Higher education needs to move past ‘intercultural-washing’
What is ‘intercultural-washing’?
We have all heard of greenwashing discourses; ‘intercultural-washing’ works in a similar manner. The emphasis that many higher education institutions place on intercultural communication often gives misleading impressions about the structural, financial and theoretical resources devoted to addressing interculturality in practice. In the , we argue that there is often a lack of structural and financial support to implement intercultural education in a meaningful and theoretically sound manner.
Intercultural communication teaching too often draws on a solid or essentialist view of culture as a system of interpretations and behavioral patterns territorially bound to the nation-state and “naturally” shared and expressed by all the persons seen as belonging to the national group. Intuitively appealing and offering the promise of a quick fix, the essentialist notions of culture have become, and continue to be, extremely popular with trainers, consultants and educators. With intercultural-washing discourses, intercultural communication becomes an empty buzzword and loses its societal and theoretical relevance.
How to go from ‘intercultural-washing’ to meaningful intercultural education?
The special issue discusses the limitations of ‘intercultural-washing’ discourses but it also gives solutions to move past them. We wanted to gather a collection of articles that would offer concrete ways of bridging the gap between recent critical intercultural communication theorises and ‘intercultural-washing’ discourses still prevalent in teaching practices.
Many of the authors draw on their own experiences in teaching intercultural communication from a critical non-essentialist perspective and the challenges they have faced. The challenges may be about finding new or revisiting existing pedagogical tools, but they can also be about finding ways to address the students’ expectations or to challenge one’s own assumptions as a teacher.
The articles included in the special issue cover a wide range of subjects and contexts (e.g. supervision, language education, designing discipline–specific courses) but they all highlight similar conclusions. Contrary to what we often hear, the articles included show that renewing intercultural education at individual level is possible but requires time and support.
A special issue relevant for anyone working in higher education
Most people teaching in higher education are nowadays confronted with incentives to incorporate interculturality into the curricula. Such incentives may take different names and forms, internationalization or intercultural communication or intercultural competence, for instance, but this trend is the same applies across disciplines. That is what makes this special issue relevant to everyone teaching in higher education.
What we have seen is that many faculty members have not been trained in intercultural communication and often struggle to know what is the best way to incorporate it into their courses. This collection offers them some concrete ideas on how this could be done. Given how ubiquitous discourses about intercultural communication are nowadays, this special issue really is relevant for anyone working in higher education. People working in international services as well as university decision makers who, for instance, develop university strategies or language policies, may benefit from reading the special issue.
Link to the Journal of Praxis in Higher Education, Special Issue, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2021):
For more information:
University Teacher Mélodine Sommier, Ģֱ, +358503463707, melodine.c.m.sommier@jyu.fi
University Teacher Malgorzata Lahti, Ģֱ, +358405767852, malgorzata.lahti@jyu.fi
University Lecturer, Anssi Roiha, University of Turku, +358 29 450 4726 ja +358 50 471 3303, anssi.roiha@utu.fi