This book examines continuing professional development (CPD) of teachers in Finland. As one of the best-performing countries in terms of education, the Finnish education system is often revered and held up as an example to follow. However, the authors argue that CPD actually constitutes the Achilles' heel of this 'miraculous' system, demonstrating that in fact it is a victim of contradictory discourses and actions among decision-makers, teacher educators and practitioners. Including extensive interviews from CPD providers, teachers and other educational actors, the authors critically discuss the 'wonders' of Finnish education, in the process debunking various myths created both inside and outside Finland. The authors also call for a new approach to comparative and international education. Based on over 20 years of experience in Finnish education, this pioneering book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of Finnish education, continuing professional development and international education branding more generally.

Chinese ethnic minority education is virtually unknown to readers outside China. Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative data, this book examines the basic education policies for ethnic minorities in China and describes policy implementation. It also discusses successful case studies, restrictive factors, existing gaps and challenges as well as the associated problems, highlighting teacher training and the role of policymakers. The authors propose recommendations to address the challenges faced by Chinese education, and to develop and implement culturally sensitive basic education for ethnic minorities in the country. Offering a rare glimpse inside minority schools in different parts of the country, the book appeals to educators, scholars, decision-makers and anyone interested in diversity education (intercultural, multicultural, global education).

This book deals with the importance of interculturality in teacher education and training. It is mostly through the concept of intercultural competence that interculturality has been constructed and problematized for educators. However, different approaches and paradigms are available and differ and/or share similarities in terms of ideology, method, practice, theoretical frameworks, and ethical considerations. There is no global agreement on the meanings of interculturality in teacher education and training, although some principles might be common across national borders. There is thus a need for educators to consider these aspects of interculturality in education to be able to become better teachers in a diverse world like ours.

This collected volume examines the multifaceted contexts and experiences of Chinese students, teachers and scholars in Australia, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK and the US. It can serve both as an introduction to Chinese people's mobility and migration in Higher Education and as a thorough review for more knowledgeable readers.

This innovative book problematises the internal relationships within and between the intercultural and the political in education. It engages in a critical dialogue with current practices and discourses, and the focus on 'the political' offers an alternative trajectory to explore interculturality within education. Drawing on international research and consolidated with application of top interdisciplinary theories in the field, Dervin and Simpson alert us to the current dangers of treating interculturality loosely in education. The authors engage in a dialogue to encourage readers to examine the meaning of interculturality and the state of research in education today, suggesting that we move beyond merely rehearsing theories, concepts and methods. More importantly they urge researchers, teachers and students to question Western-centric ideologies of interculturality. Intercultural and the Political Within Education is a must read for those who are dissatisfied with current intercultural research and education. It will be of great interest to researchers and students of the philosophy of education and those interested in the contemporary debates concerning ideologies, definitions and ownership of interculturality.

The concept of Third Culture Kids is often used to describe people who have spent their childhood on the move, living in many different countries and languages. This book examines the hype, relevance and myths surrounding the concept while also redefining it within a broader study of transnationality to demonstrate the variety of stories involved.

The concept of culture has long been criticized, with many scholars reformulating it or discarding it entirely. The field of intercultural communication and relations, however, still relies on culture to examine interculturality and this volume provides a comprehensive examination of the problems that the concept poses today.

This volume revisits the notions of Orientalism, Occidentalism and, to a certain extent, Reverse Orientalism/Occidentalism in the 21st century, adopting post-modern, constructionist and potentially non-essentialising approaches. The representations of the 'cultural Other' in education, literature and the arts are examined by scholars working in Australia, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and the USA. Vinyl compilations, TV series, novels, institutional discourses and surveys, amongst others, are examined so as to better understand how people construct their identity in relation to an imagined and idealised Other. This book will appeal to all researchers and students interested in cultural identity and stereotypes of the 'East' and the 'West', in particular in the fields of academic mobility, cultural studies, intercultural education, postcolonial literature and media studies.

Takes intercultural research and education to a new level by focusing on how scholars, students and teachers can communicate around the notion Supports the reader in building up their reflexivity and criticality (two essential aspects of working on interculturality) Language and the issue of translation are given a central position in problematizing how to communicate around interculturality Stimulates new thinking on what scholars and educators can do about interculturality as an object of research and education

This book explores the decades-long use of the notion of interculturality in education and other fields, arguing that it is now time to move beyond certain assumptions towards a richer and more realistic understanding of the 'intercultural'. Many concepts such as culture, identity and intercultural competence are discussed and revised. Myths about interculturality are also unpacked and dispelled. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, this book proposes a very useful framework to address theoretical and methodological issues related to interculturality. This somewhat provocative book will be of interest to anyone who wrestles with this knotty but central notion of our times.

This volume aims to stimulate interest in the under?researched role of silent partners (SPs) in multicultural education. Silent partners include formal and informal places?spaces in schools (e.g. architecture, classroom facilities, libraries, corridors, playgrounds, canteens), objects (e.g. teaching aids, furniture, wall decorations and overall interior design), interactive technologies (use of devices and applications) but also often taken?for?granted and not immediately visible patterns of thought, ideologies and assumptions. People involved in education all engage and work with a number of SPs that contribute to the delivery of curricula, but also to social life and well?being in and out of schools. The way places?spaces, objects and technologies influence the school community's experiences of learning, well?being and social justice is rarely observed and problematised in education - hence the adjective 'silent' in the term 'silent partners'. This book not only fills a significant empirical gap, but it can also inject public debate over future working environments in schools for multicultural education. It will be relevant to both researchers interested in developing their knowledge on these issues from a different perspective but also educators in search of inspiration for multicultural education.

 This book provides answers to the following questions: How could visual art support us in reflecting about interculturality critically? When we look at, engage with and experience art, what is it that we can learn, unlearn and relearn about interculturality? The book adds to the multifaceted and multidisciplinary field of intercultural communication education by urging those working on the notion of interculturality (researchers, scholars and students) to give art a place in exploring its complexities. No knowledge background about art (theory) is needed to work through the chapters. The book helps us reflect on ourselves and on our engagement with the world and with others, and learn to ask questions about these elements. The authors draw on anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and sociology to enrich their discussions of critical interculturality.

This book explores the concept of intercultural competence, focusing specifically on education. Intercultural competence can vary depending on the field of research or the context of application and has therefore developed over recent decades. As the world becomes increasingly global intercultural competence has become even more important but it is still not practiced satisfactorily. This book highlights views which are at odds with official and orthodox positions on intercultural competence to encourage fresh approaches to intercultural competence. It will be invaluable for researchers, practitioners and students interested in the global possibilities of education.

As the number of international students in Chinese higher education increases steadily, this volume is one of the first to focus on their many and varied experiences. With contributions focusing on such topics as intercultural adaptation, soft power and interculturality, language learning strategies and the intercultural, and transformations in perspective, this volume provides the reader with a broad overview of the latest advances in the field of interculturality and study abroad. While the book will appeal to a global audience of researchers, practitioners and students with an interest in Chinese higher education, it will also be of interest to all those who remain intrigued by conceptual and methodological issues of interculturality.

This book explores, and problematizes, what it means to be 'critical' in education research. Drawing together chapters from diverse global perspectives, this volume aims to stimulate dialogue about possible meanings of criticality in education research. In doing so, they question why criticality has become such an essential part of education, and what researchers expect of it. The book opens up and contests some of the deficiencies of criticality in education research: ultimately it is not a global term, but often creates a false binary between East and West. Offering an alternative trajectory to educational narratives surrounding criticality, this book will be of interest and value to scholars of critical pedagogy and comparative education.

Offering a unique reading experience, this book examines the epistemologies of interculturality and explores potential routes to review and revisit the notion anew. Grounded in different sociocultural, economic and political perspectives around the world, interculturality in education and research bears a paradoxical attribute of 'contradictions' and 'inconsistencies', making it a polysemous and flexible notion that has no definitive diagnosis and requires constant unthinking and rethinking. The author provides a toolbox of 'out-of-box ideas' in the form of fragmental yet standalone writings and follow-up questions concerning stereotypes about the very notion of interculturality and conceptual and methodological flaws in the way it is used. Readers are encouraged to critically reflect about interculturality as it stands today in global research and education. In identifying the paradoxes of interculturality and proposing alternative directions, the book stimulates a diversity of thoughts about the notion that goes beyond the 'West'. The book will be an essential reading for scholars, students and educators interested in education philosophy, applied linguistics and the broad field of intercultural communication education.

This book is unique in presenting new perspectives on how to introduce interculturality to children. It proposes critical ideas for introducing sensitive topics around culture, race and intersectionality. The book develops the reader's criticality and reflexivity, providing original and concrete tools to introduce interculturality to children and to make children aware of how intercultural issues matter in their lives and in the world at large. It includes case studies of children's realities from across the world, and provides insights into how to approach sensitive topics such as culturalism, discrimination, inequality and racism in relation to diversity in different contexts. Written in the spirit of critical interculturality, the book will be of great interest to researchers and students in the field of intercultural studies, global childhood and early childhood education, as well as trainee teachers and educators.

This book continues the author's long-term reflections (over 20 years of scholarship and experience in intercultural communication education) around the fascinating and yet contestable notion of interculturality in education. As an unstable and polysemic notion, interculturality deserves to be opened up again and again and there is a need to engage with it continuously, observing, critiquing and problematizing its complexities. This book urges researchers, students and interculturalists to take the time to think carefully and deeply about interculturality and to find inspiration beyond the dominating 'Western' ideological world of intercultural research and education. This book starts from short fragments written by the author for himself over a period of one year. In these short statements and notes about interculturality, the author reflects creatively on the questions he had in mind at the time of writing and offers some (temporary) answers, which, in turn, are questioned and revised. Over the 1000 fragments that the author wrote, he selected about 100, for which he wrote commentaries, referring to and reviewing current research and debates on interculturality in the process. One of the specificities of the book is to be highly multidisciplinary to help us get used to looking for inspiration in other fields of research and creativity. The fragments can be read randomly - the reader may open the book at any page and pick any fragment. The author suggests reading each individual fragment first and then the accompanying explanatory texts. While reading them, the reader is also invited to reflect on any potential addition to what the author wrote - anything they might dis-/agree with, anything they would have wanted to discuss with the author. Questions have been added at the end of each chapter for readers to reflect on and to enrich their own criticality and reflexivity. The book serves as continuous guidance for engaging with interculturality.

A major objective of this book is to identify the key determinants of the "East" and the "West" in the field of intercultural communication. It examines but also counter-attacks essentialist and culturalist analyses of intercultural communication between China and the rest of the world. Offering a cross-country examination and comparison of drought awareness and experience, this book shows two fields of research, which are complementary but rarely found side by side, i.e. the Arts and Intercultural Encounters, serve as illustrations for theoretical and methodological discussions about intercultural communication between China and the West. Scholarly and media discourses will find this work thought-provoking, instructive and informative.

This book offers a snapshot of interculturality as a complex, unstable and highly political object of research and education when it locates at the centre of multifaceted dialogues between teachers and students; students and students; teachers, students, scholars and readers. The context of the book is a Chinese course on intercultural communication education where students engage with local and international teachers. By listening to the intriguing and stimulating voices of these students in dialogue with the teachers, the reader also has the opportunity to enter the intercultural world of Chinese youth, beyond stereotypes. The unique approach proposed in the book is of interest to students, teachers of intercultural communication education, teacher educators, researchers and anyone wishing to build up supercriticality in relation to the fascinating notion of interculturality. The book contains 15 chapters and revolves around five main dialogues between the students and their teachers. Following each dialogue, the floor is given to the students to react to the dialogues and to share their views on questions that emerged from the main dialogues. The book conveys the authors' excitement about approaching interculturality in supercritical ways, engaging in the process with multiple voices.

This book starts from the premise that honest and constructive dialogue between scholars and educators of interculturality, especially from different geopolitical spheres, is needed more than ever. The book is about the important and yet contested notion of interculturality-a notion used in different fields of research. It was co-written by two scholars who have never met before and who got to know each other intellectually and personally in the process of writing this book, using interculturality as a looking-glass. (Re-)negotiating meanings, ideologies and their own identities in writing the chapters together, the authors enter into multifaceted dialogues and intercommunicate, sharing while accepting disagreements. The co-authors' different profiles in terms of geography, generation, status, preferred paradigms and multilingual identity (amongst others) are put forward, confronted, and mirrored in the different chapters, leading to the joint negotiation of aspirations concerning interculturality in communication and education. While describing their current takes on interculturality they also conduct autocritiques of their past and present engagement with the notion. The following questions are also addressed: Who is talking the most about interculturality in the world today? Whose voices are not heard? How to disrupt current hegemonies around the notion for real? And how to promote epistemological plurality in the discourses and narratives shaping our understandings of the notion? Autocritiquing is proposed as a way of unthinking and rethinking interculturality ad infinitum. This book argues that engaging with the notion requires constant self-reflection, examining one's positionality and intersectionality, listening to the voices that one projects onto the world of, e.g., research and education, and operating transformations in one's thinking, trying out new paradigms, ideologies and methods.

This unique book starts from the premise that students, scholars, and educators should be given access to a form of global education that is genuinely global. Using the notion of interculturality as change and exchange as a basis, the authors examine fifty discourse instruments (e.g. idioms, neologisms, slogans) related to what they call 'Chinese stories of interculturality'. China, like other countries, has a rich and complex history of intercultural encounters and her engagement with the notion today, which shares similarities and differences with glocal discourses of interculturality, deserves to be unpacked and familiarized with. By so doing, digging into the intricacies of the Chinese and English languages, the reader is empowered to unthink, rethink and especially reflect on their own take on the important notion of interculturality.

opens up new trajectories withn the conceptual labor in interucltural communication education and research reviews the most fundamental notions in interucltural communication education and research co-written by two scholars from different gepolitical locations providing complex and profound analysis a liberating book in the sense that it invites scholars and students to take the intiative to doubt, engage and critique what has been popularized, asserted and normalized

This book continues the two scholars’ endeavours for opening up more spaces for alternative perspectives, analyses and praxis in interculturality. The main text features fragments that bear relevance to a wide range of topics including education, politics, experiences, social realities, hierarchies, self-critique, language and locus of enunciation. The book takes a step forward by using fragments as an alternative way of doing research and writing scholarship. The premise here is that fragments are human and they reflect our fleeting, inconsistent and unsystematic production of knowledge that today’s scholarship has presented to be linear, structured and aligned. The authors draw on fragments to make their points as forcefully as possible by constructing sentences that destabilize themselves and readers to consider other paths and perspectives. That is, writing otherwise may propel thinking otherwise since the very bases, upon which we force our insights to mould through and by, are shaken and ultimately transcended. The chapters include questions with (temporary) answers as an attempt to induce readers to think for themselves and to move beyond what this book has to offer. The book will be a great read to scholars and students in the field of interculturality, education, and sociology. The authors hope that this book will be seen as a genuine example of breaking away from mainstream writing and thinking conventions about interculturality in communication and education without compromising epistemic depth and nuance.

An up-to-date discussions of interculturality, especially in teaching Adopts critical and reflexive perspectives Presents varied international voices Helps unthink and rethink interculturality for the 21st century