Interculturality in Teacher Education in Times of Unprecedented Global Challenges

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.