The conversation that encompassed deeper issues of culture took place almost while we watched with bated breath, hoping that it would not go “too far” into the realm of the politically incorrect. Well, perhaps we need to let that breath go and allow ourselves to go far.

–Yasmin,^[1] preservice teacher, December 2014

Over the past two decades, teacher educators have grappled with preparing new teachers to build on the varied languages and cultures that are characteristic of U.S. classrooms. In the interconnected global context, these concerns for knowledge and practice are further complicated by the new role of educators as cultural agents of change. In this perspective, educators as global citizens and change agents are challenged to develop cultural awareness, dispositions, and practices necessary to achieve equity and social justice for linguistically diverse and (especially) marginalized communities (Heugh, 2018). In our work in teacher education at a public university in the United States, we attempt to bring together these global and democratic imperatives by opening up spaces for intercultural and multilingual practice through service-learning, an educational activity that addresses human and community needs and engages students in critical reflection and analysis. Several core courses bring together preservice teachers and linguistically diverse community members for a language-focused program, the Conversation Café (CC). In the CC, participants meet for 8 weeks at a public library, community organization, or school for an hour of conversation in English.^[2] Designed to be mutually beneficial, the CCs work to address community desire for access to English conversation and for preservice teachers to meet the professional goal of learning to serve diverse students and communities. The CCs engage preservice teachers in intercultural dialogue in community settings. How do we create and scaffold opportunities for intercultural dialogue?

In our program, we draw from intercultural citizenship (Byram, 2008) to bring together interculturality as the reflexive capacity to decenter, to make comparisons, to care for others, and to celebrate shared experiences (Palpacuer Lee & Curtis, 2017) with an intercultural citizenship orientation toward social action and change (Rauschert & Byram, 2017). Our community-based language courses are organized around these objectives: The first 4 weeks of class focus on co-constructing our understanding of interculturality, global citizenship, and structural inequalities associated with language in the United States; the next 8 weeks turn to action and engagement through participation in informal conversations in English (or other community languages); the final weeks are dedicated to critical reflection on the learning-to-serve experience.

Language and Intercultural Journeys

Community-based language courses in our teacher education program, which are also offered to undergraduate students, encourage the recognition of multiple and layered diversities, including one’s own. We begin our practice of interculturality with a guided self-examination of the multiple ways each of us uses languages, language varieties, and registers (Blommaert & Backus, 2013), an activity we call Language and Culture Journey (Curtis, 2018). This activity is followed by a self-examination of intercultural encounters, adapted from the Council of Europe’s Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters (Byram, Barrett, Ipgrave, Jackson, del Carmen Méndez García, 2009). These activities emphasize the biographical dimensions of language and culture learning and the situatedness of language use and of interculturality.

Through the Language and Culture Journey activity, we learned about the rich multilingual and intercultural practices among undergraduate students and preservice teachers. These practices include translanguaging (e.g., speaking with or listening to grandparents, parents, or other family members in varieties of English, such as African American Vernacular English, Korean, Mandarin, Punjabi, Spanish, and varieties of these), translating (on behalf of parents, family, or community members), social activities (e.g., gatherings for watching Bollywood movies in Hindi and English), and religious activities (e.g., reading religious texts in Arabic, English, or Hebrew). These examples occasioned discussion, comparisons, and celebration of the linguistic and cultural diversity in our classrooms and scaffolded thinking about subsequent autobiographical reflection and inquiry. The following excerpt illustrates growing awareness of linguistic diversity:

I have taken notice to differences in the ways Noor [a classmate] and I speak [English] even though we have both lived in New Jersey for our entire lives. She grew up in a more urban, diverse setting, with parents who were immigrants. I grew up in a small suburban town, without much diversity, to parents who had been raised in New Jersey as well. We both understand one another, but there are definitely things that we say differently. So, my thinking was that if the two of us speak differently due to slightly differing environments, it must be really difficult for English language learners to be learning North American English.

This excerpt indicates acts of decentering (“notice to differences”), making comparisons (e.g., of urban and suburban English), and evidence of care (“it must be really difficult”), leading to an analysis of and empathy with the situation for new immigrants (Curtis, 2018). 

The Conversation Café: Action and Engagement

We then turn to action and engagement, extending our classroom activities and reflections to interactions with linguistically and culturally diverse members of the community. As members of an English-speaking community, the preservice teachers are expected to participate with and encourage collaboration among community members. In practice, this means that community participants are empowered to access family languages, social networks, and emerging knowledge of English through collaborative dialogue (described by Swain, 2000). The Conversation Café Routine, illustrated in Table 1, is not meant to be prescriptive; instead, it represents a guide to opportunities for collaboration, intercultural dialogue, and action, “being willing and able to become involved with other people in making things different and better” (Byram et al., 2009, p. 5).

Table 1: Conversation Café Routine

The design of the Conversation Café Routine emphasizes collaboration. For many community members, the CC has been their first opportunity for extended conversation with English speakers, and many reported that in this environment they had gained confidence. In a community member focus group, Umar, commenting on the power of asking questions, said, “You can ask, if you see some script [text] anywhere, you can ask.” For Aesera, “here is very different culture from my country…a subject like shopping help me more than other subjects.… At first, I wanted to learn something that help to live here.” Umar also noted that his conversations at the public library were “intergenerational exchange.” Eva said, “It’s like you are friends” in the CC (Curtis, 2018).

Opportunities for conversation afforded spaces for reciprocal cultural learning. In weekly and postprogram reflections, preservice teachers revisited their cultural assumptions. These reflections included evidence of awareness of the situatedness of their own views and of language as action, and care for members of their community. Yet, such realizations and awareness were emergent, developing over time. At semester’s end, Yasmin wrote:

By eliciting information about the adults’ home countries and festivals, we had tried to show that we valued their culture just like they valued ours. However, by sticking to neutral parts of culture such as food and festivals, we had perhaps denied them the ability to express the parts of their culture that contradicted with American culture. We ourselves could have grown more if we had been open to conversations that would challenge our own cultural beliefs.

Yasmin’s reflection suggests an emergent openness to interculturality as a creative action that allows for co-constructing new and multiple interpretations through intercultural dialogue. Negotiating roles as cultural agents of change in multilingual classrooms requires practice, and our role as language teacher educators is to design opportunities for practice and to scaffold our collective inquiries. Thus, reflection and guided practice over time are central to engagement with this work. As Yasmin put it, to “allow ourselves to go far.”

References

Blommaert, J., & Backus, A. (2013). Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. In E. Saint-Georges & J. Weber (Eds.), Multilingualism and multimodality: Current challenges for educational studies (pp. 11–32). Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense.

Byram, M. (2008). From foreign language education to education for intercultural citizenship: Essays and reflections. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Byram, M., Barrett, M., Ipgrave, J., Jackson, R., & del Carmen Méndez García, M. (2009). Autobiography of intercultural encounters. Strasbourg, France: Council of Europe Language Policy Program.

Curtis, J. H. (2018). Negotiating identity in a language-focused service-learning project. Unpublished dissertation, School of Graduate Studies, Language Education, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Heugh, K. (2018). Multilingualism, diversity and equitable learning: Towards crossing the “abyss.” In P. Van Avermaet, S. Slembrouck, K. Van Gorp, S. Sierens, & K. Marijns (Eds.), The multilingual edge of education (pp. 341–367). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Palpacuer Lee, C., & Curtis, J. H. (2017). “Into the realm of the politically incorrect”: Intercultural encounters in a service-learning program. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 19(2), 163–181.

Rauschert, P., & Byram, M. (2017). Service learning and intercultural citizenship in foreign language education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 48(3), 353–369. doi:10.1080/0305764X.2017.1337722

Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In J. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 97–114). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

^[2] In this article, we focus on English conversation, but we have also developed Conversation Cafés in other community languages, such as Spanish and Mandarin, to honor and engage with our community’s multilingualism.

Jessie Hutchison Curtis, PhD, is a part-time lecturer at the School of Arts & Sciences, Program in American Language Studies and co-adjunct at The Collaborative Center for Community-Based Research & Service, Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research interests include expanding educational spaces for multilingualism and intercultural learning.

Christelle Palpacuer Lee, EdD, is assistant teaching professor at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research and pedagogical interests focus on the notion of interculturality in teacher education.