Interculturality in Language Teacher Education: Theoretical and Practical Considerations E-Book

Varios autores

• Herausgeber: Universidad del Valle
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Spanisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 341

Beschreibung

The desire to develop more intercultural focused language teaching and learning has grown significantly and to date there has been a lot of attention given to theoretical issues around the nature of interculturality and what it means for language education, and also around the educational practices of intercultural language teaching and learning. This work has shown that moving to an intercultural perspective in language teaching and learning is complex and multifaceted, and often challenging for teachers. However, to date, there has been less focus on teacher education and how new teachers can be prepared to bring an intercultural perspective into the language classroom. This book is thus a very important contribution to the development of educational practice, and to intercultural oriented thinking in teacher education. Moving towards an intercultural orientation in language education is actually a significant shift in educational thinking. Although culture has often been a focus in language education, and teachers and teacher educators have often considered the inclusion of cultural content to be synonymous with interculturality, recent work has shown that this is far from the case. Educational practice has been an inheritor of a deeply embedded ideology of culture that associates cultures with nations and languages in fixed and ultimately stereotypicalised ways. This ideology, which Bayart (2002) refers to as 'culturalism', constructs cultures and nations in terms of boundaries between 'us' and 'them' that create sets of differentiated national identities. The nation is seen as an entity that is distinct linguistically and culturally from other nations. Educational approaches have thus often presented the culture of the other in ways that focus on perceived differences and position language learners as analysts of these differences. This positioning reinforces the idea that 'we' and 'they' are different and sees the educational goal as knowing the differences that exist with national cultures

Leseprobe

Álvarez Valencia, José Aldemar

Interculturality in Languaje Teacher Education: theoretical and pratical considerations / José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia, Alexander Ramírez Espinosa, Omaira Vergara Luján, editores.

Cali : Programa Editorial Universidad del Valle, 2021.

204 páginas ; 24 cm-- (Colección: Artes y Humanidades )

1. Educación intercultural - 2. multiculturalidad - 3. Segunda lengua - 4. Competencia comunicativa intercultural - 5. Formación profesional de maestros - 6. Formación docente

370.117 cd 22 ed

A109

Universidad del Valle - Biblioteca Mario Carvajal

Universidad del Valle

Programa Editorial

Título: Interculturality in Language Teacher Education: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

Editores: José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia, Alexánder Ramírez 
Espinosa, Omaira Vergara Luján

ISBN: 978-628-7523-11-1

ISBN-PDF: 978-628-7523-13-5

ISBN-EPUB: 978-628-7523-12-8

DOI: 10.25100/PEU.7523111

Colección: Artes y Humanidades-Investigación

Primera edición

Rector de la Universidad del Valle: Édgar Varela Barrios

Vicerrector de Investigaciones: Héctor Cadavid Ramírez

Director del Programa Editorial: Francisco Ramírez Potes

© Universidad del Valle

© Editores

Imagen de la portada: Lunas sobre Cali de Gelber Samacá, óleo y acrílico sobre lienzo

Diseño de carátula y diagramación: Sara Isabel Solarte E.

Revisión de estilo: Shamir Sha

_______

Este libro, o parte de él, no puede ser reproducido por ningún medio sin autorización escrita de la Universidad del Valle.

El contenido de esta obra corresponde al derecho de expresión de los autores y no compromete el pensamiento institucional de la Universidad del Valle, ni genera responsabilidad frente a terceros. El autor es el responsable del respeto a los derechos de autor y del material contenido en la publicación, razón por la cual la Universidad no puede asumir ninguna responsabilidad en caso de omisiones o errores.

Cali, Colombia, octubre de 2021

Diseño epub:Hipertexto – Netizen Digital Solutions

CONTENT

Foreword

Chapter 1Re-sourcing Second/Foreign Language Teacher Education: The Critical Intercultural Option

José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia & Alexánder Ramírez Espinosa

Chapter 2Practical and Theoretical Articulations Between Multimodal Pedagogies and an Intercultural Orientation to Second/Foreign Language Education

José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia

Chapter 3Enacting Critical Interculturality in an Initial Teacher Education Programme

Carlo Granados-Beltrán

Chapter 4Critical Interculturality: A Key Element in the Construction of Social Subjects in Pre-Service Foreign Language Teachers’ Education

Bertha Ramos Holguín

Chapter 5Gay Slang and the Need for Intracultural Negotiation in Homosexual Men in Cali, Colombia

Alexánder Ramírez Espinosa

Chapter 6Rethinking the EFL Textbook from a Critical Interculturality Stance

Astrid Núñez-Pardo

Chapter 7Intercultural Communicative Competence Mediated by a Virtual Space: The Case of Livemocha

Alejandro Fernández Benavides

The Authors

NOTAS AL PIE

FOREWORD

Anthony J. LiddicoatUniversity of Warwick

The desire to develop more intercultural focused language teaching and learning has grown significantly and to date there has been a lot of attention given to theoretical issues around the nature of interculturality and what it means for language education, and also around the educational practices of intercultural language teaching and learning. This work has shown that moving to an intercultural perspective in language teaching and learning is complex and multifaceted, and often challenging for teachers. However, to date, there has been less focus on teacher education and how new teachers can be prepared to bring an intercultural perspective into the language classroom. This book is thus a very important contribution to the development of educational practice, and to intercultural oriented thinking in teacher education.

Moving towards an intercultural orientation in language education is actually a significant shift in educational thinking. Although culture has often been a focus in language education, and teachers and teacher educators have often considered the inclusion of cultural content to be synonymous with interculturality, recent work has shown that this is far from the case. Educational practice has been an inheritor of a deeply embedded ideology of culture that associates cultures with nations and languages in fixed and ultimately stereotypicalised ways. This ideology, which Bayart (2002) refers to as ‘culturalism’, constructs cultures and nations in terms of boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that create sets of differentiated national identities. The nation is seen as an entity that is distinct linguistically and culturally from other nations. Educational approaches have thus often presented the culture of the other in ways that focus on perceived differences and position language learners as analysts of these differences. This positioning reinforces the idea that ‘we’ and ‘they’ are different and sees the educational goal as knowing the differences that exist with national cultures.

An intercultural perspective in language teaching and learning involves developing a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of language and culture and of the educational goals of intercultural learning. Interculturality implies not simply knowing ‘others’ but coming to engage in diversity in active ways. The interculturally capable language learner is not therefore someone who is positioned outside diversity as an observer of it but rather acts inside diversity as an active participant in the linguistic and cultural processes through which diversity is constructed and experienced. Ultimately, the change in focus from culturalism in language education to interculturalism is a movement from the study of the other to a study of the self in relation to the other. The core learning involves coming to understand the self, how one interprets and communicates meanings, one’s reactions and responses and the roles of language and culture in communication, interpretation, perceptions, understandings and identities. In addition, the focus on the self in relation to others involves a recognition of the immense variability of cultures, of their continual creation, reinforcement and recreation in interaction with others, and of the presence of diversity as a normal part of all experiences of cultures, including those with which one identifies.

When conceived as a focus on the self in relation to diversity, interculturality is no longer something that is external to the learner, but rather something that the learner embodies: responses, reactions, practices, values, attitudes, and identities. The intercultural (self in relation to diversity) is closely connected with the intracultural (self in relation to self) and the language classroom is thus not simply a place for learning about a remote other but also for learning about oneself and one’s surrounding communities. The focus of teaching needs to move inward as well as outward. This means that the intercultural is open to many things that have often not been considered within the context of culture for the purposes of language learning, such as the cultures of the learners and of their environment (the cultures of the self) and also aspects of society often not considered to be ‘cultural’ such as gender, race, sexuality, class and wider issues such as relations with the environment and biodiversity, some of which are discussed in this book. In engaging with such issues, language learners need to develop their critical responses to the phenomena they experience and to the ways that languages and cultures construct the worlds in which they live, and their (and others’) understandings of these worlds.

By moving the focus of language learning away from a focus solely on the other to a focus on the self in relation to the other, language learning opens spaces for students to bring in, develop and reflect critically on their own identities and perceptions. This means that language education can have significant social justice implications by drawing in perspectives and epistemologies that have been traditionally excluded from the classroom and by valuing and validating, but at the same time challenging, learners’ experiences and perceptions. The issue of social justice is strongly articulated in this book and is a particular focus of many of the Colombian scholars who have contributed to it as they grapple with issues relating to decolonisation, minoritisation and marginalisation.

Ultimately, language learners and language teachers are both in the position of becoming intercultural mediators and this idea of mediation is fundamental for understanding the development of interculturality. Intercultural mediators are those who seek to make sense of meanings where meaning-making is problematic (Liddicoat, 2014). They may do this for others, when they bring others to understand the meanings of linguistically and/or culturally different others. Language teachers often find themselves needing to do this with students but for language teachers, mediation for others is not simply the same as providing answers as it also requires teachers to enable learners themselves to mediate languages and cultures. This cannot be done by accumulating information about meaning but rather involves developing the ability to make meaning in contexts where interpretation is unsure or divergent. This can only be done by placing students into situations where they need to mediate for themselves; that is where they need to consider and reconsider possible interpretations as a way of coming to understand the unknown. This mediation for self involves aspects such as decentring from one’s own linguistic and cultural starting points, considering possibilities for interpreting, and accepting the possibility of multiple valid ways of understanding the same behaviour, expression or phenomenon.

Moving away from the nation-state view of culture to the more expansive view of intercultural learning discussed above is not easily done. The ideology of the trinity of nation-culture-language is deeply entrenched and has been strongly supported by educational practice over time. Thus it is a comfortable and familiar way to engage with culture in educational practice. It is also a relatively contained body of knowledge, in that it has fixed, essentialised content and does not need to engage with complexities of variation. Moreover, it is strongly supported by textbooks and language learning materials. Changing practice thus means moving from a way of teaching that is familiar and supported to one in which teachers are more likely to be challenged and for which there is less institutionalised support. Educating future language teachers then is ultimately a question of resourcing them to engage with the intercultural as emergent, contingent and variable by encouraging them to approach their own lived experiences of diversity as entry points into an intercultural orientation to language teaching and learning. This means opening the teacher education beyond the narrow confines of language pedagogy, curriculum and assessment to examine the complexities of students’ life worlds and the diverse range of human experience.

Educating interculturally oriented language teachers involves more than teaching them how to teach interculturally. In fact, in my own work (e.g. Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013) I reject the idea that intercultural language teaching and learning is an approach or method, with its attendant expectation that learning to teach involves assimilating the techniques that go with the approach, and argue instead for the idea of perspective or stance. That is, intercultural language teaching and learning is a way of viewing the world, and in particular the place of languages, cultures and learning in the world. Educating teachers is thus not simply teaching them to teach in particular ways but rather forming them as people who reflect on experiences of diversity wherever they occur and draw on these experiences to shape learning opportunities for their learners. This means teacher education needs to be understood as humanistic education of educational professionals rather than as technical training in the processes of delivering curricula.

As in any wide-ranging innovation, moving to an interculturally oriented approach to language teaching and learning involves particular challenges for teacher education. Teacher educators need to develop an orientation to teaching that their learners will not usually have experienced in their own language learning. This means that teacher education needs to open up to students’ new ways of thinking about languages, cultures, learning and engaging with diversity that have not been part of their previous experience of language learning, and help them to develop autonomy in responding to the complexity of the intercultural. Teaching student teachers in this way also involves an issue for teacher educators, as they too may not have experience of learning in an interculturally oriented program and may need to develop their own professional understanding and practice in the absence of prior models. Ultimately, this process is exploratory and reflective. Teachers and teacher educators both need to explore languages and cultures and their engagement with linguistic and cultural diversity and to develop a praxis of interculturally oriented teaching. This means integrating theory and practice in complex ways, not just basing practice on theory but also theorising practice to further develop thinking and reflection. Research, and sharing experiences through research, plays a central role in this development for teacher educators.

This book represents an important investigation of the complexities of developing practice in teacher education for intercultural language teaching and learning. It presents a range of different perspectives and understandings of practice that shows how teacher educators are working with their students and how their work is developing the professional expertise of their students as future teachers. In so doing, it addresses a pervasive theory/practice gap in language teacher education by providing a discussion of emerging critical themes in intercultural language teaching and learning supported by empirical accounts and case studies from the classroom. By evaluating theoretical and practical issues, this book identifies viable, sustainable innovation strategies that can resource teacher educators in developing their expertise and professional practice.

REFERENCES

Bayart, J.F. (2002). The illusion of cultural identity. University of Chicago Press.

Liddicoat, A. J. (2014). Pragmatics and intercultural mediation in intercultural language learning. Intercultural Pragmatics, 11(2), 259-277. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2014-0011.

Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. Blackwell Publishers.

CHAPTER 1

RE-SOURCING SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION: THE CRITICAL INTERCULTURAL OPTION

José Aldemar Álvarez Valencia &Alexánder Ramírez Espinosa

“We showed that we are united and that we, young people, are unstoppable”

GRETA THUNBERG

At the time of this writing (November 2019), Colombia is being shaken by a national strike organized by different union organizations, rural social organizations, political indigenous organizations, and university members. This social movement emerged as a reaction to the government’s announced tax and pension reforms, but soon grew beyond these causes and became a catapult for people to express their general dissatisfaction with their living conditions. The situation in Colombia coincides with other protest movements in Latin American countries like Haiti, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador where protesters have flooded the streets, rallying against their government’s corruption, failure to reduce poverty and inequality, and politicians’ self-serving agendas. This state of upheaval seems to constitute a global trend. This year, similar civil unrest has led people in several countries like France, Lebanon, Netherlands, China (Hong Kong), Indonesia, Syria, Iraq, India, and Italy to claim for different living conditions. Although there are nuances on what has inspired these social movements, a common thread is inequality, corruption, political freedom, and climate change (BBC News, 2019; Kaplan & Akhtar, 2019). This geopolitical landscape entails two issues: people’s development of a sort of global social consciousness; and the central role that younger populations play in invigorating social protest movements. Now, how can this phenomenon be explained from the intercultural perspective? What does this geopolitical landscape have to do with language teacher education programs? And what is its place in this volume in particular?

One central pillar in interculturality is otherness. An examination of what this concept entails sheds light on the ontological reasons for these social movements to question the current geopolitical landscape. In Aspects of Alterity, Brian Treanor (2006) introduces a definition that revisits the common idea that otherness is a category that applies to people; in other words, that otherness solely refers to how we position ‘the other’ individual. The author posits the following:

We encounter otherness anytime we come up against or are confronted with our own limits and anytime events or others we have not foreseen surprise us. Anything beyond the ken of the self—either externally as in the case of other persons or the limitations of mortality, or internally as in the case of obscure motivations—confronts us with otherness. Thus, God, evil, death, identity, the unconscious, and other people are all examples of topics where the question of otherness is of central importance. (pp. 271-272)

Put in this way, otherness concerns the way we relate with ourselves and the external world on a daily basis: the ways we relate with illness, our desires and passions, our friends, acquaintances, people we do not know, animals and the environment. Our construction of otherness is highly ensconced within the ideological basis of the modern project and clashes with the multiplicity of postmodern identities that have surfaced from the interstices of the cracking wall of modernity. Treanor (2006) explains that what we call the postmodern era is characterized by the demise of what Lyotard (1984) termed Grand Narratives or frameworks of interpretations that helped individuals make sense of the world. Without them, people are confronted with ‘petit narratives’ which, in turn, lead to a multiplication of identity affiliations and thus, a ‘crisis’ of identity and legitimation (Treanor, 2006). A clear example of this is the proliferation of sociocultural groupings (e.g. urban tribes), new dependences, religions, and religious factions. Maffesoli (1996) uses the term ‘postmodern tribes’ to refer to this kind of sociality proper of our times. However, the diversification of ways of being in the world conflicts with the Grand Narratives that informed the modern project because “Grand Narratives will not tolerate otherness; their motto is ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’’’ (Treanor, 2006, p. 2).

The way otherness is approached today clearly resonates with the rhetoric of modernity. In the Western tradition otherness has been considered as something to be conquered (Treanor, 2006). It is in this manner that we have related ourselves with our consciousness if we think of expressions such as ‘the conquest of reason;’ one of the major pillars of modern rationality. This ideology also applies to how we have related with nature, which explains why our understanding of progress and development spins around the control of our natural environment, leading to obliteration of the ecological balance of our planet. In literature, for example, classic novels published between the 16th and 20th Century like Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, and Tarzan of the Apes are archetypes of the modern project because they place the human being at the center and show him conquering, dominating, and controlling nature. The European colonial project in Asia, America, and Africa in the 15th Century also obeys the logic of conquest, destruction, and invisibilization of otherness. In imposing the idea of a universal culture, framed within the principles of Cartesian dualism, the cult of reason, anthropocentrism, the Judeo-Christian creed, and a logocentric view –all tenets of modernity–, the colonizers repressed the otherness of those colonized by vanishing their ways of imagining, meaning making, and, in general, by stripping them from any form of cultural and symbolic production (Quijano, 1992).

Historically there has been an epistemological tendency to understand the ‘other’ that is new to a community by confronting it to current and accepted frameworks of interpretation and making it fit. The period of colonial domination (e.g., the colonization of the American continent) and the recent imperialist and expansionist project of the supposed values of the West (e.g., democracy) continue to show that we approach the encounter with otherness as an opportunity to turn something unknown into something known, that is, “We are much more likely to alter a new phenomenon to fit the mosaic of our worldview than we are to abandon our worldview because a new phenomenon does not fit” (Treanor, 2006, p. 4). Ultimately, this approach to otherness has strengthened ethnocentric and anthropocentric views which manifest in processes of discriminatory and unequal treatment at the inter and intracultural as well as the inter and intra-species level.

While the world is experiencing a postmodern condition of superdiversity (Vertobec, 2007), the modern rationality still dominates the way we understand difference and otherness. This paradox in part explains the reasons behind worldwide protests about gender, ethnic, racial, economic, social and cultural inequality and climate change. It is a clash between those who cling to the Grand Narratives of cultural, class and ethnic homogeneity and those who see the need for a change in the way they are othered. Current evils of the world related with inequality, corruption, political freedom and climate change index views of an ‘other’ that deserves less because they do not fit neatly into the forms of life and semiotic systems that people in power or dominant groups inhabit. Social movement protests are an example of the awareness of the multiplicity of otherness and the need to claim the right to belong in societies where diverse ways of being and staying in the lifeworld are possible. Despite the well-spread hazards of globalization, as a social and cultural phenomenon it has helped us realize that the proclaimed universality of human needs, moral principles, knowledge, semiotic resources, and values is limited and limiting. The awareness that social movements generate are starting points to develop pluriversal views that move from Anglo-Eurocentric epistemologies, and verbocentric and anthropocentric narratives toward the recognition of other epistemological genealogies, other semiotic resources, and other intersubjectivities and biocentric narratives (Grosfoguel, 2007; Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 1992; Walsh, 2007). The intercultural indigenous movements in Latin America are a clear example that there could be other epistemic matrices, forms of consciousness, forms of socio-political organization, and ways of coexistence with nature (De La Cadena, 2015; Walsh, 2009, 2011).

Young people such as Greta Thunberg, a teenage environmental activist whom we cite in our epigraph, participating in or leading social movements are sending a message to older generations and the youth that are still complacent with the current state of affairs. These young leaders belong to a generation that is not necessarily getting all their education from traditional schooling and have developed other sensitivities and understandings toward the social and natural world. Scholars studying youth political participation (e.g., Pickard, 2019; Pickard & Bessant, 2018; Taft, 2019) explain that younger populations are exercising citizenship differently, by designing and embodying new, creative, and authentic forms of political agency. Concerning education, younger generations are demanding a type of education that is more attuned with the lifeworld they are inhabiting; a lifeworld where unstable truths are more accepted, where diversity and expression of otherness at the corporeal, sexual, social, religious, cultural, ethical, political, ethnic and racial levels are acceptable; a lifeworld where the human community has been expanded to one that includes non-human beings (Haraway, 2016) –a move from anthropocentrism to biocentrism (Duque, 2019). It seems as though young people are taking a more critical and hopeful stance, and it may be the underlying message they are sending to educators through these worldwide protest movements.

THE UNDERLYING MESSAGE FOR EDUCATION: A CRITICAL STANCE

So, what are social movement protests around the world telling education stakeholders? Perhaps they represent an invitation to think of the role of education in perpetuating or decimating social, cultural, political, and environmental inequality. Their message compels us to consider other valid categories of otherness beyond our particular zones of comfort. They are as well telling us that we must strive to change the narrative through which dominant groups have othered us. It is clear that education has been attending to its responsibility partially, and that a more critical lens should inform curriculum planning and teaching methodologies. A critical perspective poses great challenges to educational systems that are grounded in the technical rationality inherited from modernity, characterized by the objectification of ‘the other’ individual, animal, environment. Western education has, in the name of science, atomized knowledge, stripping it from its historical and socio-cultural roots and has positioned students as thinking beings rather than feeling-thinking human beings (Fals Borda & Moncayo Cruz, 2009).

These social movements show stakeholders that when people openly express their diverse ways of being, living, feeling, wanting, needing, and thinking, they open the doors for recognition of otherness. In this regard, Guilherme (2019, citing Blommaert, 2015) explains that “recognition as (identity X) is a socially regimented effect that demands recognizability within a frame of intersubjectivity” (p. 6). She further explains that if recognition requires recognizability, then it is fair play to make difference evident without losing sight of synchronic and diachronic processes that inform sociocultural difference as well as dominant regimes of truth. We deem this a strong message sent to educators who are invited to bring forth their identities and let students deploy their diversity. In the context of teacher education, such a message acquires particular primacy since teacher education programs are instrumental in helping future teachers co-construct the necessary semiotic resources (see Chapter 2 in this volume) to deal with the multifarious expressions of otherness in classrooms. In this volume our assumption is that a critical intercultural perspective constitutes a viable approach to ground teacher education, and in particular, foreign/second language education (Guilherme & Souza, 2019). Recognizing otherness is a first important leap in learning to live together harmoniously, nonetheless, a critical stance should be taken if we aim for transformation. This train of thought resonates with the spirit of this volume in that it is threaded around the critical intercultural perspective and its role in diversifying teacher education in terms of redefining conceptual frameworks (Chapter 2), methodologies and strategies (Chapter 3), views of students as social subjects (Chapter 4), categories of gender and sexual identity (Chapter 5), the role of pedagogical material (Chapter 6), and media of instruction (Chapter 7).

TEACHER EDUCATION: SHIFTS AND CHALLENGES

Second/foreign language teacher education (S/FLTE) refers to a process that encompasses “the preparation –training and education– of L2 teachers” (Wright, 2010, p. 260). The area has taken different trajectories in recent decades (Freeman, 2009; Kanakri, 2017; Wright, 2010). Freeman (2009) presents an overview of how S/FLTE has broadened its scope. The author explains that up to the 1970s, teacher education programs focused on learning about language content, learners, SLA, and classroom methodologies. A different orientation gained ground during the 80s wherein the focus was the teacher and the process of professional development. The teacher was seen as a learner who developed beyond transmitted knowledge and skills passed on in initial teacher training programs. Teacher learning stemmed from other spaces of teacher activity including the classroom, non-formal settings or experiences, and formally instructed settings like postgraduate courses. The scope of teacher education was remarkably redefined during the 1990s. The period was marked by an interest in research and conceptualization of teachers’ knowledge base, teacher learning, and other concepts that helped reshape and expand the boundaries of the field. Influenced by the sociocultural perspective (Johnson, 2009a), the field experienced in the 2000s an emphasis on operational questions that regarded dimensions such as teacher identity, socialization, and situations of practice. As Freeman (2009) clarifies,

professional learning processes were redefined in a broader sense to include not only what happened in instructed teacher-training environments, but also the wider influences of socialization evident in individual development. These processes were refocused as much on the evolution of participants’ professional identities… as on the ways in which they learned new knowledge or ways of doing in the classrooms. (p. 15)

Freeman’s (2009) insights converge with other scholars’ reflections about issues that continue to concern stakeholders in teacher education programs (Burns & Richards, 2009; Farrell, 2015; Johnson, 2006, 2009b; Kanakri, 2017; Kumaravadivelu, 2012; Wright, 2010). These issues comprise:

• the level and status of the profession in ELT,

• the knowledge base of professionals in the field,

• the nature of teacher learning or how teachers develop a ‘practitioner knowledge,’

• the role of context in affording teachers learning,

• the role of teacher cognition or the personal theories, representations, and beliefs of teachers in teaching practice and identity shaping,

• the development of teacher identity,

• the reconceptualization of the teaching practice and the act of learning,

• the question of accountability of teacher education programs,

• the different approaches to investigate phenomena in S/FLTE,

• the preparation of teachers for multilingual and multicultural ESL/EFL classrooms,

• the gap between teacher preparation program contents and novice teachers’ actual classroom realities,

• the influence of critical theories and critical pedagogies in second/foreign language teacher education,

• the preparation of teachers for the challenges inherent in globalization and the digital age.

Authors like Farrell (2015, 2016), Wright (2010) and Kanakri (2017) pinpoint that one of the greatest challenges of S/FLTE is to bridge the gap between the type of education novice teachers receive and the realities they face in the language classroom when they go into the job market. This is also related to teacher education programs’ slow appropriation of conceptual developments in the field. In a state-of-the-art article, Wright (2010) concludes that,

what will become clear from the review of a fairly wide selection of accounts of practice, is that the uptake of new conceptualisations of SLTE has not, in the daily reality of SLTE programmes, kept pace with the valuable theoretical consolidation that has been achieved… What we encounter, therefore, is an uneven uptake of new ideas in SLTE, and the slow emergence of research procedures in SLTE which reflect the nature of the new knowledge base, and in particular, the process of how teachers learn teaching. (p. 260)

S/FLTE has moved from a perspective in which teacher learning was deemed as a cognitive process in which content and procedural knowledge were transferred to teachers who, in turn, were supposed to transform it into practice. Influenced by sociocultural principles, teachers are now more empowered to become inquirers and to theorize practice, becoming producers of knowledge rather than consumers (Kumaravadivelu, 2006). By adopting elements from sociocultural theories, S/FLTE has opened new avenues of exploration about teachers’ identity construction, the place of context, and the role of classroom interaction and social activity in mediating teacher learning and identity construction (Johnson, 2006; 2009a; Johnson & Golombek, 2011).

Although still a central dimension, the knowledge base of S/FLTE has been subject to constant reconceptualization (Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Johnson, 2009b; Tarone & Allwright, 2005). Traditionally, teacher education programs have included within this dimension the components of content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, that is to say, the what to teach and the how to teach it. The discussion about what should be the knowledge base of language teachers is still contentious, although, different components have been outlined (Colton & Sparks-Langer, 1993; Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Johnson, 2009b; Johnston & Goettsch, 2000; Kumaravadivelu, 2012; Pineda, 2002; Richards, 1994; Tsui, 2003; Wallace, 1999; Wright, 2010). More recently, Johnson (2009b) has indicated that knowledge base in teacher education programs regards three broad areas:

1) the content of L2 teacher education programs, or what teachers need to know; 2) the pedagogies that are taught in L2 teacher education program, or how L2 teachers should teach; 3) the institutional forms of delivery through which both the contents and pedagogies are learned, or how L2 teachers learn to teach. (p. 21)

Of particular noteworthiness is the latter dimension because it evokes dialogic and chronotropic dimensions (Bakhtin, 1981) to understand teachers’ knowledge base development.

Thinking of teachers’ knowledge base as being complemented, shaped by the polyphony of voices present in dialogic encounters in specific chronotropic or time-space conditions helps understand the dynamic, situated, and intersubjective nature of the teacher’s knowledge base construction. In fact, this perspective is in line with research conducted by one of the authors (Álvarez Valencia, 2009) about in-service teachers’ knowledge base. In discussing their construction and the sources of knowledge base, teachers acknowledged that it is an ongoing process and is composed of all the ‘footprints’ left by their family, previous teachers, and schooling experiences. As mentioned above (Farrell, 2015; Kanakri, 2017; Wright, 2010), one typical roadblock of teachers’ practice is the gap between theory and practice. In order to cope with this shortcoming, teachers think of teaching as the deployment of different knowledges that are constructed and enacted product of ‘decision-making within a polyphonic interaction.’ Teaching is represented through the metaphor of an orchestra that plays depending on its audience:

The music of an orchestra is a polyphony of sounds which needs to establish a dialogue among its different instruments. Likewise, we can say that the knowledge used in a classroom is made up of a polyphony of voices or sources of knowledge that establishes a dialogic interaction and constitutes the teaching activity. This dialogic interaction entails a reflective teaching exercise which, according to Richards and Lockhart (1994), will guide teachers’ decision-making processes in their teaching settings. (Álvarez Valencia, 2009, p. 91)

Accordingly, the task of a teacher is searching how to play (how to teach) in a way that meets the needs of their students and the characteristics of their milieu. It is in this dialogic interaction, combined with the teachers’ spatiotemporal resonances of their previous personal and work experiences, their schooling, their own beliefs and theories, and professional training, that teacher learning occurs. However, although this study as well as other works on teacher’s knowledge base and S/FLTE acknowledges the role of the local context and broader macro contextual structures (sociopolitical, sociohistorical, and socioeconomic contexts) in informing teacher education curricular planning (Farrell, 2016; Gurmit & Richards, 2006; Johnson, 2009a,b; Kanakri, 2017; Wright, 2010), we argue for a more explicit and emphatic inclusion of the critical dimension in S/FLTE, framed within the intercultural orientation.

A CRITICAL INTERCULTURAL ORIENTATION IN SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION

We position ourselves within a critical intercultural perspective to suggest that the gap mentioned above between teacher education programs and the realities teachers face upon graduation is further heightened by the absence of an intercultural perspective that prepares future teachers for contexts of superdiversity, social inequality, and the multiplicity of otherness found in language classrooms. S/FLTE programs do not seem to be in touch with the multiple social lives current populations embody, the current communication landscape with the textual habitats that they inhabit, and the intra and intercultural encounters that they engage in on a daily basis; processes afforded by local and translocal mobility or online mediated telecollaboration (Álvarez Valencia, 2016a, b). Many of the realities that novice teachers encounter in language classrooms such as multilingual populations, diversity of sexual orientations, issues of race and ethnicity, conditions of disability, or students’ social, political, religious and environmental activism are scarcely touched upon in the curriculum of teacher education programs. For instance, hot-button topics such as diversities of sexual orientation and identity embodiment have not found a way into the teacher education curriculum, yet this is a reality that novice teachers will need to face in language classrooms, as Ramírez-Espinosa explicates on Chapter 5 in this volume.

Another illustration of the cited gap is how in Colombia, due to sociopolitical and economic instability, thousands of farmers and members of indigenous communities have been forced to flee to urban areas. The political and economic crisis of neighboring countries such as Venezuela has caused a wave of immigration that has impacted our educational system with a growing number of Venezuelan children attending Colombian schools. Thus, more than before, a typical Colombian classroom portrays the multicultural and multilingual nature of our country. Members of the Afro-Colombian population along with mestizos, indigenous children and immigrants with their different cosmogonies, semiotic resources (e.g., cultural practices, languages or linguistic varieties), socioeconomic conditions, needs, and interests share the classroom space, challenging the teacher to have the necessary conceptual and pedagogic skill and intercultural sensitivity to account for the diversity enmeshed in this ecology. The question again is whether S/FLTE programs in Colombian or other countries with similar conditions are preparing teachers for such complex contexts of unequal distribution of symbolic and material resources; whether this preparation enables novice teachers to engage in reflective practices upon the ideological forces that shape individuals, society, culture and nature; and, what is more, whether teachers are able to raise students’ awareness of these forces and to lead them into transformative practice and the affirmation of human dignity.

The multicultural and multilingual classroom configuration presented above along with underlying sociodemographic characteristics of countries like Colombia speak to the need of an intercultural orientation to teacher education in general and S/FLTE programs, in particular (Kramsch, 1993; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). Drawing on Álvarez Valencia (Chapter 2), we understand culture as a repertoire of semiotic resources that are open and dynamic. These semiotic resources are historical and therefore cultural. They take the shape of material (e.g., gestures, painting, literature) and symbolic (ideas, beliefs) artifacts. Semiotic cultural resources are developed within communities through historical processes that provide them with certain stability when they are shared by individuals. Some semiotic cultural resources like language, beliefs, and customs are deployed, negotiated, or transformed in social interaction. Since cultural semiotic resources are acquired in processes of socialization within the different social groups (e.g., family, school, work settings) to which individuals belong, it is common that individuals develop cultural affiliations. These affiliations manifest anytime individuals engage in sociocultural practices where semiotic resources are embodied and enacted. In this view, individuals develop multiple cultural affiliations to several groups in which they are socialized ranging from gender, race, class and physical ability to regional/national provenance, linguistic, professional, religious, and political membership.

Taken in this light, a meeting between members of two different social groups, for instance individuals with different professional affiliations, materializes an intercultural encounter. In turn, this intercultural encounter sheds light on the “chronotropic nature of cultural practices” (Blommaert, 2015) in that they invoke cultural semiotic resources with their spatiotemporal resonances (time and space configurations) and orders of indexicality (behavioral modes) that correspond with a particular sociocultural practice. Such conceptualization is helpful because it suggests that in most interactional encounters intercultural negotiation is required, given the possible differences of individuals’ semiotic resources (e.g., dialects, frameworks of interpretation, regional origin) and their underlying indexical organization valid in a specific time-space. This view of intercultural communication has implications for S/FLTE programs since it stretches the limited and traditional definition of intercultural communication, seen as the encounter of members of transnational communities, and instead posits a microlevel analytic perspective in which an intercultural encounter may take place between members of social groupings of divergent cultural, social, ethnic, gender, political, and linguistic affiliation. In contexts as diverse as Colombia, with a historical past marked by conservative ideologies and intolerance toward difference, a microlevel analytical perspective to intercultural encounters is called upon in educational contexts. It is for this reason that we argue, with Ramos (Chapter 4) and Granados (Chapter 3), that teacher education programs, preparing new generations of professionals should take the lead in advancing an intercultural agenda (Álvarez Valencia, 2014).

In the case of S/FLTE programs, they are impelled to guide novice teachers in recognizing that developing and enacting intercultural capabilities and intercultural awareness is not only applicable to an interaction with members of the foreign language target culture. Intercultural capabilities are extendable to all spheres of social interaction and they aim at bringing about transformation at the cognitive, ethical, epistemological, and ontological level. However, in most cases transformative action requires critical thinking; the ability to question established paradigms and to take agentive action. It is in this sense that we articulate an intercultural orientation with elements of critical decolonial theories; a rationale that clearly matches the experiences described by some of the authors of this volume (Ramos, Granados, and Núñez) and that as expressed by Granados, contributes “with the goal of forming future language teachers as grounded intellectuals and professionals” (see p. 68, in this volume). Our approach echoes many of the ideas outlined by Kumaravadivelu, who in 2016 published an article entitled The Decolonial Option in English Teaching: Can the Subaltern Act? This volume represents a humble way of beginning to answer the question he poses.

Given our geohistorical locus on enunciation, the critical intercultural perspective that we envision as an interpretative framework that informs foreign teacher education programs in Colombia aligns mostly with ideas of decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, Gloria Anzaldúa, Anibal Quijano, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Ramón Grosfoguel, Manuela Guilherme, Lynn Mario de Souza among others. Although it is not our intention to address in this writing the different positions championed by these scholars, we will funnel down the discussion toward one major point: the need to contest and reconfigure imperial epistemologies and imperial identities (Mignolo, 2000; De Sousa Santos, 2008). Rather than purporting to discard the current dominant northern (Anglo-Eurocentric) epistemologies (knowledge systems) and ontologies (modes of being in the world –identities), we propose, following De Sousa Santos (2008) and Guilherme (2019), to take distance from these hegemonic frameworks, however,

taking distance does not mean discarding the rich critical Eurocentric tradition and throwing it into the garbage dump of history, ignoring in this way the historical possibilities of social emancipation in Eurocentric modernity. Rather, it means including it in a much broader panorama of epistemic and political possibilities. (De Sousa Santos, 2008, p. 26)1

De Sousa Santos’ (2008) purview is in dialogue with Mignolo’s (2000) concept of border thinking or border epistemologies. To begin with, the Argentinian scholar explains that “Decolonial thinking consists… in deploying in their coevalness forms of knowledge and ways of being that have been pushed aside or buried in the past in order to make room for the triumphal march of modernity” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 206). Those other forms of knowledge and being in the world are possible due to border thinking, an epistemological position in which individuals are aware and sensitive of the colonial difference, and from their subaltern perspective find spaces to delink from the colonial matrix of power by creating or enacting other forms of knowing and being (Mignolo, 2000;