Exploring the intercultural competences of high school students: a case study of traditional classrooms in a minimal-cultural-gap context
- Autores: Hiltrud Awad
- Directores de la Tesis: Mireia Trenchs Parera (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Carmen López Ferrero (presid.), Adriana Patiño Santos (secret.), Maria González-Davies (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Humanidades por la Universidad Pompeu Fabra
- Materias:
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- Resumen
Intercultural education is one way of responding to the current political and social realities resulting from globalization, migration, and political and economic crises. It puts emphasis on educating young people and equipping them with the necessary skills to counter radicalism and embrace diversity. The present dissertation investigates interculturality and intercultural education from a new perspective and in a previously unexplored context: traditional classrooms in minimal-cultural-gap communities. This study points out several research gaps in intercultural research and criticizes contemporary approaches to intercultural development and assessment. It re-conceptualizes interculturality and intercultural education upon the basis of findings from this study, which reveal a different perspective of interculturality and draws a picture of the implications, complications, and challenges of conducting intercultural education in such educational and sociocultural settings. The research study further presents recommendations for scholars and policy makers working in the field of intercultural education.
This study is structured in five chapters: introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion and conclusions. This introductory chapter presents the status quo in regards to globalization, cultural changes, and cultural clashes resulting from increased digital and face-to-face human interactions. It further highlights the significance of intercultural education and intercultural citizenship education as ways to promote acceptance of diversity and peaceful coexistence. It presents an overview of the purpose and significance of this study, and it introduces an overview of the chapters of this thesis.
Chapter 2 presents a review of literature on concepts, theories, and empirical research on interculturality and intercultural education in modern times. It traces the emergence of intercultural education from teaching culture in foreign language classrooms all the way to intercultural citizenship education. The chapter presents and discusses available and relevant models for developing and assessing interculturality. It also presents studies on the development of interculturality in the different educational contexts as well as methods and tools for assessing interculturality. Chapter 2 also looks closely at the recent criticism of intercultural education in regards to concepts, practice, and assessment. At the end of the chapter, the research gaps are discussed in detail, and two research questions are proposed.
Chapter 3 describes the context and methodology of the study. The chapter starts with the justifications for choosing Palestine as the study context, and it continues to introduce the educational and socio-political context of Palestine and the school that participated in this study. The following section introduces the study's participants, which were some of the schools' students, their English language teacher, and myself as the researcher. After that, the chapter presents a detailed account of the intercultural activities carried out with the students as part of the study project, the data collection tools used in this study, and the timeline of project implementation and data collection. The chapter closes with a description of the data analysis procedures employed in the study.
Chapter 4 is the largest chapter in this thesis as it presents detailed analysis of the data collected and the results. The chapter is divided into two parts. Part 1 presents background data on students, which was collected from them and the school before the beginning of the project's activities. Part 2 presents an analysis of students' emerging intercultural competences. It begins with an overview of the number and type of each emerging intercultural competence, and continues to present evidence and analysis of these competences one by one, starting with intercultural competences related to the category of knowledge, followed by those related to the category of attitudes, then skills, and finally values.
The fifth and final chapter presents a discussion of the results in relation to existing literature, and it highlights new findings that this study managed to capture. The first section of the chapter is devoted to discussing the first research question related to students' intercultural competences, while the second one is devoted to discussing the findings related to the second research question as regards to context and factors influencing students' intercultural competences. These two sections also present my own conclusions and recommendations in regards to each of the discussed findings. Following, the chapter describes the challenges and limitations faced while conducting this research, and it also presents recommendations for scholars and policy makers. The chapter closes with my personal remarks on interculturality and intercultural education.
