factual knowledge with conceptual frameworks by encouraging deep understanding, and supporting students in taking active control over the learning process. Any instructional intervention that claims scientific credibility should reflect these principles, which are particularly important when it comes to English language learners. Prior knowledge refers not only to information or skills previously acquired in formal instruction but also to the totality of the experiences that have shaped the learner's identity and cognitive functioning. In classrooms with students from linguistically diverse backgrounds, instruction should explicitly activate this knowledge.
mmigrant students who arrive in Canada speaking little or no English (henceforth bilingual/ESL students) face formidable challenges in catching up academically, particularly if they arrive after the initial grades of elementary school. By Grade 4, the language of content areas such as social studies, science, and math has become increasingly complex, and students seldom hear this academic language in everyday conversations outside of school. School systems across North America have grappled with the question of how to enable bilingual/ESL students to participate academically when they don't yet have the academic language proficiency to understand instruction in the mainstream classroom. Because they are unable to carry out grade-level assignments, they are frequently seen as underachieving, despite the fact that they may be making good progress in catching up academically. In this article, we argue that given the timelines required for bilingual/ESL students to catch up to their peers in English literacy skills, instruction that builds on students' home language (L1) proficiency represents a potential lifeline that enables students to participate academically and express their intelligence and identities within the classroom.
This paper develops a concept of transculture as a model of cultural development that differs from both leveling globalism and isolating pluralism. While culture frees humans from the material dependencies of nature, it also creates new, symbolic dependencies—on customs, traditions, conventions, which a person receives as a member of a certain group and ethnos. Among the many freedoms proclaimed as rights of the individual, there emerges yet another freedom—from one's own culture, in which one was born and educated. Transculture is viewed as the next level of liberation, this time from the “prison house of language,” from unconscious predispositions and prejudices of the “native,” naturalized cultures. The case of the Japanese poet Araki Yasusada (1903–1972), a survivor of Hiroshima, demonstrates how transcultural creativity, though cast in the form of a literary hoax, can produce an internationally recognized achievement. Transculturalism is especially needed in world politics, where the factor of fixed cultural identity based on race, ethnos, religion, or ideological commitments turned out to be a source of conflict and violence. This paper argues that the categories of opposition and identity do not preclude the significance of the third category, which is difference. The differences complement each other and create a new interpersonal transcultural community to which we belong, not because we are similar but because we are different. The transcultural perspective opens a possibility for globalization not as homogenization but, rather, as further differentiation of cultures and their “dissemination” into transcultural individuals, liberating themselves from their dependence from their native cultures. The global society can be viewed as the space of diversity of free individuals rather than that of fixed groups and cultures. It is an alternative to the clash of civilizations and a hope for lasting peace.
Fuelled by globalisation, the internationalisation of higher education in Canada is happening at a rapid pace. One manifestation of internationalisation is the increasing enrolment of international graduate students in Canadian institutions. Many of these students face challenges and barriers in integrating into Canadian academic environments including isolation, alienation, marginalisation and low self-esteem. This case study investigates a programme at a large Canadian university intended to help international graduate students with their adaptation to an unfamiliar academic environment. The research shows that the programme was successful in creating a transnational learning space where international students developed a sense of belonging, increased cross-cultural understanding and raised awareness about global issues. More importantly, it helped international students with their integration into a Canadian learning community. The findings have important implications for the development of programmes to provide appropriate levels of support for international students and for building internationally inclusive campuses.
The successful development of a professional identity is paramount to becoming a successful doctor. This study investigates medical students’ professional identity formation over time through the analysis of their narrative accounts of events recorded during their first two years of medical school using longitudinal audio diaries. The data was analysed for underlying narrative plotlines. Six dominant discourses from societal narratives about doctors and medicine were found within the students’ narratives: The Privilege narrative, the Gratitude narrative, the Certainty of Medicine narrative, the Good Doctor narrative, the Healing Doctor narrative, and the Detached Doctor narrative. A further two narrative plotlines were identified as emerging narratives that contest master narratives and which are frequently found in the current culture within a modern medical school: the Informed Servant narrative and the Uncertainty of Medicine narrative. Following an overview of these narrative plotlines identified within medical students’ audio diaries, a single event narrative is presented in full, in order to provide a deeper understanding of how these are played out as medical students try to make sense of the events they experience and of their own development as a doctor.
This article explores the adoption of a transcultural education approach, rather than multicultural or intercultural education, and the implications this would have for educational practice. With the multiple issues associated with multicultural and intercultural education, the authors emphasize the need for a definitive definition of the term “transcultural” in the educational literature, as well as a new model of transcultural education. Addressed in the article are: (a) the contribution of transdisciplinary teaming to the definition and practice of transcultural education; (b) the meaning of “trans” in the term, transcultural; (c) a discussion of culture and individuality related to education; and (d) possible conclusions to facilitate dialogue regarding the future of transcultural education. Twelve vignettes are included to provide real world examples of the need for a paradigm of transcultural education.
The impact of transnational migration with activities across transnational borders has reconfigured multiple social and public identities calling for shifting to transculturalism as a theoretical framework in understanding the changing nature of adult education. Transculturalism becomes a mode of being and learning where humans interact with each other in a culturally diverse environment. Integrating different identities and connecting the global with the local, transculturalism is a learning commitment that facilitates socio-cultural adaptation and interaction in a dynamic society recognizing different worldviews. This paper offers a theoretical approach toward transculturalism as transformative learning with a focus on discussions of cultural concepts and connections with perspective transformation. The common ground between transculturalism and transformative learning is the idea of continuum, and interconnection of knowledge, skills and attitudes as an ongoing process of inquiry, thinking, reflecting, and acting. Connecting theories of transculturalism and transformative learning with our new reality of transnational mobility across the world opens new horizons for policies and practices in immigration and adult education.
The paper reviews quantitative and qualitative research evidence regarding the relationship between intercultural education and academic achievement among students from socially marginalized communities. Intercultural education is conceptualized as including a focus both on generating understanding and respect for diverse cultural traditions and challenging inequitable distribution of resources and educational opportunities across social groups. As such, intercultural education incorporates notions such as critical literacy and culturally responsive education. By definition, socially marginalized communities have experienced social exclusion and discrimination, often over generations. Thus, educators who adopt an intercultural education orientation are also committed to challenging the operation of coercive relations of power within their school environments. The operation of societal power relations that affect marginalized group students’ academic achievement can be conceptualized along a continuum ranging from structural/societal, through structural/educational, to interpersonal. Structural/societal forms of discrimination are largely outside the scope of what educators can influence directly (e.g. housing segregation). However, the research evidence suggests that educators have considerable power to resist and challenge coercive power relations operating at both structural/educational (e.g. curriculum materials) and interpersonal (e.g. classroom interactions) dimensions of the continuum. Thus, the proposed framework represents an explanatory model to account for patterns of school success and failure among marginalized group students and a predictive model to specify educator behaviors that are likely to promote academic achievement.
The topic of diversity in higher education has attracted considerable interest in recent times, with studies being undertaken on the diversity of such areas as institutions, students, funding mechanisms and course content. Shifts in policy approaches can be seen in many countries. This chapter considers whether any pattern of emerging trends can be discerned in the global context, drawing on examples drawn from a range of countries.
The book discusses the internationalizing of education and what educators need to think about in moving abroad to teach and to do in creating an imaginative and successful cross-cultural classroom.
The construct of identity text conjoins notions of identity affirmation and literacy engagement as equally relevant to addressing causes of underachievement among low socioeconomic status, multilingual, and marginalized group students. Despite extensive empirical evidence supporting the impact on academic achievement of both identity affirmation and literacy engagement, these variables have been largely ignored in educational policies and instructional practices. The authors propose a framework for identifying major causes of underachievement among these three overlapping groups and for implementing evidence-based instructional responses. The framework argues that schools can respond to the devaluation of identity experienced by many students and communities by exploring instructional policies and strategies that enable students to use their emerging academic language and multilingual repertoires for powerful identity-affirming purposes. Drawing on projects involving First Nations and immigrant-background multilingual students, the authors document the profound transformations in academic, intellectual, and personal identity that multimodal identity text work is capable of engendering.
Development from a Sociocultural PerspectiveHow Teachers Use LanguageSome Characteristics of Effective TeachingTalk Among LearnersLearning to Engage in Collective ReasoningFrom the Intermental to the IntramentalConclusions
This article argues that improved interactions between home and international students are dependant on the way we use both the formal and the informal curricula to encourage and reward intercultural engagement. It draws on the results of several research studies to present some strategies for facilitating meaningful interaction between students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds in and out of the classroom. Principles and guidelines for structuring formal and informal curricular activities and services are proposed. This article concludes that the development of intercultural competencies in students is a key outcome of an internationalised curriculum, which requires a campus environment and culture that obviously motivates and rewards interaction between international and home students in and out of the classroom. This means that a range of people across institutions need to engage with the internationalisation agenda over time to improve interactions between home and international students.
The papers in this special issue of of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism edited by Shelley K. Taylor and Mitsuyo Sakamoto cover a wide range of educational contexts and issues and they draw on a variety of disciplinary perspectives to interpret the phenomena they analyze. As the editors point out in their introduction, the common thread linking these analyses is the intersection between language and power. In some contexts, minority communities are the victims of overt violence exercised either by racist groups within society. In other cases, coercive power operates through discourses that position individuals and groups in subordinated relationships. The papers by Lee and Norton, and Morgan all analyze how individuals and/or educators can challenge coercive relations of power operating through these discourses to re-position themselves as agents in their own identity formation. The disciplinary focus shifts in Mayer's paper to address the psycholinguistic challenges faced by Deaf and hard-of-hearing students in appropriating the academic language competencies (in both first and second languages) necessary for school success. Although the primary focus in these papers is on psycholinguistic and pedagogical issues, societal power relations are never far from the surface. The devaluation of community languages (e.g. American Sign Language in the case of the Deaf community) in the wider society results in ambivalence among parents and educators about whether these languages should be strongly supported in home and school.
Theories of human development and learning provide an essential framework in which to understand the mechanisms involved in the process of formal instruction as a specific form of teaching and learning in the school setting. The sociocultural theory of development, founded on the works of Lev Vygotsky, espouses the view that social interaction among two or more people is the greatest motivating force in human development. Communication, via the use of language, provides one of the most effective means of social interaction. By collaborating toward a common cultural goal, people co‐construct new knowledge by building on each participant's contribution. Based on the main tenets of sociocultural theory, the following eight interrelated principles for instruction are presented, namely, that it should be: mediated; discursive; collaborative; responsive; contextualized; activity‐oriented; developmental; and integrated.
Today, who we are (by birth) and where we are (by choice) is not as relevant as it once was. More persons than ever before are pursuing lives that link the local and the global. They are becoming increasingly transcultural —physically or electronically connected with diverse peoples, and involved in decision-making that is influenced by, and in turn influences, the affairs of a global society. Transcultural persons may be sustained through transnational corporations, grassroots organizations, professional societies, and advocacy groups. But they are also identified at the level of simple, cross-cultural friendships made with residents of local communities.
The importance of storytelling as the foundation of human experiences cannot be overestimated. The oral traditions focus upon educating and transmitting knowledge and skills and also evolved into one of the earliest methods of communicating scientific discoveries and developments. A wide ranging search of the storytelling, education and health-related literature encompassing the years 1975-2007 was performed. Evidence from disparate elements of education and healthcare were used to inform an exploration of storytelling. This conceptual paper explores the principles of storytelling, evaluates the use of storytelling techniques in education in general, acknowledges the role of storytelling in healthcare delivery, identifies some of the skills learned and benefits derived from storytelling, and speculates upon the use of storytelling strategies in nurse education. Such stories have, until recently been harvested from the experiences of students and of educators, however, there is a growing realization that patients and service users are a rich source of healthcare-related stories that can affect, change and benefit clinical practice. The use of technology such as the Internet discussion boards or digitally-facilitated storytelling has an evolving role in ensuring that patient-generated and experiential stories have a future within nurse education.
Medical education is as much about the development of a professional identity as it is about knowledge learning. Professional identities are contested and accepted through the synergistic internal-external process of identification that is constituted in and through language and artefacts within specific institutional sites. The ways in which medical students develop their professional identity and subsequently conceptualise their multiple identities has important implications for their own well-being, as well as for the relationships they form with fellow workers and patients.
This paper aims to provide an overview of some current thinking about identity and identification with the aim of highlighting some of the core underlying processes that have relevance for medical educationists and researchers. These processes include aspects that occur within embodied individuals (e.g. the development of multiple identities and how these are conceptualised), processes specifically to do with interactional aspects of identity (e.g. how identities are constructed and co-constructed through talk) and institutional processes of identity (e.g. the influence of patterns of behaviour within specific hierarchical settings).
Developing a systematic understanding into the processes through which medical students develop their identities will facilitate the development of educational strategies, placing medical students' identification at the core of medical education.
Understanding the process through which we develop our identities has profound implications for medical education and entails that we adopt and develop new methods of collecting and analysing data. Embracing this challenge will provide better insights into how we might develop students' learning experiences, facilitating their development of a doctor identity that is more in line with desired policy requirements.
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