The Discourse of Interculturality: Framing Intercultural Dialogue

• In Event: Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Issues in Literacy

Abstract

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Intercultural dialogue is said to be “an open and respectful exchange of views between individuals, groups with different ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds and heritage, on the basis of mutual understanding.” This definition, which comes from the Council of Europe’s (2008) White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue, is often cited by other transnational organizations and also by foundations and educational groups that promote intercultural dialogue as a solution to social conflict. The emphasis in interculturalism is on the inter—the connections that can result from openness to, and awareness of, others’ perspectives. Intercultural projects are being conducted throughout Europe and elsewhere that are educational in nature and that focus largely on communicative practices, oral and written.

The study reported here, which has an international scope, employed framing analysis to analyze a corpus of 11 declarations from the Council of Europe as well as the European Union and UNESCO to examine, first, how the problem of cultural conflict is presented and, second what practices are offered as solutions at the micro-level. Framing, according to Rein and Schön (1993) entails “selecting, organizing, interpreting, and making sense of a complex reality to provide guideposts for knowing, analyzing, persuading, and acting” (p. 146). For analyzing these documents, which employed a problem-solution frame, I employed Burns and Carson’s (2005) approach to analyzing problem complexes, solution complexes, and authority complexes. These analyses showed that the problem was most often posed as the conflict resulting from cultural diversity and that the solution varied across organizations and documents and even within documents. Included in the solution complexes was the discourse of liberalism (e.g., best practices, management of diversity), the discourse of postmodernism and postcolonialism (e.g., references to “the Other”), and the discourse of sustainability (e.g., linking cultural diversity and biodiversity). The paper concludes with a discussion of the educational approaches suggested by the organizations to help achieve intercultural dialogue, many of which have been implemented. These include using intercultural communication as core content for inservice and preservice teachers, giving more emphasis to the teaching of languages, fostering and supporting linguistic diversity, and promoting youth communicative exchanges and twinning projects.

Author

• Nancy J. Nelson, University of North Texas