Practising ‘inclusiveness’ in teacher training through critical cultural awareness

The objective of this workshop is to present ‘a challenge to customary modes of perception, thought and feeling’1 by taking ESOL teachers through a series of introspective activities that focus on raising critical cultural awareness. I hope this experience will invite the audience to recognize and value ‘otherness’ and ‘inclusiveness’ in the creation and interplay of learner identities.

In teacher education programmes, both teacher educators and trainees bring into the training classroom theoretical and personal experiences and attitudes, and expectations of course content and methodologies that are not easily shaken or displaced. Developing Critical Cultural Awareness (CCA) through intercultural experience may help reduce this gap between ‘relativism and ethnocentricism’2, enable teachers to practice inclusiveness, and recognize and value ‘otherness’ as a pedagogical construct. Introspection - to gain ‘reflexive knowledge of social and cultural practices’3 - would allow us (ESOL teachers) to be more open to reinventing our pedagogies and moving towards a fuller understanding of classroom dynamics and learner identities.

In the workshop, I first aim to take the audience through a series of small-group activities that mostly deal with scenes out of life aimed at making participants examine, hopefully through humour, the misunderstandings that arise out of conflicting perceptions and assumptions about cultures and social customs of different groups of people. Then I plan to introduce a few information gap activities that are aimed to elicit responses that reflect shared perspectives of groups defined by age, personal interests or beliefs. Through these definitions of similarity and difference, I hope to make the audience introspect on how we unconsciously enact and practice exclusiveness, and how a more open and inclusive stance would help us develop in our learners the confidence to view English not just as a tool to learn about ‘target’ culture, but as an instrument to create, define and shape their individual identities.