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How interculturally aware are you? Book clubs could provide an answer... Caroline Ellwood suggests some classroom reading
The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect ...... These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right. (IBO, 2017) Indeed through a number of pedagogical channels the teacher is alerted to the importance in practice and in the curriculum of inculcating a state of mind that recognises cultural differences in a world where the students are global citizens. Teachers are encouraged to ‘actively look beneath the surface of the cultural iceberg in order to understand the driving motivations of their students’ (Thomas and Inkson, 2009). The focus is on the students. But what about the teachers’ own cultural intelligence; how far are they inclined to consider for themselves the questions and ideas they put to their students? Are the teachers who are expected to discuss complex and often politically contentious messages themselves ‘internationally minded’? Do they feel like ‘global citizens’, or are they carefully preserving their own identity in a foreign country? Terry Haywood comments (2017):
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I have often found that teachers are not nearly so internationally minded as they think they are (and frequently a lot less internationally minded than the students they teach). They need to be challenged into reflecting on their own preconceptions and to considering that they might not have a monopoly on the truth. So how far is the teacher involved in the ‘lifelong learning’ that is recommended for the student? In the whirlygig of the commitments of a teacher, already overloaded with responsibilities and becoming more and more stressed (Precey, 2015), where is the time for such an extravagant extra? Far from being an indulgence, however, opportunities for personal development and intellectual refreshment can be regarded as both necessary and profitable. Adult education encourages personal growth, relieves stress and indeed makes for a more efficient and knowledgeable teacher. If we take the aim of personal development for teachers to be the same as that proposed in the IB mission statement for the students, using the theme of intercultural understanding and respect a number of activities are possible. Open meetings can be arranged with outside speakers to promote debate. (Check on the talents of your parents). Invite staff and parents to a series of IB Diploma Theory of Knowledge classes: get some of your students to be the instructors. Possibly the best way to promote exchange of opinion and discussion, however, is through a book club. Teacher book clubs promote intellectual inquiry, conviviality and friendship. They can have a social as well as intellectual purpose. Discussing a novel can enlarge our understanding of ourselves as well as of the characters involved, and puts us inside the experience of others:
...narrative fiction in particular deals in dangerous knowledge: knowledge the price of whose acquisition is the risk the reader runs of being changed in his or herself by what she or he reads (Harrison, 1991)
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Mission statements, in-service training programmes and curriculum development plans abound with efforts to encourage students to be internationally minded, to have intercultural understanding and global awareness, and to become global citizens or globally minded. The precise meaning of these terms and how in practice they apply to the curriculum have become a staple ingredient of staff meetings, conferences and learned articles. There is, though, a general agreement that however it is interpreted the development of some form of intercultural understanding is an essential part of a truly international education. Whilst the focus and nuance of meaning may change, the general aim is well summed up in the IB mission statement:
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