COVID-19 and Interculturality: First lessons for Teacher educators

Abstract

This exploratory article represents an attempt to examine and problematize the links between the COVID-19 crisis and interculturality for education. Aiming at teacher educators, we review problems with the notion of interculturality in light of the crisis. We argue that these problems were not created by the crisis, but that the crisis unveiled them. In the first part of the article we suggest that these issues should be approached by looking into interculturality (and companion terms such as “democracy” and “equality”) as an ideology that deserves deconstructing, unthinking, reconstructing and rethinking. We also describe the problems triggered by this ideology: the need to shift from “dead imagination” (culture, difference, etc.) to unearthing the “groundwater” of the economy and globalization in the way interculturality functions. We then propose a set of three principles that could be used by teacher educators to train future teachers to deal with interculturality afresh: “Beyond comparison”, “The mirror: turning inward”, and “Questioning the unquestionables”.