ICIS Newsletter - December 2019 (Plain Text Version)
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LEADERSHIP UPDATES LETTER FROM THE CHAIR Roxanna Senyshyn, Ph.D, Abington College Pennsylvania State University, Abington, Pennsylvania, United States
Greetings ICIS Colleagues and Friends, The editors of the newsletter have done an excellent job of soliciting and bringing several important topics to our attention. This year-end issue contains articles which touch on the increasingly complex and diverse ways that multilingualism and global education are experienced around the world. As TESOL professionals, we represent a wide variety of expertise in language teaching and learning and those of us affiliated with the ICIS are also facilitators of intercultural learning and communication. In my teaching over the past several years, I have been increasingly utilizing various maps in my courses when discussing linguistic and cultural diversity and its implications for teaching and learning and cultivating global citizenship. Many of us use maps principally for the utilitarian purpose of getting from one place to another. However, we cannot always be sure that what is shown on the map will match what we anticipate or what we see on the ground. I think that maps metaphorically speak about intercultural learning, too. For many of us, our ideas about the world, its cultures and its peoples, initially come from maps. We seem to internalize this information as truth rather than as a set of compromises and conventions. It is not easy to represent the exact structure of the curved surface. How do we think of the shapes of the land’s masses? What are our impressions of places we have not visited? Without these direct experiences, how do we form images of the world and its peoples? And how do these images affect our interaction with people from different and distant places? I also observed that the use of maps in my own teaching context often brings to the surface the lack of most of my students’ basic knowledge of the world beyond their own local or regional location. This lack of knowledge, or this ethnocentric tendency, might also suggest a lack of curiosity and respect. All three factors are critical components in intercultural communication. In an interconnected global world and in diverse local communities, ethnocentric attitudes can have serious consequences. So I keep asking myself:
I would like to encourage you
to use myTESOL community group as a space to share information and
insights related to intercultural learning and intercultural
communication in the interest of inspiring dialogue with your fellow
ICIS members! Roxanna Senyshyn, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics and Communication Arts and Sciences at Abington College Pennsylvania State University, where she teaches TESOL education and intercultural communication courses. Her research interests include three strands: transformative intercultural learning in teacher education, intercultural (communication) competence development for academic and professional purposes, and second language writing pedagogy and assessment. |
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