International Perspectives on Intercultural Education offers a comprehensive analysis of intercultural education activity as it is practiced in the countries of Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, England, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Chapters by key scholars and practitioners from these nations inform the reader of current educational practice related to diversity. Each author, responding to a common series of guiding questions, presents: *a brief description of the national educational system in her or his country; *descriptive data on demographics in these countries, including data on various subgroups and subcultures and their experiences with the mainstream educational system; * a discussion of the perceived obstacles to addressing intercultural issues in schools and solutions to overcoming these obstacles; and *a comprehensive analysis of intercultural information on how teacher preparation institutions address intercultural education at the present time. An overall concern of each chapter author is how intercultural approaches can be employed to solve the difficulties faced by both individuals and schools while maintaining the cultural integrity of the child.

The ability to recognise and understand your own cultural context is a prerequisite to understanding and interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds. An intercultural learning approach encourages us to develop an understanding of culture and cultural difference, through reflecting on our own context and experience.

Intercultural Education: Critical Perspectives, Pedagogical Challenges, and Promising Practices, co-edited by Cinzia Pica-Smith, Carmen N. Veloria and Rina Manuela Contini, is an edited volume that brings together scholars from across the globe who delve critically into the frameworks of interculturalism and intercultural education to go beyond the European context, to reorient our perspectives on the frameworks and engage in new conversations across various institutional contexts and countries. The scholars in this volume explore and critique intercultural education on localized alliances, epistemologies, pedagogy, multi-sector collaborations, and language policies. Some scholars contextualize this phenomenon by acknowledging the on-going struggles for recognition, representation, and heritage language maintenance; while others write about the institutionalization that brings about warped narratives, produces challenges and tensions, and the interplay of power dynamics that impacts practice which is ultimately felt most by practitioners and students. Finally, authors move beyond this critique by working with diverse communities, expanding the dialogue to include multiple perspectives, and promoting the adaptation of indigenous practices in new ways.The scholar-practitioners in this collection engage with the theory and practice of intercultural education to describe, interrogate, critique, and put forth recommendations for future iterations of policy and practice. They do not stop at historicizing, contextualizing, and problematizing the conceptual framework. These scholars go beyond analysis and provided us a roadmap to real-life possibilities for changes to the framework of intercultural education that will manifest in policy and curricula that will impact the institution of schools, translating, ultimately, into real-time change in the lives of children and their communities.

Over the last two decades drama pedagogy has helped to lay the foundations for a new teaching and learning culture, one that accentuates physicality and centres on performative experience. Signs of this ‘performative turn’ in education are especially strong in the field of foreign/second language teaching. This volume introduces scholars, language teachers, student teachers and drama practitioners to the concept of a performative foreign language didactics. Approaching the subject from a wide variety of contexts, the contributors explore the extent to which performative approaches, emphasising the role of the body as a learning medium, can achieve deep intercultural learning. Drama activities such as improvisation, hot seating and tableaux are shown to create rich opportunities for intercultural encounters that transport students beyond the parameters of conventional language, literature and culture education.

This edited book provides professionals in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) with a situated and culturally-responsive account of diversity and inclusion in English language education, from primary to higher education and in a wide range of settings. The volume focuses on three overlapping areas: interculturality, special education needs, and gender. The chapters in each section seek to help readers reflect on the opportunities and challenges of diversity as a step towards inclusive practices, and raise awareness of critical topics across the curriculum and beyond by engaging in wider social issues. This book will be of interest to language teachers and teacher trainers, as well as scholars working in applied linguistics, higher education, intercultural studies, and related fields.

This book primarily analyses the current situation in intercultural education and intercultural competences, and addresses the challenges to, and possible ways of dealing with, different perspectives in intercultural education. Advances in the new millennium, such as the revolution in information technologies, have led to a reduction in distances between people, stronger ties between different geographical areas, and greater mobility. This volume examines how these advances seem to have given rise to profound economic, environmental, political, social, and cultural crises, not just within nations, but also in relations between cultures. Such crises are of concern to all aspects of human life, including family, work and mass media, but they particularly affect educational institutions. The papers in this collection explain, therefore, why it is necessary to invest in education.