## Fiona Maine Maria Vrikki Editors

# Dialogue for Intercultural Understanding

Placing Cultural Literacy at the Heart of Learning

Dialogue for Intercultural Understanding

Fiona Maine · Maria Vrikki Editors

# Dialogue for Intercultural Understanding

Placing Cultural Literacy at the Heart of Learning

*Editors* Fiona Maine Faculty of Education University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Maria Vrikki Department of Education University of Nicosia Nicosia, Cyprus

ISBN 978-3-030-71777-3 ISBN 978-3-030-71778-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71778-0

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### **Acknowledgments**

## **Contents**

## **Contributors**

**Michael J. Baker** Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique, Télécom Paris, Paris, France

**Lucas M. Bietti** The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

**Benjamin Brummernhenrich** University of Münster, Münster, Germany

**Talli Cedar** The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

**Maria Chatzianastasi** Department of Education, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

**Françoise Détienne** Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique, Télécom Paris, Paris, France

**Lilija Duoblien˙e** Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Educational Sciences, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

**Maria Evagorou** Department of Education, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

**Riikka Hofmann** Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

**Regina Jucks** University of Münster, Münster, Germany

**Sandra Kair˙e** Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Educational Sciences, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

**Aino-Kaisa Koistinen** University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

**Tuuli Lähdesmäki** University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

**Fiona Maine** Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

**Elisabeth Mayweg-Paus** Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Education Studies, Digital Knowledge Management, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

**Beci McCaughran** Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

**Erez Nir** The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

**Gabriel Pallarès** Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique, Télécom Paris, Paris, France

**Chrysi Rapanta** NOVA University, Lisbon, Portugal

**Marina Rodosthenous-Balafa** Department of Education, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

**Stéphane Safin** Télécom Paris, Paris, France

**Baruch B. Schwarz** The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

**Ben Zion Slakmon** Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

**Agni Stylianou-Georgiou** Department of Education, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

**Susana Trovão** NOVA University, Lisbon, Portugal

**Maria Vrikki** Department of Education, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus

**Irena Zaleskien˙e** Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Educational Sciences, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

**Maria Zimmermann** Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Education Studies, Digital Knowledge Management, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

## **List of Figures**

## **List of Tables**

## **Chapter 1 An Introduction to Dialogue for Intercultural Understanding: Placing Cultural Literacy at the Heart of Learning**

**Fiona Maine and Maria Vrikki**

#### **1.1 The DIALLS Project Aims and Overview**

This book is a result of an extensive, ambitious and wide-ranging pan-European project focusing on the development of children and young people's cultural literacy and what it means to be European in the twenty-first century, prioritizing intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding. The book explores themes underpinning this unique interdisciplinary project, drawing together scholars from cultural studies, civics education and linguistics, psychologists, socio-cultural literacy researchers, teacher educators and digital learning experts. This chapter sets the context for the book by introducing the DIALLS project (Dialogue and Argumentation for cultural Literacy Learning in Schools) and its core aims and themes. It sets the tone of interdisciplinarity and its importance for an educational future where issues of living together, social responsibility and sustainable development transcend traditional categories of learning. DIALLS is seen as an opportunity for a synthesis of thinking, but our book allows each author to explore the goals of the project from their own interdisciplinary angle.

The three-year long DIALLS project has included ten partners from countries in and around Europe. The project was developed in response to a call from the European Commission (EC) Horizon 2020 scheme to gain a greater understanding of cultural literacy as a non-normative concept covering relevant culture-related knowledge, skills and competences and how young people in particular acquire it. The call argued that,

F. Maine (B)

Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. Vrikki Department of Education, University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Cultural diversity is one of Europe's most valuable assets and European educational and cultural systems need to cater for diversity and enable all citizens to build the skills and competences needed for effective inter-cultural dialogue and mutual understanding. The challenge is about understanding how young people make sense of Europe and its differing cultures. The influences on young people are wide ranging including formal education, family and cultural background and media. (European Commission 2017, 89)

The EC challenge was to create a project that could address how children and young people might develop the knowledge, skills and competencies needed for intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding.

The DIALLS project has met this challenge by working with teachers in different educational settings (pre-primary, primary and secondary) to create cross-curricular resources and activities. A Cultural Literacy Learning Programme (CLLP) was developed to teach children dialogue and argumentation as core skills needed for meaningful interactions where cultural values, identities and heritages could be explored in authentic discussions. The program, developed by teachers and researchers working together across several European countries, drew on Cultural Texts from Europe as stimuli for classroom discussion. One innovation of the project was that these were short films and texts that contained no words, so not only could they be used across all countries with no translation, but their non-verbal nature potentiated rich dialogues as children worked together to explore their meanings. This co-construction gave authentic opportunities for students to practice their skills of dialogue and argumentation to explore their ideas and move beyond interpretations of the text into rich, philosophical discussions about living together and social responsibility. In a further innovation and to enable intercultural dialogue in action, the project developed an online platform as a tool for engagement across classes.

#### **1.2 Reconceptualizing Cultural Literacy**

The DIALLS project centralizes co-constructive dialogue as a main cultural literacy value, with the aim of promoting tolerance, empathy and inclusion as key dispositions underpinning it. This aim has been achieved through teaching children in schools from a young age to engage together in discussions in the CLLP where they may have differing viewpoints or perspectives, to enable a growing awareness of their own cultural identities, and those of others.

As a term, Cultural Literacy has traditionally been used to describe knowledge about a list of significant cultural facts. Hirsch, who coined the phrase in 1988, even created a list of 5000 cultural items that 'Every American should know'. Whilst there has been significant debate about what should be on the list, few authors have challenged the notion of having a list in the first place, a problem that we address in the project. DIALLS moves beyond a concept of cultural literacy as being about knowledge of culture (through exploration of literature and art for example) into a consideration of the disposition to explore different interpretations of it. Thus, DIALLS reconceptualizes *cultural literacy* as a social practice that is inherently dialogic and based on learning and gaining knowledge through empathetic, tolerant and inclusive interaction with others (Maine et al. 2019). In other words, for our project we see cultural literacy as at the heart of intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding. The concept of 'literacy' itself has changed over time, from normative expectations about reading and writing print, into concepts about 'social practice' (Street 1984) and 'reading the world' (Freire and Macedo 1987). This view of literacy embraces multi-modality, a key feature of the DIALLS project as children are supported not only to co-construct meaning from visual and moving image texts but represent their responses through artwork in multiple non-verbal modes. For example, in one of the CLLP lessons, young children (five and six year-olds) created soundscapes for busy market scenes, in another lesson eight and nine year-olds responded to themes of inclusion by creating physical tableaus of themselves enacting inclusive behaviors.

We apply this evolution to the term 'cultural literacy' as we consider it to be 'dialogic' and by that we turn to Buber and his theories to explain how individuals view the world, their place in it and their relationship with it. Buber (1958) describes two positions in relation to a world view. An 'I-it' relationship views that world and its people as 'other' to the self. This position sets individuals as just that—a distinction between oneself and everyone else. However, he also describes an 'I-Thou' mode of being, that instead focuses on relationships. Through this an intersubjectivity is created, as 'we' exist together and our experience is present and mutual. 'My *Thou* affects me, as I affect it' Buber (1958, 12) argues. Through this lens, culture is a fluid and 'dynamic co-construction, lived in the present and not solely rooted in the past' (Maine et al 2019, 389).

In the European Network of Cultural Literacy in Europe, cultural literacy is described as:

an attitude to the social and cultural phenomena that shape and fill our existence – bodies of knowledge, fields of social action, individuals or groups, and of course cultural artefacts, including texts – which views them as being essentially *readable.* This legibility is defined by the key concepts of textuality, rhetoricity, fictionality and historicity ... which are understood as properties both of the phenomena themselves and of our ways of investigating them. (Segal 2014, 3)

Crucially this European definition uses 'attitude' as an indicator rather than just considering knowledge about culture only. It is more liberal, more open to global problems, cultural innovations and inventions, and critical skills. It works with the fields of cultural memory, migration and translation, electronic textuality, biopolitics and the body.

From this position, the underpinning dispositions of tolerance, empathy and inclusion take on particular significance and these three dispositions are key to Buber's concept of genuine dialogue (Shady and Larson 2010). We consider these dispositions together. Tolerance is at the center of the 2014 UNESCO report on Learning to Live Together, and more than merely 'putting up with' alternative views we view it as an by "an absence of prejudice, racism or ethnocentrism" (Rapp and Freitag 2015, 1033) and a capacity "to maintain ongoing relationships of negotiation, compromise, and mutuality" (Creppel 2008, 351). However, following Shady and Larson's interpretation of Buber's work (2010) we recognize that tolerance might still present more of an 'I-It' perspective (1947) and so look to empathy and inclusion as deeper commitments to living together. Buber (1957) takes an interesting perspective on the issue of empathy. He argues that in empathizing with other viewpoints, it is crucial that one's own position is not lost (1957), and he turns to the concept of inclusion to promote 'genuine dialogue' 'where each of the participants really has in mind the other or others in their present and particular being and turns to them with the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them' (1947, 22).

#### **1.3 Dialogue and Argumentation in DIALLS**

Dialogue in DIALLS then pertains to a wider concept of engagement with cultures, values, heritages and identities of both self and other people. This engagement opens up a 'dialogic space' where an 'I-Thou' relationship builds towards acceptance of multiple viewpoints. Wegerif writes:

People always have irreducibly different perspectives on the world because we have different bodies and histories. Even when we think that we agree about concepts we inevitably understand those concepts differently. This is not to suggest that achieving 'common ground' is not important in dialogues but that it is one moment in a larger flow of meaning that is more fundamentally described as the tension between different perspectives held together in proximity around a dialogic gap. If there is no gap then there is no dialogue and if there is no dialogue then there is no meaning. (Wegerif 2011, 182)

Dialogue means more than this in DIALLS and we embrace dialogue and argumentation as involving key skills that young people can learn to enable them to talk together across their diversity. These skills include listening carefully, building on and being sensitive to each other's viewpoints, critiquing perspectives thoughtfully and thinking about shared values and ideas. Careful positioning of ideas, respectful disagreements and acknowledgements of changes of mind are all part of participating in a pluralistic society and the CLLP lessons focus on two types of learning objective in parallel: to learn how to engage meaningfully in genuine dialogue and to discuss themes around living together, social responsibility and sustainable development.

#### **1.4 An Interdisciplinary Project**

We follow the principles of genuine dialogue espoused in the make-up of our project itself. We are interdisciplinary researchers and each chapter of our book explores a theme that is common to the project; we celebrate our interdisciplinarity by exploring these themes through different lenses.

The chapters in the book start with broader reflections on how education policy has embraced the notion of 'intercultural dialogue' and realized core concepts within different curricula, in addition to examining citizenship education and cultural literacy and their place in schools. In Chapter 2, researchers from Portugal start us off by asking whether and how educational research has changed its conception of "intercultural" in the face of the current fluid cultural realities around the world and the need for a continuously adapting and adaptive education. To address the question, they conducted a systematic review of empirical research with the goal to reveal the most predominant objectives, methods, contents, and risks that teaching and learning interculturally has faced in the last two decades. They end with recommendations regarding the most predominant current mandates of contemporary educational systems struggling with the challenges of globalization and inclusion.

In Chapter 3, Lithuanian researchers explore how the concept of Social Responsibility develops in educational research discourse and how it relates to the concepts of Citizenship and Cultural literacy. All of these concepts are defined and reflected in the contemporary research literature considering the challenging world issues such as multiculturalism, inclusion, climate change and they are discussed in consideration within a framework of Cultural Literacy Analysis framework developed as part of the DIALLS project. In the empirical part of the chapter the authors present, analyse and compare research data on how some of the interrelated concepts are reflected in different national education policy documentation. Finally, the chapter ends with the conclusions from the theoretical and empirical data, which are strongly conditioned by the research: Social Responsibility serves as a key ground stone for cultural literacy learning.

In Chapter 4, our Finnish colleagues look more closely at how intercultural dialogue has been defined as a policy and practice in policy discourses and research literature since the establishment of the concept in the Council of Europe's White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue (2008). Besides agreeing with its importance, recent research includes criticism of its implicit meanings and uses in policy discourses, as well as its implementation in practice. They summarize this criticism and discuss what kind of challenges scholars have identified from policy discourses and the implementation of intercultural dialogue. The chapter ends by discussing how art may function as an arena and instrument to overcome some of these challenges.

In Chapter 5 colleagues from Cambridge look closely at Cultural Texts in the project and how collaborative meanings can be made as teachers and children engage together in reading wordless picturebooks. Whilst similar in their wordlessness, the reading pathways of these narratives can vary considerably, offering different affordances for the oral co-construction of narratives. Case studies of children engaging together with their teachers are presented to illustrate how teachers can mediate these texts and support children in their dialogic co-construction. The chapter explores how the themes underpinning cultural literacy as defined in the DIALLS project can be realized in talk and through talk with young children. The data demonstrate how the language modelled by teachers and their careful guidance allows independent sense-making and enables collaborative co-construction.

The book stays with the Cultural Texts as researchers from Cyprus investigate some of the texts that were used in the DIALLS project in Chapter 6. The authors present several creative ways to analyze and teach the theme of "diversity", as this is approached in various ways across age groups (i.e. pre-primary, primary and secondary education). The wordless picturebooks that are comparatively examined both in terms of illustration and teaching are *Saturday* by Sasjua Halfmouw, *To the Market* by Noëlle Smit.

Chapter 7 investigates the potential of digital tools to support children's development skills around dialogue and argumentation and how these can ensure challenge and extension of ideas. Researchers from France and Israel describe the process of designing the 'DIALLS platform', a new Internet-based platform for supporting cultural literacy and understanding of European values based on collaborative and teacher-led reflection on wordless texts. They present the multistage process adopted for the designing of the platform. Firstly, a systematic and critical review of existing tools supporting the co-creation and sharing of cultural resources (e.g., multimodal texts, images, videos) was undertaken. Secondly, several co-design workshops with researchers, teachers and students were conducted aimed at contextualizing and further specifying the functionalities of the existing tools. Thirdly, multiple usability studies where teachers in five European countries tested different versions of the platform as well as the set of blended online pedagogical scenarios were organized. To conclude, the complexities and challenges involved in the development of an online platform aimed at supporting the objectives of a large European research project in Education are discussed.

Chapter 8, written by members of the teams in Israel and France, presents a theoretical overview of historical and philosophical approaches to moral development. Then, it introduces the researchers' methodology, which focuses on a microgenetic approach for analysis meant to examine two aspects of moral development existing in the DIALLS framework: dialogue on ethics (DoE) and ethics of dialogue (EoD). This methodology lends itself to the settings in DIALLS, as teachers direct the children to interact and create a dialogue following the textless narratives they are presented with. These discussions include both talking about certain values that appear in those narratives and conceptualizing them, and the children's conduct towards each other within the interaction, executing—or not—moral/ethical values expressed in the interaction. The researchers' approach is presented through an illustrative example taken from a DIALLS lesson at an Israeli primary school.

Chapter 9 stays with themes of social interaction, written by researchers from Münster, Germany, and France. Here, a hypothesis is developed about how social relations influence how students argue with each other. Building on findings about how relations develop in small student groups, the researchers focus on perceived psychological safety as an antecedent of sophisticated argumentation. Feeling safe and valued should benefit risk-taking, in the sense that students should be more willing to contribute diverse, and maybe unusual, perspectives. However, strong social cohesion could also lead groups to converge too readily on simple, nonchallenging ideas. After building a theoretical model, the authors operationalize central communicational dimensions: social aspects such as supportive behavior and facework, and cognitive aspects such as deepening and broadening. Excerpts from discussions recorded in a German classroom serve as examples for variations on these dimensions. Finally, the chapter describes how the multi-lingual discussion corpus and additional data gathered during the DIALLS project will enable testing this hypothesis.

Moving from students to their teachers, authors from Cyprus and England discuss in Chapter 10 the importance of offering a teacher professional development (PD) program in DIALLS in order to support teachers in the implementation of the CLLP. Focusing on the PD offered in Cyprus and Cambridge, the authors explore how theories of effective teacher professional learning were incorporated in the development of the PD. It then proceeds to discuss how teachers were supported in promoting dialogue and argumentation with their students. The chapter ends by presenting teacher reflection data on the PD and its benefits.

We stay with teachers in Chapter 11 as researchers from Berlin, Germany, consider communities of practice for teachers. With respect to the sustainable impact of educational programs, teachers need to be able to deal with the open educational resources of a program efficiently and appropriately. The chapter outlines how digital collaboration among teachers who are aiming to work with the open educational resources of DIALLS in their classrooms may support them in (1) using the materials and (2) building a long-lasting 'community of practice'. As part of an ongoing community of practice, teachers can share their own knowledge and experiences as a basis of their professional development. In this sense, the exchange of support and feedback also may give future teachers the opportunity to become confident and self-determined in teaching cultural literacy with the materials of DIALLS. In the chapter, the advantages and challenges of engaging in digital communities are discussed by considering the specific affordances of DIALLS.

#### **1.5 An International Project in the Time of COVID 19**

Normally, the specific time and place of a project is placed in the background of writings about it, yet the unprecedented crisis that the world found itself in during the Spring of 2020 inevitably had an impact on DIALLS and our engagement with teachers in and across countries. Initially planned innovations to engage children in actual intercultural dialogues through our designed platform were impeded by the closures of schools and then stringent social distancing measures on their return. As this book goes to press, schools are still in turmoil with a generation of children and young people affected by the pandemic and resultant societal actions. As children gradually return to school after months of being socially distant from their peers, the importance of a project like DIALLS is significant. If the goals of the project are to listen to and learn about and from each other, then the skills to enable this need to be centralized.

#### **References**

**Fiona Maine** is a Senior Lecturer in literacy education at the University of Cambridge. Her research focusses on the responses of children as they read multimodal texts together. She is the principal Investigator of DIALLS.

**Maria Vrikki** is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Nicosia. Her research interests focus on educational dialogue, teacher professional learning and professional development.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Chapter 2 Intercultural Education for the Twenty-First Century: A Comparative Review of Research**

**Chrysi Rapanta and Susana Trovão**

#### **2.1 Introduction**

Based on the assumption that globalization should not imply homogenization, it is important for education to promote dialogue and intercultural understanding. The first appearance of the term 'intercultural education' in Europe dates back to 1983, when European ministers of education at a conference in Berlin, in a resolution for the schooling of migrant children, highlighted the intercultural dimension of education (Portera 2008). One of the mandates of intercultural education is to promote intercultural dialogue, meaning dialogue that is "open and respectful" and that takes place between individuals or groups "with different ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds and heritage on the basis of mutual understanding and respect" (Council of Europe 2008, 10). Such backgrounds and heritages form cultural identities, not limited to ethnic, religious and linguistic ones, as culture is a broader concept including several layers such as "experience, interest, orientation to the world, values, dispositions, sensibilities, social languages, and discourses" (Cope and Kalantzis 2009, 173). As cultural identities are multi-layered, so is cultural diversity, and therefore it becomes a challenge for educators and researchers to address it (Hepple et al. 2017). Referring to Leclercq (2002), Hajisoteriou and Angelides (2017, 367) argue that "intercultural education aims to stress the dynamic nature of cultural diversity as an unstable mixture of sameness and otherness." This challenge relates to the dynamic concept of culture itself, as socially constructed, and continuously shaped and reshaped through communicative interactions (Holmes et al. 2015).

Faced with this fluidity of cultural identities, several European research initiatives, such as DIALLS, have focused on intercultural dialogue as a vivid experience not limited to *knowing about* other ethnical/religious/linguistic identities, but including the engagement in a *being with* relationship with any other person having their own

© The Author(s) 2021

C. Rapanta (B) · S. Trovão

NOVA University, Lisbon, Portugal

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
F. Maine and M. Vrikki (eds.), *Dialogue for Intercultural Understanding*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71778-0\_2

cultural identities. This twofold consideration of otherness and engagement forms the basis of the approach adopted by DIALLS with regard to intercultural dialogue and informs the project's place within the European context of intercultural education. The goal of this chapter is to analyze the intercultural education research literature, investigating its most salient theoretical operationalizations throughout the years, and identifying challenges and gaps that still need to be addressed by current and future projects.

#### **2.2 Theoretical Operationalizations of Intercultural Education Research**

#### *2.2.1 Intercultural Learning*

Under a broad understanding, intercultural learning is about "how we come to understand other cultures and our own through *interaction*, how we learn and communicate in *cultural contexts*, and how we learn *culturally*" (Jin and Cortazzi 2013, 1; emphasis added). Of the three key concepts mentioned, i.e. 'interaction', 'cultural context' and 'learning culturally', the first relates to means (dialogue), the third to consequences (culturally learning competence), while understanding and awareness of the cultural context is most related to intercultural learning understood strictly. Such cultural context awareness is mainly subjective, i.e. based on and including one's own world views (Bennett 2009). In this sense, an important related concept to intercultural learning is "cultural self-awareness," i.e. recognizing the ways in which one's "own worldview is reflective to some extent of the group of people with whom they interact" (Bennett 2009, S4).

Another related concept to cultural awareness is cultural sensitivity. According to the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) (Bennett 1993), people seem to move through six possible orientations while learning culturally: three ethnocentric orientations (Denial, Defense, Minimization), where one's own culture is experienced as central; and three ethnorelative orientations (Acceptance, Adaptation, Integration), where one's culture is experienced in the context of other cultures. The underlying assumption of the DMIS model is that as one's experience of cultural diversity becomes more sophisticated, in the movement from ethnocentrism towards ethno relativism, one's potential for demonstrating intercultural competence also increases (Hammer et al. 2003). To further highlight this passage from sensitivity to competence, Hammer et al. (2003) use the term intercultural sensitivity to refer to "the ability to discriminate and experience relevant cultural differences", and the term intercultural competence to mean "the ability to think and act in interculturally appropriate ways" (p. 422). The latter is further explained below.

#### *2.2.2 Intercultural Competence*

According to Otten (2003), intercultural learning leads to intercultural competence. Intercultural competence is largely associated with social, culturally learnt competence, such as the ability for empathy and perspective taking (Busse and Krause 2015). It can be defined as "the ability to interact effectively and appropriately in intercultural situations, based on one's intercultural knowledge, skills and attitudes" (Deardorff 2006, 247). To these components, Deardorff (2006) and others (e.g. Busse and Krause 2015) add the ability for reflection, which includes the display of flexibility and empathy. Deardorff's definition of intercultural competence is different from the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) which mainly refers to the ability of communicating effectively in a foreign language (Byram 2012).

In its initial conceptualization by Byram (1997), intercultural competence (IC) comprised a diverse set of skills and attitudes, including the knowledge of contents about the others' cultures (*savoirs*), the skills to interpret and relate (*savoir comprendre*), the skills to discover and/or interact (*savoir apprendre/faire*), the attitudes of being with others (*savoir être*), and the attitude of critical cultural awareness (*savoir s'engager*), which refers to "relativisation of one's own and valuing of others' meanings, beliefs and behaviours" (p. 35). However influential this description of intercultural (communicative) competence has been, it should not be ignored that it was proposed in the field of foreign language teaching to describe effective social interaction with someone from a different country. From this perspective, especially meaningful for foreign language education contexts, the differences between IC and ICC are difficult to identify, rendering Byram's proposal limited as regards the '*savoirs*' or know-what aspects of intercultural communication, which need to refer to a particular culture or cultures. This limitation is overcome with an 'etic' view of intercultural dialogue, as explained below.

#### *2.2.3 Intercultural Dialogue*

Intercultural dialogue is broadly defined as "the exchange of views and opinions between different cultures" (European Commission n.d.). In this broad definition, a distinction between the *emic* (i.e. culture-specific) and *etic* (i.e. culture-general) aspects (Triandis 1994) of cultural awareness or sensitivity is implied, with a clear focus towards the latter. Moreover, cultures are perceived as 'containers' and intercultural dialogue "as the interaction of stable and cohesive units which mutually accept and appreciate one another but which remain closed to mutual influences" (Gropas and Triandafyllidou 2011, 413). Therefore, a focus on the 'etic' aspects of culture as implied in the general definitions of intercultural dialogue often found in European policy documents (Lähdesmäki et al. 2020) weakens, if not cancels, the 'inter' (Portera 2008) dynamics of dialogue and their implied transition of knowledge and learning as part of an emic negotiation (Allmen 2011).

A culture-specific approach to intercultural dialogue must take into consideration both individuals' *objective* and *subjective* cultures. Objective culture, also known as 'Big-C' culture, refers to "the set of institutional, political and historical circumstances that have emerged from and are maintained by a group of interacting people" (Bennett 2009, S3). Subjective culture, also known as 'little-c' culture, refers to the "worldview of people who interact in a particular context" (Bennett 2009, S3). The importance of taking into consideration both types of culture when teaching or engaging in intercultural dialogue is explained by educational researchers O'Connor and Michaels (2007, 275), commenting on Wells (2007):

in the process of language acquisition, children acquire their culture's implicit sign system. As signs are internalized, so is the 'dialogicality' or meaning-making stance of the home culture internalized. In this way, children from different cultures, different social classes, or different school environments take on more than language; they take on different values or 'meaning potentials' and expectations relating to making meaning in dialogue with others or in thinking on one's own.

Based on the above, we cannot speak of intercultural dialogue without taking into consideration the meaning negotiation dynamics between at least two individuals representing different, both objective and subjective, cultural backgrounds at that moment of interaction. Further extending this assumption, it is those interaction dynamics, and their analysis, that define whether a dialogue is *inter*-cultural, and not any a priori definition of individuals' static characteristics before entering the dialogue. This view is adopted by the recently developed field of intercultural pragmatics, where culture is seen "as a socially constituted set of various kinds of knowledge structures that individuals turn to as relevant situations permit, enable and usually encourage" (Kesckes 2014, 4). These knowledge structures can be of various types, as previously explained, comprising specific culture knowledge (knowwhat), skills (know-how), attitudes (know-to-be) and behaviors (know-to-engage), all of which are also important components of intercultural competence (Byram 1997; Barrett 2012). A common paradox in the sociocognitive learning literature (Sfard 2008) emerges: from an *acquisition* perspective, intercultural competence is a prerequisite for engaging in intercultural dialogue; from a *participation* perspective, intercultural dialogue fosters intercultural competence.

For DIALLS researchers (e.g. Maine et al. 2019) and other educational researchers, the dialogue participation and engagement perspective prevails. Following Buber's (1955) perspective on genuine dialogue, a 'simple' conscious awareness of the other or others and "the intention of establishing a living mutual relation between himself and them" (p. 22) is enough for someone to engage in intercultural dialogue in its broader emic sense. Nonetheless, as dialogue analysts would counter-argue, such awareness of the others and their intentions in dialogue are not at all simple to develop, from the participants' point of view, and to detect, from the analysts' point of view. As Kesckes (2014, 11) points out:

To interpret an utterance properly, the interlocutor has to arrive at an understanding not only of its communicative function of utterances but also of the communicative agenda of his/her dialogue pattern, i.e., what s/he really wants to achieve in the dialogue.

Thus, since understanding of the content but also and especially of the communicative function of the others' utterances is highly problematic to achieve and to analyze, the study of intercultural dialogue *in action*, and not as a pre-defined or taken-for-granted entity, is itself a good starting point.

To summarize this theoretical introduction, the basis of intercultural education is intercultural dialogue (UNESCO 2009), which, in its turn, may or may not satisfy the intercultural education standards and goals, depending on the degree, depth or quality of participants' intercultural learning which leads to the so-called intercultural competence. At the same time, intercultural competence perceived as sensitivity and adaptability to different cultural contexts may be enhanced through people's engagement in dialogue and learning with and from each other. The three interrelated concepts, namely dialogue, learning and competence are important pillars of intercultural education, as policy documentation analysis shows (Lähdesmäki et al. 2020; see also Chapter 4 in this volume). However, it is not yet clear how the three concepts have thus far been operationalized and assessed by empirical educational studies.

#### **2.3 The Present Study**

In the face of the current fluid cultural realities the world over, and the need for a continuously adapting and adaptive education, the question of whether and how educational research has changed its conception and operationalization of intercultural education emerges as highly relevant. To address this question, a systematic review of empirical research is presented, aiming to reveal the predominant objectives, methods, contents, and risks of teaching and learning interculturally in the last two decades. Another aim shall be to identify whether there are any emerging differences by comparing research conducted in the beginning, middle, and end of the studied period (2000–2019). The chapter ends with recommendations regarding the facing challenges of contemporary educational systems struggling with the challenges of globalization and inclusion.

#### *2.3.1 Research Questions*

The following aspects/questions were taken into account when looking at intercultural education research initiatives described in the selected literature:

a. Which are the main explicit goals of intercultural education when operationalized through concrete programs, interventions or research initiatives? Have those goals changed over the years?

#### *2.3.2 Sampling*

The search for sources was carried out in the Scopus database by Elsevier for its strictness regarding quality criteria of published research. The first search performed had as unique criterion the inclusion of "intercultural education" or "intercultural learning" in the title of the document (Note: the terms "intercultural competence" and "intercultural dialogue" were not selected as keywords due to the specific meaning intended for the first, i.e. related to foreign language contexts, and the broad meaning of the second, i.e. as a general policy and not as educational praxis). This search resulted in 514 documents. After limiting the search to (a) documents published between 2000 and 2019, (b) the subject areas of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and Psychology, and (c) documents written in English, search results were limited to 370 documents including journal articles, books, book chapters, and conference proceedings.

After this initial search, three screening phases followed. The first was an "abstract only" screening, during which 220 documents referring to theoretical studies and not reporting on applied or empirical research were excluded. The 150 documents left went through a second, "full text" screening, during which documents not reporting directly on the study of intercultural education/learning/competence either as a process or as an outcome (e.g. studies focusing on the need for intercultural education as a policy without describing its practice) were excluded. This second screening phase resulted in 80 documents. Finally, a third screening focused only on journal articles, due to the difficulty in finding the full texts of several book chapters and conference proceedings papers. The main exclusion criterion for this final screening was studies carried out in the general context of intercultural/multicultural education but without defining the goals and/or scope in terms of dialogue and/or learning and/or intercultural competence development (e.g. studies exclusively focusing on foreign language learning, or studies describing intercultural education in general without defining any concrete aspects, or studies only describing students' or teachers' perceptions of a course or policy). Moreover, as the focus of this study is on the experience of intercultural education defined as intercultural dialogue, learning, competence or similar, we were not interested in what international educational systems offer. We were rather interested in identifying how intercultural education is operationalized in terms of its goals, methods, and contents, and whether this operationalization has changed throughout the years. The result of

**Fig. 2.1** The review sample selection process

this final screening was 39 journal articles, which formed the final review sample. Figure 2.1 shows the search and screening process.

#### **2.4 Findings**

#### *2.4.1 Demographic Characterization of the Sample*

Of the 39 studies included in the literature review, eight focused on Australia, either as host or as guest country, six on the United Kingdom, six on the United States of America, four on Germany, four on Italy, and the rest on other countries such as Spain, China, the Netherlands, and Canada. Five studies focused on primary school students, six on secondary school, 24 on university students, and the remaining four focused on post-graduate/professional education. Among the studies focusing on university students, five had pre-service teachers as participants, whereas another five of the rest of the studies focused on both students and teachers. Finally, regarding the studies' context, the largest number (eleven studies) took place as part of an international exchange/mobility/work abroad program, ten implemented a particular intervention aimed at enhancing participants' intercultural communication/learning skills such as film watching or dramatic performance, eight were carried out in "natural" classroom environments with a multicultural or intercultural focus, five focused on transnational higher education classrooms, and five implemented some type of telecollaboration between countries. The details of the reviewed studies are presented in Fig. 2.2.

#### *2.4.2 Chronological Progress in the Conceptualization of Intercultural Education*

The first research question was about identifying the concrete goal(s) through which intercultural education was operationalized in the reviewed studies, and whether there was any change in this operationalization throughout the years. A first observation pertains to the number of studies in the review and their chronological arrangement. A main criterion of inclusion in the sample was the degree to which intercultural education goals were somehow operationalized in the studies, and not remaining vague, undefined or even left implicit, which was quite often the case. It was also common that the studies focused on theoretical or policy-making aspects of intercultural education without any interventional or empirical aspect of assessing its components and goals. This led to quite a reduced sample of 39 studies published after the year 2000. It is noteworthy that the vast majority (36 out of 39 studies) were published from 2010 onwards, and the number of publications doubled after 2015. These differences in the number of studies focusing on some type of operationalization and assessment or improvement of intercultural education goals and outcomes probably reveal an increase in the felt need for this type of focus in recent years.

Of the 16 studies published between 2000 and 2015, 56% operationalized intercultural education goals in terms of intercultural competence, mainly influenced by Michael Byram's theory of ICC. The other 44% opted for the use of intercultural learning, with one study (Martin and Griffiths 2014) adopting Mezirow's (2000) transformative learning theory as main reference and six other studies focusing on different aspects/factors of learning such as cultural dissonance (Allan 2003), intercultural adaptation (Gill 2007), and (self-)reflexivity (Donelan 2010; Holmes et al. 2015). Studies published after 2016 present a different image, as shown in Table 2.1. A large majority (44%) of these focus on intercultural learning, sometimes equated to intercultural dialogue, whereas the rest is divided between intercultural competence (26%) and other definitions (30%), as follows: intercultural (self-)awareness (Brooks

#### 2 Intercultural Education for the Twenty-First Century … 17

**Fig. 2.2** Demographic characterization of the reviewed studies

and Pitts 2016; Bedekovi´c 2017; Varga-Dobai 2018; Børhaug and Weyringer 2019), intercultural adjustment (Dai and Garcia 2019), and finally definitions referring to a broader sense of intercultural competency, literacy or even education, often defined as a 'transcultural' competence (Frimberger 2016; Tonkin and Coudray 2016; Hajisoteriou and Angelides 2017; Hyett et. al. 2019). The Fisher's exact text of independence between year of publication (i.e. before or after 2015) and main intercultural education goal (i.e. intercultural competence, learning, or other) was significant (*p* = 0.03). See Table 2.2 for the corresponding cross-tabulation.

**Table 2.2** Cross-tabulation of year of publication and main operationalized goal

#### *2.4.3 Ways of Operationalizing Intercultural Education*

As an answer to the second research question, i.e. whether authors have focused on *learning about* versus *interacting with* other cultures, the latter was predominant in the analyzed sample, although manifested in different forms, as explained below.

Cultural self-awareness or 'cultural sensitivity' refers to the degree to which individuals are able and disposed to reflect on their own cultural identities, to identify any dissonances between them, and to understand the origins of the same (i.e. whether consciously or unconsciously acquired). In the analyzed sample, cultural self-awareness was studied both as an intra-personal and as an inter-personal process. Examples of studies that adopted the former include Varga-Dobai's (2018) study with pre-service teachers applying the 'cultural selfie' technique as a way of exploring their own 'funds of knowledge', and Mesker et al.' s (2018) study, again with preservice teachers, where personal biographies and visual metaphors of intra-personal development helped reveal their learning mechanisms of identification, reflection and transformation. When applied in inter-personal contexts, cultural self-awareness can easily be replaced by interpersonal/intercultural awareness and reflexivity. Indeed, several studies showed that this type of reflective experience usually takes place through encounters with others. For instance, Hepple et al. (2017) describe the critical cultural self-examination and 'multicultural awakening' stimulated by the immersion experience of ten Australian pre-service teachers in Malaysian culture. Mitchell and Paras (2018) describe how the experience of intercultural encounters between Canadian and Indian university students caused the former to shift cultural perspective and to question their values, beliefs, and self-concept. In another study, with secondary school students, Børhaug and Weyringer (2019) describe how European summercamp activities led participants to an indirect experience of the stigmatized position of the other and stimulated critical and empathic reflections on social justice and to greater awareness. Thus, reflecting on the experience of others and with others often comes hand-in-hand with cultural self-awareness and is, as Bennett (2009) argues, the precursor of intercultural learning.

For such a personal experience to be transformed into knowledge, an active/reflective dialectic between *intention* and *extension* of experience is necessary, as Kolb (2015) argues. Intention refers to the internal reflection preceding or accompanying action, whereas extension refers to the action itself, i.e. the active external manipulation of the external world (Kolb 2015, 67). This dynamic, dialectical basis of knowledge creation also applies to intercultural learning, which also explains why some authors have characterized it as *transformative* learning (Martin and Griffiths 2014; Mesker et al. 2018; Senyshyn 2018; Dorsett et al. 2019). During the process of transformation, which follows reflection, the individual "experiences profound changes in their existing practices", which usually results in "a new role or new identity" (Mesker et al. 2018, 56). Therefore, from this perspective, for individual competence or learning to be achieved, a manifestation of transformation is necessary in how individuals perceive themselves, others, and the world as a whole. For some authors in the analyzed sample, this transformation is manifested simply as a change of perspective from a more ethnocentric towards a more ethnorelativist worldview, following Bennett's (1993, 2009) theory. For others, transformation is or can be even more holistic, and includes a continuous adaptation to new realities, new perspectives, and new 'others' and 'otherness/-es' encountered both outside and within oneself. For instance, Frimberger (2016) uses drama as a method to stimulate 'strangeness' experiences with university students and help them acquire a collective understanding of the "transcultural, in-flux and subjective dimensions of intercultural encounters" (p. 133). Hajisoteriou and Angelides (2017) present a method of collaborative art-making as a way for primary school students to empathize with each other's emotions, within a context of civic efficacy, democratic agency, and friendship promotion.

#### *2.4.4 Main Methods Used, Findings and Considerations*

Regarding the third research question, i.e. the studies' main methods and findings, the analysis showed that a large majority of the sample (34 out of 39 studies) used qualitative methods of data collection and analysis, three used mixed methods (questionnaire and interview), and only two opted for quantitative methods (closed-ended questionnaires). From the studies that implemented qualitative methods, seven used ethnographic and narrative research methods, 13 used interviews, either alone or in combination with other methods, three used some type of transcribed classroom interaction analysis, and 11 studies used other qualitative analysis methods such as analysis of diaries, blog entries, written reflection or fieldnotes.

In terms of the main findings of the reviewed studies, only two of them (Santos et al. 2014; O'Brien et al. 2019) report an increase of culture-specific knowledge among their main outcomes. Most studies focus on the experiential aspects of intercultural learning, mentioning the value of: 'embodied' experiences (Donelan 2010; Tonkin and Coudray 2016; Frimberger 2016), 'immersion', 'boundary' and 'belonging' experiences (Hepple et al. 2017; Mesker et al. 2018; Dai and Garcia 2019), or even the concrete experience of the 'stigmatised position of the other' (Børhaug and Weyringer 2019). Other experiential and affective aspects were also highlighted: cultural/cognitive dissonance (Allan 2003; Mitchell and Paras 2018), non-essentialist engagement (Holmes et al. 2015), enacted understanding of the Other (Gill 2007), and mutual enrichment (Bedekovi´c 2017). For such experiential or even transformative learning to take place, a disorienting dilemma (Senyshyn 2018), contradiction (Baraldi 2012), or out-of-comfort-zone experiences (Hyett et al. 2019) are often necessary, while Martin and Griffiths (2014) stress the value of dialogue and critical reflection on those same experiences. The teachers' role (Piipponen and Karlsson 2019) and tension/discomfort balance (Grimminger-Seidensticker and Möhwald 2017; Mitchell and Paras 2018) are also reported as essential for successful intercultural learning.

When it comes to findings related to intercultural competence, such as acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, several studies identify a gradual acquisition and improvement of skills (Chao 2013; Santos et al. 2014; Wilbur 2016) and attitudes, namely ethnorelativism (Campbell and Walta 2015), empathy (Hernandez-Bravo et al. 2017), or understanding of cultural diversity (Busse and Krause 2015). However, other studies revealed problems in the development of students' intercultural competence. For instance, Ari and Laron (2014) found that encounters with 'others' during mixed-education (Arab–Jewish) college experience positively influenced the multicultural attitudes of participants, but only at a low percentage (11%). Another not-so-positive finding is reported by Lau (2015), who mentions the difficulty of disrupting children's ingrained stereotypes of migrants/refugees, and their tendency to be attracted more by the 'exotic' customs and festivals rather than deeper understandings. Students' superficial understanding of culture which remained at a traditions-sharing level is also reported by Bozda˘g (2018) in his study with adolescents.

Finally, when it comes to the main challenges identified by the reviewed studies, several authors have considered the influence of national culture on education, especially on policy makers' intercultural perceptions (Allan 2003; Bedekovi´c 2017; Hernandez-Bravo et al. 2017; Bozda˘g 2018). Other studies highlight limitations in the use of the concept 'culture' to refer only to a national identity, and its consequences on students' intercultural learning outcomes (Bozda˘g 2018; Hessel 2019). Studies also highlight the teachers' role within intercultural education initiatives, notably the need for educational support for cross-system transitions (Dai and Garcia 2019) and the importance of teacher education (Senyshyn 2018). Cloonan et al. (2017) further argue that teachers' exposure to intercultural learning techniques does not guarantee an increase in their capacity to deal with interculturality in their classrooms. Finally, regarding intercultural education projects mediated by the use of technologies, Tonkin and Coudray (2016) warn that students' concentration on online interaction may disconnect them from the very experiences which educators wish them to reflect on.

#### **2.5 Conclusion**

The goal of this review was to track the progress, if any, in the use and operationalization of the term 'intercultural education' in representative literature of the last two decades (2000–2019). The most salient finding was that there is a significant tendency towards different operationalizations of intercultural education after 2015, not limited to static concepts such as intercultural competence, but expanded towards learning and dialogue as dynamic and interdependent constructs: the more one engages in meaningful interaction with others, the more (s)he learns about oneself and the others; and the more one learns and reflects about his/her own learning, the more eager (s)he is to engage in genuine intercultural dialogue (with a focus on the 'inter' aspects of the interaction, such as mutuality, reciprocity, and responsiveness). This marked shift from a static, de facto view of intercultural education as a competence to deal with other cultures, towards a more dynamic, etic, culture-transcending perspective of intercultural education is highly significant. First, it shows how the recent reality of the new waves of immigration due to the Middle East crisis is reflected on actual challenges that educational systems face, in particular when it regards an 'alwaysin-the-making' citizenship education (Rapanta et al. 2020). Second, it highlights the importance of cultural literacy as "an indispensable tool for transcending the clash of ignorances (…) as part of a broad toolkit of worldviews, attitudes and competences that young people acquire for their lifelong journey" (UNESCO 2009, 118).

This new conceptualization of intercultural education based on an awareness development during intercultural learning experiences places attention on the fact that cultural diversity and internationalization per se are not enough for intercultural learning and dialogue to occur (Otten 2003). On the contrary, as our review showed, many times it is the national educational system, and with that, the way teaching and learning is perceived, that poses obstacles for authentic dialogue to occur. To add to this challenge, adopting an action-oriented perspective to interculturalism further implies that all education is potentially intercultural, when it addresses interaction, inclusion, or integration (Faas 2010). This tension between the official discourse about intercultural education, on one hand, and its actual implementation and operationalization in the classroom practice, on the other, is not to ignore, and, in fact, it emerged from the present review as well, as explained below.

First, the transformational aspects of experiential, intercultural learning are mainly assessed through self-reporting methods (e.g. reflective narratives, interviews), and not through more dynamic ways of assessment, such as interactional analysis over a period of time. This limitation is also observed by Borghetti et al. (2015) who argue that when intercultural learning is explored through interviews or questionnaires after a particular event (e.g. a class, a stay abroad, an intercultural encounter), there is the risk that participants forget or tend to justify what they have been doing and why during their interaction with the objective or subjective cultures. The second major space of improvement for intercultural education research is related to this distinction between cultures, still limited to the national level, when what is supposed to be studied are the "different and multiple identity subjectivities" (Trovão 2012, 263) that every individual carries with them. Although a few studies focus on the intrapersonal aspects of cultural literacy development (e.g. Bedekovic 2017; Børhaug and Weringer 2019; Brooks and Pitts 2016; Varga-Dobai 2018), a gap in the study of the dynamic aspects of cultural literacy and how it is developed through dialogue with *any* others is observed. Moreover, addressing otherness only in relation to differences in ethnical identities entails the risk of reinforcing stereotypes and prejudices (Catarci 2014; Muller-Mirza 2011).

This gap in existing intercultural education initiatives is addressed by the DIALLS project. Rather than drawing on definitions about what intercultural education and dialogue should look like, DIALLS promotes the view of cultural literacy as an always-in-the-making dialogue praxis (Maine et al. 2019; Rapanta et al. 2020). This is achieved through the implementation of a pedagogy that promotes genuine dialogue and constructive argumentation, where all viewpoints, and subsequently the cultural subjectivities expressed within, are equally welcome and encouraged to be expressed.

#### **References**

**Chrysi Rapanta** (PhD Communication Sciences, University of Lugano, Switzerland) is a Senior Researcher at NOVA University Lisbon, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, where she also teaches Intercultural communication and Social science methods courses. She has experience in the field of Argumentation and Education.

**Susana Trovão** (PhD Anthropology, Universidade Nova, Portugal) is a Full Professor of Anthropology at NOVA University Lisbon, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences. Her areas of research and expertise comprise Migrations, Inter-Ethnicities and Transnationalism.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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## **Chapter 3 Social Responsibility Through the Lens of an Agenda for Cultural Literacy Learning: Analyses of National Education Policy Documentation**

**Sandra Kair˙e, Lilija Duoblien˙e, and Irena Zaleskien˙e**

#### **3.1 Introduction**

The contemporary world is marked by numerous new challenges: growth of inequality, migration, development of new technologies, climate change. All of them create tensions among nations, social groups or cultures. In the face of growing multiculturalism and need for dialogue, social responsibility as a concept in the educational field has received due attention. For instance, Berman (1990, 1997, 2011) emphasized the importance of education for social responsibility in school and classroom and defined it as personal investment in the well-being of others. Vallaeys (2014) discussed social responsibility as a matter of university mission and function. Berman (2011) related the concept of social responsibility to the development of social consciousness that meant balancing on personal self-realization and personal achievement with equal focus on social self-realization and collective achievement. In particular, a person becomes conscious that personal development (i.e. How will I lead my life?) is interrelated with the development of others (i.e. What does the way I lead my life mean for the life of others?). In this case, social responsibility embraces cultural values and creates empowerment, cooperation, compassion, and respect.

Some researchers looked at different meanings of social responsibility (Dahlsrud 2008; Vallaeys 2018) and found that most of them attempt to take a social and citizenship approach to social responsibility as a meaningful action towards society. The United Nations (2013) highlight education for social responsibility at school level as a value-driven way for school development that encourages students to become more effective and compassionate individuals, prepared for the challenges of leadership and responsibility beyond their school environment. In the context presented above, we see *education* for social responsibility as a creation of a bridge

S. Kair˙e (B) · L. Duoblien˙e · I. Zaleskien˙e

Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Educational Sciences, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021

F. Maine and M. Vrikki (eds.), *Dialogue for Intercultural Understanding*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71778-0\_3

of communality which connects people from different stakeholders, diverse activities, diverse cultures, different personalities**,** etc. Education for citizenship, which is of the same importance as education for social responsibility, is seen as a creative way for every personality willing and able to participate in building this type of bridge which leads to a socially responsible, more coherent and sustainable social environment for everyone, especially those who are different in times of multiculturalism. This understanding deepens and adds more value to understanding the extended cultural literacy concept which helps to disclose that people feel involved in co-creating and supporting lives not only for themselves but for others as well.

We argue that social responsibility is an important attitude and action used to support the concept of citizenship. Strengthening education for active participation in schools could provide a much stronger framework for developing sustainability, and also intercultural cooperation for seeking common purposes in a rapidly changing and multicultural world. Thus, we raise the research question: What is the role of social responsibility in education for cultural literacy and how the concept of "social responsibility" is manifested in education policy documents?

To answer this research question, we used data from the DIALLS project. The authors of the paper, who are members of the DIALLS research team at Vilnius University, consider education for citizenship and education for social responsibility to be strongly interconnected with cultural literacy learning as it is understood and presented by the DIALLS project. It should help young people in schools to build up more dialogic, friendlier, more active, more respectful, and responsible communities and civic societies through empathy, tolerance and inclusion.

#### **3.2 Social Responsibility in the Contexts of Cultural Literacy Learning and Education for Citizenship**

Social responsibility is one of the cornerstones in the Cultural Literacy conceptual structure, composed by the DIALLS group (see Chapter 1 for overview). At present, due to the possibility to study abroad and be part of a more globalized educational network, students live in multicultural societies and have not only the opportunity, but also the responsibility of communicating with people from cultural and national backgrounds that differ from theirs. Accordingly, they need adequate education. The concept of literacy nowadays is changing rapidly and is understood not as singular and autonomous skill progression of learning to read and write, but it is in its essence "social practice" (Street 1984; Carter 2006). The concept of cultural literacy is also changing, and its understanding has radically turned from Hirsch (1980, 1989), who was the pioneer of the concept, to becoming much more sensitive towards communication, dialogue and social responsibility (Maine et al. 2019). Moreover, the first Cultural Literacy Education CLE conference (April 16–18, 2015, London) concluded that cultural literacy is a key societal challenge for now and the future and that social and cultural issues are seen side by side through the lens of literary thinking, employing communication, comparison and critique.<sup>1</sup> The concept of cultural literacy has been transformed partly using Freire's (2017) ideas towards critical and dialogic thinking, existential perception of action and events, and growth of reflection by turning attention to social responsibility. Presenting the ideas and purposes of the CLE, Segal (2015) stresses contemporary contexts of cultures that face migration, biopolitics, biosociality and unequal body treatment in different societies, and growth of new types of problems, which is why it is important to foster human rights and social responsibility.

Education for social responsibility started being perceived neither as a way to ensure higher professional prestige among companies, as it was around the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Crave et al. 2014), nor as a way to increase power, which was treated as foundation given the development of Corporate Social Responsibility in 1960 (Davis 1960). In discussing the concept of "social responsibility", some contemporary researchers (Hussain and Gonen 2017) point to the emotional approach which is generated from love, care and empathy. Thus, responsibility incorporates the emotional ability to empathize with others and understand their otherness, which means to put oneself in the place of another. Attention to social responsibility in education increased following Levinas' (1998) philosophy of dialogue, in which he outlined openness to unfamiliar others. He directed the existentialist's care for the world towards the care for the other, in that way giving priority to the social aspect. Practice caring as the main moral value in Levinas' view leads towards a socially sustainable world. Empathy to the "Unfamiliar Other" in the perspective of Levinas has been broadly reflected in those times and later, for example by Levin (1998), Biesta (2003) and Strhan (2012), and it is even more important to discuss it nowadays (Baranova and Duobliene 2019), when cultural diversity in the world is growing and provoking unpredictable encounters.

The main authors (Putnam 2002; Tonge et al. 2012; Martinache and Gobert 2020) researching citizenship education, cooperation, civic participation and engagement strengthen different forms of civic activism. However, most of these forms and actions are related to cognitive and practical approaches. Analysis of the works of mentioned authors showed that, theoretically, education for citizenship does not necessarily incorporate an emotional approach that represents the cornerstone of "social responsibility".

Looking into tendencies shifting educational perspectives, the outcome document of the Technical Consultation on global citizenship education "Global Citizenship Education—An Emerging Perspective" (2013) appears to shift the educational perspective and leads to the main competences of global citizenship, partly trying to cover the emotional dimension in the developmental process of learner skills, including: non-cognitive social skills (empathy and conflict resolution), communicative skills and aptitudes for networking and interacting with people of different backgrounds, origins, cultures and perspectives; behavioral capacities to act collaboratively and responsibly, and to strive for collective good. It is clear that even global

<sup>1</sup>The CLE Forum was established on the basis of LCS (Literary and Cultural Studies). More information: https://cleurope.eu/.

citizenship cannot be avoided by *supervision* of *social responsibility*. Furthermore, we found the importance of social responsibility versus citizenship in the UNESCO Strategy "Education 2030 Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action for the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4" (2015). Target 4.7 of this document reads that all learners should promote sustainable development through education, sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and cultural contribution to sustainable development. Social responsibility then becomes a particularly important concept for the understanding of the Global Citizenship and Cultural Literacy.

Theoretical and education policy discourse analysis shows that social responsibility is undoubtedly significant for teaching cultural literacy across European schools and all over the world. In the time of rapid changes, imbalances in nature and an aggressive human relationship with it, new waves of human migration, robotization of organic life, and the high speed of IT development and flows of information, humanity is facing injustice, insensibility and manipulation in social and cultural life, especially in social networks. Responsibility becomes one of the most important values in multicultural communication as well as in dealing/living with others, especially those who are different. As Segal claims (2011, 275), "nature may give us the basic tools to be empathic and socially responsible, but we need social guidance to do so collectively on an ongoing basis" and that cannot work out of the context. The authors of this paper would argue that it cannot work out of the cultural context and based on cultural literacy, which is also emphasized by DIALLS.

That is why "social responsibility" occupies a significant part and has a special role in the composition of other elements of culture-related concepts united within the Cultural Analysis Framework developed as part of the DIALLS project.

#### **3.3 Methodology**

The examination of national policy documentation was conducted as a qualitative conceptual analysis, extended with a quantification of the chosen concepts. This methodological choice is motivated by a constructivist perspective on concepts, emphasizing their contested, controversial, and transforming nature (e.g. Koselleck 2002; Guzzini 2005). According to Guzzini (2005), a constructivist conceptual analysis not only enables analytical assessment (i.e. what exactly it is meant by the concept that is used), but also encourages understanding of the performative aspects of the concepts (i.e. what does the concept might do). Therefore, the chosen approach not only enables clear understandings of the concepts and its variables, but also stimulates reflection on their performative nature, i.e. what particular concept can achieve in educational politics and practice. Based on a constructivist perspective, concepts are considered as a part of language that is also performative (Guzzini, 2005). The performative view of language makes meaning of words and signs in relation to reality, humans and artifacts (Guzzini 2005; Barinaga 2009). From this perspective, the concepts used in the national policy documentation are also seen as a performative part of educational policy language.

The analysis of the national policy documentation in this chapter encompasses five selected countries from nine participant countries of the DIALLS project—Cyprus, the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Germany, Lithuania, Spain, and Portugal. Firstly, the selection of countries was based on accessibility of the national policy documentation for the qualitative concept analysis in the English language. The latter criterion was essential for selecting countries and at the same time the most challenging one, as often national policy documents in each country are primarily written in the official language. Thus, based on these two criteria, five countries have been selected. It was possible to get access to the national policy documentation in English for Finland, Lithuania, the England and Spain, while Portugal has been selected following consultations and translation support from a Portuguese university participating in the DIALLS project.

The selection of the national education policy documents was carried out using the following criteria: (a) official documents that are applicable for the entire school system in the chosen country; (b) official documents that are the same or as similar as possible among all the selected countries; (c) official documents that are available in English. Based on these criteria, the chapter concentrates on 14 national policy documents that are relevant.<sup>2</sup> The selected documents provide an equivalent comparative analysis of these five countries.

The conceptual analysis of the education policy documentation in this chapter focuses on origin and performance of the concept of social responsibility. The concept analysis of the data was guided by theoretical views on constructivist perspectives on concepts, performativity of language and context. Therefore, the analysis not only focused on the concept of social responsibility, but also of the established overlap or relation of social responsibility concept with other culture-related concepts.3 The analysis included the following questions: (a) How are the concepts defined: explicitly or implicitly? (b) What is the conceptual context of these concepts? (c) What is their cultural/societal context to which they are connected in the documents? (d) What is their relationship with the concept of social responsibility? The findings in the chapter are discussed in order to answer these questions.

The conceptual analysis of the national documents was carried out using MAXQDA18 software for qualitative and mixed methods data that can be used for data coding and retrieving coded segments. The MAXQDA software incorporates various data management features as well as various visual tools for data analysis.

<sup>2</sup>The list of all selected documents appears after the list of references.

<sup>3</sup>The culture-related concepts were identified in the planning phase of the project as a key for intercultural dialogue and cultural literacy. This list is based on the previous experience and expertise of team members from the University of Jyväskylä and Vilnius University representing different scholarly approaches, also the list is based on the literature review and the development of the notion of cultural literacy. The key culture-related concepts that address different aspects of cultural literacy have been listed in the DIALLS Grant Agreement (2018). The concepts are *cultural literacy, culture, value/values, cultural heritage, identity, inclusion, empathy, tolerance, multiculturalism, intercultural dialogue, citizenship, participation and cooperation* (Lähdesmäki et al. 2018)*.*

The relation between social responsibility and other culture-related concepts in the national policy documents at issue are visualized using Code Maps.

CodeMaps reveal an overlap of different concepts (coded segments) in the national policy documentation. In particular, the more similar the concepts are in terms of their use in a particular national policy document, the closer they are placed together on the map. The circles symbolize the concepts with the distances between two concepts representing how similarly the concepts have been applied in the document. The larger the circles are, the more assignments have been made with the particular concept. The connecting lines between different concepts indicate which codes overlap or co-occur in the document. The thicker the connection lines are displayed, the more coincidences there are between two concepts. The connection line between two concepts appears if there are at least two frequencies between these concepts in one segment of the document.

#### **3.4 Findings: Manifestation of Social Responsibility Through Citizenship, Cooperation and Participation**

There are other scientific analyses about the significance of the social responsibility concepts for the educational systems in the selected countries. For instance, Rauhansalo and Kvieska (2017) analyzed the significance of social studies and social subjects in the Finnish educational system and revealed that the Finnish National Board of Education identifies social studies as a critical element for the basics of democracy education, like equality, respect for human rights, social responsibility and freedom of opinions. Another example is the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility model proposed by Hellison (2003). It represents one of the most consistent intervention programs that can be applied in physical education classes, and which has been widely explored in the Spanish education context (e.g. Escartí et al., 2010; Carbonero et al. 2017). However, surprisingly, social responsibility as a single two-term concept does not appear in the analysed national policy documentation of any of the five countries. Moreover, looking into the national policy documentation, it is difficult to identify clear reasons why the term of social responsibility (or social and responsible) does not appear there.

Having analysed Finland's national documents, we found the closest relation between *social* and *responsible* in the statement of national goals of the Finnish education. Specifically, the first national goal of education that steers the preparation of the National Core Curriculum is identified as *Growth as a human being and membership in society* (The Core Curriculum of Basic Education 2014). The description of this goal specifically states that "supporting the pupils' growth as human beings and into ethically responsible members of society is a central goal" (The Core Curriculum of Basic Education 2014, 25). We could grasp another close occurrence of*social* and *responsible* in the profiles of social studies curricular subjects. However, in all these cases the relation between *social* and *responsible* is more implicit than explicit as co-occurrences of the terms *social* and *responsible* are barely linked to each other. The co-occurrences presuppose close relation between society and individual's responsibility. However, *social* and *responsibility* more often occur as two separate terms or concepts in the Finnish documents.

Similarly, in the national documentation of Lithuania, the co-occurrences of the terms *social* and *responsible* are not used as united, but rather as supplementary or separate elements. For example, there is an obvious distinction between two concepts in the Lithuanian Law on Education (2016) where responsibility is related to the formation of a human being, while the social element is exceptionally significant for modern social competence of an individual. These two terms also occur in the Curriculum Framework of Primary and Basic Education of Lithuania (2008) where educating a *responsible citizen* is related to pupils' *social integration and lifelong learning*.

In the education policy documentation of the England and Spain, *social* and *responsible* basically occur in the descriptions of citizenship education. The England's Secondary Education Curriculum (2013) explicitly states that citizenship should "equip pupils with the skills and knowledge to explore political and social issues critically [--] and should also prepare pupils to take their place in society as responsible citizens" (59). These two terms are also incorporated in the aim of education where educating a responsible citizen is related to pupils' *social integration* and *lifelong learning*. Similarly, in the case of Spain, it is explicitly indicated that "[- -] education is the most effective way of guaranteeing the exercise of democratic, responsible, free and active citizenship, which is essential for the constitution of an advanced, dynamic and equitable society (the Spanish Law on Education 2006, 13). Yet, in both countries the concepts of responsible citizens and social issues generally occur not as a single element, but as complementary principles of citizenship education.

The concept of social responsibility in Portugal's Law on the Education System (1986, 2009) is also implicitly related to social or civic citizenship. The Portuguese Students' Profile at the End of Compulsory Education (2017) also repeatedly states that the conceptual framework of a pupil orients towards training of autonomous, responsible and engaged citizens who are not only self-aware, but also conscious of others and the world and become active participants in society.

The analysis reveals that, in general, social responsibility as a singular concept occasionally occurs in the national documents. These two concepts are regularly considered as complementary or separate aspects in school education. In generalizing the dominant meaning of social responsibility among all the selected countries, we could state that being socially responsible means being a human and a natural member of society. In this case, social responsibility is interlinked with individual responsibility. However, such a rare reference to the concept of social responsibility in the national policy documentation of all five countries inevitably minimizes its significant contribution to promoting and practicing cultural literacy and making sense of Europe. Yet, this concept manifests in the national policy documentation through other culture-related concepts that will be analysed below. Meanwhile, the

**Fig. 3.1** Code map of the Core Curriculum of Basic Education (Finland, 2014)

concept of cultural literacy is rarely visible in the analysed documents of all countries and, therefore, is hardly related to social responsibility**.**

Looking into the overlap of social responsibility with other culture-related concepts in the National Curriculum (or Curriculum Framework) of the selected countries, we can see a variety of combinations. For example, in the National Curriculum of Finland, the concept of *cooperation* is the most frequent among all the analysed concepts (588)<sup>4</sup> and, therefore, could be considered a core concept that forms relations with various other concepts (see Fig. 3.1).

It can be clearly seen in the code map that social responsibility also overlaps with cooperation. In particular, social responsibility together with cooperation and citizenship establish a cluster (i.e. *light grey* concept cycles in the Fig. 3.1) that shows the closest co-occurrence of these three concepts in the National Curriculum of Basic Education of Finland. We can also see other clusters: the cluster of cultural heritage, culture and multiculturalism, and the cluster of participation, inclusion and identity. However, these two clusters do overlap only with the dominant concept of cooperation, while social responsibility co-occurs only with two concepts in the same cluster.

<sup>4</sup>In the analysis, the quantitative frequency of the particular concept is given in the brackets.

Interestingly, the concept of cultural literacy does not appear in the code map of Finland. Generally, the concept of cultural literacy is mentioned only twice in this document and is related to another concept that does not belong to any of the analysed culture-related concepts, i.e. to *multiliteracy*. Specifically, the concept of cultural literacy is mentioned both times as one of literacies (together with analytic and critical literacies) integrated into multiliteracy. As cultural literacy relates to multiliteracy, the meaning of this concept is related to producing, interpreting, and analyzing oral, written or visual cultural (or culture-related) texts. Thus, cultural literacy is rarely related to any of the cluster of concepts that we see on the concept map.

The National Plan of Education and Citizenship of Portugal (see Fig. 3.2) also shows similar co-occurrences of social responsibility and other culture-related concepts.

The code map demonstrates that social responsibility occurs in a cluster (light grey colour) together with many other culture-related concepts—*cooperation, identity, citizenship, inclusion* and *cultural dialogue*. In the documents at issue, social responsibility is placed closely to identity and cooperation, yet, the closest co-occurrence of social responsibility is seen only with the particular meaning of the citizenship concept (a connecting line between these two concepts)—*citizenship as a subject of the Citizenship and Development curricular unit*. The content of this curricular subject is based on three main axes: personal civic attitude (identity as a citizen, individual autonomy, human rights); interpersonal relations (communication, dialogue); social and intercultural relations (democracy, sustainable human development, globalization and interdependence, peace and conflict management). Social responsibility

**Fig. 3.2** Code map of Education and Citizenship. National Plan (Portugal, 2017)

implicitly manifests through all three axes, but especially, through the third one *social and intercultural relations*. However, the overlap of these two concepts in the document is predictive as the concept of citizenship is the most visible concept (104) in the analysed document that focuses on citizenship education. Thus, citizenship becomes an umbrella concept that co-occurs with other concepts, including social responsibility.

At the same time, cultural literacy does not appear in the Portuguese National Plan for Education for Citizenship. Cultural literacy as a term appears only in the Student's Profile at the End of Compulsory Education (2017). The document states that after school education every pupil should become

…a citizen endowed with cultural, scientific and technological literacy, able to critically question reality, to assess and select information, to make assumptions, and capable of making decisions based on the daily experience. (The Student's Profile at the End of Compulsory Education, 10)

However, it is a single segment that refers to cultural literacy; we could hardly grasp any manifestation of this particular concept in any other part of this national policy document of Portugal.

Likewise, the relationship between social responsibility and citizenship clearly manifests in the curricula documents of Lithuania and Spain. Interestingly, in both cases social responsibility forms a cluster only with this particular concept, i.e. these two concepts are placed closely to each other, yet they do not intersect. It suggests that both concepts supplement each other in the analysed documents, especially in the case of Spain, as the occurrence of both concepts is displayed in a similar position (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4).

The code maps reveal other similarities shared by these two countries. We do see occurrences of analogous concepts and there are three clusters in each case that hardly overlap with each other (no connecting lines among any of the concepts). Furthermore, in both cases there is no manifestation of cultural literacy. In the case of Lithuania, the concept of cultural literacy marginally manifests (2) only in the Law on Education (1991/2016) as socio-cultural maturity or general literacy. Both times the concept is mentioned for the purpose of (basic and secondary) education, but it is not explicitly defined:

The purpose of basic education shall be to provide an individual with the basics of moral, sociocultural and civic maturity, general literacy, the basics of technological literacy, to cultivate national consciousness, to foster an intent and ability to make decisions and choices and to continue learning. (1991/2016, 12)

As seen from the stated purpose of basic education, sociocultural maturity is mentioned in relation to the concepts of morality and citizenship, whereas general and technological literacies here are mentioned separately. In the case of Spain, however, the concept of cultural literacy does not appear in any of the analysed national documents.

Finally, in the case of the England, we found only one cluster that encompasses three concepts—*social responsibility, citizenship, and participation*, whereas other analysed culture-related concepts do not form any intersections. However, the close

**Fig. 3.3** Code map of the Curriculum Framework for Primary and Basic Education (Lithuania, 2008)

placement of all three concepts in the National Curriculum Framework of Secondary Education (2013) is a specific one. The concept of citizenship is an umbrella concept that encompasses participation and social responsibility. In particular, the latter two concepts appear in the profile of the citizenship education curricular subject. Here social responsibility and participation are related to one of the concrete activities *volunteering*—that stimulates the formation of an active citizen.

The national curriculum for citizenship aims to ensure that all pupils:

[--] develop an interest in, and commitment to, participation in volunteering as well as other forms of responsible activity, that they will take with them into adulthood develop an interest in, and commitment to, participation in volunteering as well as other forms of responsible activity, that they will take with them into adulthood. [--] (The National Curriculum Framework of Secondary Education 2013, 59)

Interestingly enough, the England's National Curriculum of Secondary Education (2013) is the only document where social responsibility is in close placement with the concept of participation. Nevertheless, participation also manifests in the code maps of other countries (except Spain). In the cases of Finland and Portugal, we can see an obvious intersection of participation and citizenship. The latter concept is

**Fig. 3.4** Code map of the Basic Curriculum for Compulsory Secondary Education (Spain, 2013)

the dominant one in relation to social responsibility in all selected countries; thus, it clearly manifests in relation to social responsibility. As citizenship is in close placement with participation, we could also relate social responsibility to participation more closely than to cooperation. The concept of cooperation occurs only in the code map of Finland and could be considered in a more fragmental intersection than participation.

#### **3.5 Conclusions**

Education policy discourse and literature analysis demonstrates the crucial role of the change of understanding of "social responsibility" in the contemporary world. Social responsibility builds bridges between different cultures and keeps their communication alive, transforming passivity into activity and creating conditions for living and working together for well-being in the future. Although social responsibility is one of the most important components of cultural literacy, the interrelation between cultural literacy and social responsibility is not clearly defined in educational policy discourse and literature. That is because understanding of cultural literacy is changing very fast, depending on changes in the world, the appearance of new social, cultural and economic challenges. If cultural literacy was first introduced and understood as a set of knowledge, later regarded as the skills for cultural communication, today it would be much more related to social actions towards implementation of common understanding for living together with those "who are different", creating culture of dialogue and empathy.

Even though the significance of social responsibility for education is obvious, the conceptual analysis showed that this particular concept is hardly visible and present in the national education policy documentation of the selected EU countries. Surprisingly, the performance of social responsibility as a single two-term concept is sporadic in the national policy documentation of all five analysed countries. Moreover, looking into the national policy documentation, it is difficult to identify clear reasons why the term of social responsibility (or social and responsible as two separate, but inter-related concepts) does not appear. The analysis captured only some possible manifestations of social responsibility that mainly refers to being a human and a mature member of society. Therefore, it raises question: what this concept can achieve in educational politics and practice? The analysis of the relationship between social responsibility and other culture-related concepts demonstrated that the latter concept in one way or another tends to relate to three other concepts—*citizenship, cooperation and/or participation.* The qualitative analysis revealed that all four concepts are often overlapping, porous, and supplementing each other. However, the relations between all concepts are not equivalent.

Commonly, citizenship and social responsibility have a solid interconnection. Citizenship becomes the dominant concept in the selected national policy documentation of the five countries that comprises other culture-related concepts and social responsibility. Specifically, citizenship refers to the formation or growth of an active, responsible and democratic citizen who also actively participates as a responsible member of society. However, the relation between social responsibility and cooperation and participation is more porous. On the one hand, it is possible to state that active membership of a responsible citizen undoubtedly manifests through a person's actual participation and cooperation in school life and afterwards in social as well as civic life. Yet, on the other hand, the concepts of *social* and *responsible* in the national policy documentation of the five countries frequently appear not as united, but as two supplementary elements that are not necessarily interrelated. Besides, cooperation and participation usually manifest not as equivalents, but as components of active citizenship. Therefore, the relation between social responsibility and these two concepts is unstable.

In comparison with *citizenship*, the qualitative analysis revealed that *cultural literacy* is rarely visible in the national policy documentation of the selected countries. Other concepts occurring in the documents—*participation* and *cooperation* are not relevant to the cultural literacy concept. Such a rare appearance of cultural literacy inevitably minimizes the significant contribution of this concept not only to social responsibility, but also to other culture-related concepts. The discourse in education policy documentation utilized a broad variety of possible meanings of the analysed concepts that might have crucial importance for cultural literacy and citizenship. However, the analysis revealed that the education policy documentation in the countries at issue seeks to guide education administration and teachers through the concepts, the meanings of which are rarely defined, explained or related to cultural literacy or such concepts as culture or cultural heritage. Therefore, it is hard to confirm that social responsibility is actually on the agenda for cultural literacy learning. The analysis revealed how the education policy documentation seeks to guide education administration and teachers through extremely broad and ambiguous concepts, the meanings of which varied even within the same document.

Responding to the findings of the presented research study, we would recommend that national education policy makers, researchers and practitioners reflect on analytical and performative aspects of the concept of social responsibility, i.e. how it appears in the national policy documentation, what it means and what these meanings can do in practice. Moreover, social responsibility is the bedrock of cultural literacy learning, development and usage of citizenship participatory skills in everyday life emphasizing not only rational, but also strong emotional dimensions.

#### **References**

Hirsch, E.D. 1980. Culture and literacy. *Journal of Basic Writing* 3 (1): 27–47.

**Documents Analyzed**

#### *England*

#### *Finland*

#### *Lithuania*

#### *Spain*

Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. *The Organic Law of Education*. Madrid: MEC, 2006.

Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. *Organic Law 8/2013 of 9 December For Improving Educational Quality* (2013, published 2018). https://www.global-regulation.com/translation/spain/ 1447540/royal-decree-1105---2014%252c-of-26-december%252c-which-establishes-the-basiccurriculum-of-compulsory-secondary-education-and-secondary-education.html. Accessed 30 September 2018.

3 Social Responsibility Through the Lens of an Agenda … 43

#### *Portugal*

**Sandra Kair˙e** PhD in Education, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Philosophy at Vilnius University. Her research field covers intercultural learning and interactions among different cultural groups in the educational context.

**Lilija Duoblien˙e** PhD in Education, Professor, Head of the Department of Education Theory and Culture at the Institute of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Philosophy at Vilnius University. Her research field is philosophy, multimodality and visuality in education.

**Irena Zaleskien˙e** Professor, PhD in Education, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Philosophy at Vilnius University; DIALLS local co-coordinator. Her research field encompasses citizenship and social responsibility.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Chapter 4 Explorations of Linkages Between Intercultural Dialogue, Art, and Empathy**

**Tuuli Lähdesmäki and Aino-Kaisa Koistinen**

#### **4.1 Introduction: What is intercultural dialogue?**

In the 2000s, European societies have transformed quickly due to the networked global economy, deepening a European integration process, forced and voluntary movement of people to and within Europe, and influence of social media on culture, communication, and society. Europe has become an increasingly diverse and pluricultural continent where many people simultaneously identify with multiple different cultural and social groups. In such "super-diversified" (Vertovec 2007) European societies diversity itself is broad, multidimensional, and fluid (ibid.; Blommaert and Rampton 2011). Different social locations and identities intersect within them whether cultural, ethnic, national, social, religious, or linguistic. At the same time, however, European societies have faced the rise of diverse populist and radical rightwing movements promoting profoundly monoculturalist views and cultural purism. What are the means to confront this polarization of views and attitudes in Europe?

In this chapter, we examine the concept of intercultural dialogue in the context of the objectives of the DIALLS project (Chapter 1), focusing on the interconnections of intercultural dialogue, art, and empathy. We explore how intercultural dialogue has been defined as a concept, policy, and practice to tackle the various challenges that 'super-diversified' societies may face if cultural encounters within them are not based on mutual respect and aspiration to understand differences. We emphasize a core aspect in the definitions of intercultural dialogue, namely empathy. Besides agreeing that intercultural dialogue is important in today's societies, recent research includes criticism of its implicit meanings and uses in policy discourses and its implementation in practice. We continue our chapter by summarizing this criticism

T. Lähdesmäki (B) · A.-K. Koistinen

University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A.-K. Koistinen e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
and discussing the challenges scholars have identified in policies and practices of intercultural dialogue. Various previous studies have emphasized 'shared space' as a prerequisite for successful intercultural dialogue. Later in our chapter, we expand this idea using feminist scholarship. In addition to 'shared space', we argue that intercultural dialogue needs 'safe space' to overcome hierarchical positions that may hinder equal and emphatic encounters of people with different backgrounds. We end our chapter by discussing how art has been perceived in academia as "an evocative and emotionally drenched expression that makes it possible to know how others feel" (Barone and Eisner 2012, 7) and as offering a form of knowledge that deals with empathy (Eisner 2008, 11). As a result, we suggest that art offers a flexible arena and instrument to set up non-hierarchical 'safe shared space' for practising intercultural dialogue, especially through its wordless mode of expression that crosses language barriers and enables creativity that can enhance empathy.

The DIALLS project recognizes art's potential in teaching empathy and defines empathy as one of the core features of cultural literacy. The Cultural Literacy Learning Programme developed in the project utilizes art as means for teaching and learning cultural literacy. Using wordless picture books and short films—thus capable of crossing language barriers—the program encourages students to create cultural artefacts of their own, such as drawings, photographs, and collages, in order to recognize, negotiate, and empathize with cultural differences. To put it simply, art is used to teach cultural literacy defined as an individual's competence and skill to encounter cultural differences with an open mind, to become tolerant, empathetic, and inclusive of other positions and perspectives, and to gain awareness of one's own cultural identity and the identities of others (Maine et al. 2019). Moreover, teaching cultural literacy is seen as a means to promote intercultural dialogue.

Intercultural dialogue is not a new concept but has an established trajectory in academic discussions and the policy discourses of several international institutions. The dialogical approach to the encounter of cultures was included in UNESCO's discourse as early as the 1980s (Wiesand et al. 2008). A similar approach started to characterize the Council of Europe's and the European Union's initiatives during the 1990s. The concept became more deeply rooted in European policy discourses at the beginning of the 2000s when the Council of Europe started a process that resulted in various declarations on intercultural dialogue, culminating in the "White Paper on intercultural dialogue" in 2008. In the same year, the EU celebrated the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue: one of its goals to raise awareness of this concept.

The concept of intercultural dialogue and policies seeking to implement it were warmly welcomed by many leading European politicians. A decade ago, several European societies faced what scholars have called 'backlash against multiculturalism' as many European heads of state accused 'multiculturalism' of creating social problems and controversies between people rather than solving them (Bauböck 2008; Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010; Modood and Meer 2012; Barrett 2013). Also in scholarly debates, multiculturalism was criticized for encouraging members of different cultures to live separately in parallel communities without any deeper interaction, for emphasizing instead of blurring boundaries, and for focusing mainly on ethnic and national issues rather than paying attention to the intersectional diversity in societies (e.g., Rodríguez-García 2010; Taylor 2012; Barrett 2013). The critics of multiculturalism discussed contemporary intersectional diversities using the concept of interculturalism, emphasizing the need to create new opportunities across cultures and to support interaction between different cultural communities (Cantle 2013).

Intercultural dialogue as a practice is instrumental to implementing the aims of interculturalism, such as fostering understanding and empathy (Cantle 2013, 80). The Council of Europe's "Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture" defines intercultural dialogue as:

an open exchange of views, on the basis of mutual understanding and respect, between individuals or groups who perceive themselves as having different cultural affiliations from each other. It requires the freedom and ability to express oneself, as well as the willingness and capacity to listen to the views of others. Intercultural dialogue fosters constructive engagement across perceived cultural divides, reduces intolerance, prejudice and stereotyping, and contributes to political, social, cultural and economic integration and the cohesion of culturally diverse societies. It fosters equality, human dignity and a sense of common purpose. It aims to develop a deeper understanding of diverse world views and practices, to increase co-operation and participation (or the freedom to make choices), to allow personal growth and transformation, and to promote respect for the other. (CofE 2018, 74–75)

This definition does not explicitly mention empathy but deals with it implicitly by emphasizing engagement across cultural divides. In academia, empathy has been connected more directly to the concept of intercultural dialogue. Empathy has been seen as the very basis of intercultural dialogue (e.g. Ratzmann 2019, 1), an effect and outcome of this practice (e.g. Elias 2017, 270), and a particular skill and competence for practising it (e.g. Houghton 2012, 97–100; Barrett 2013, 26). For instance, Houghton (2012) discusses "intellectual empathy" as a bottom-up process and cognitive skill in intercultural dialogue helping us to focus on the information provided by the interlocutor in cultural encounters and releasing us from our assumptions and stock responses based on our prior knowledge.

The above-quoted definition does not explicitly refer to the creativity often raised in scholarly discussions on intercultural dialogue. The definition, however, does highlight the ability to express oneself, personal growth, and transformation but does not characterize intercultural dialogue through creative thinking or practices. Following Wiesand et al. (2008, xiii), we argue that intercultural dialogue requires and promotes creative abilities to encounter other people and to convert experiences from these encounters into new ideas, perspectives, and forms of expression.

#### **4.2 Challenges of Intercultural Dialogue**

Although intercultural dialogue as a concept, policy, and practice has been broadly accepted and welcomed in academia, several scholars have also expressed criticism for its discursive meanings and uses as a policy instrument. Next, we will summarize the core weaknesses and limitations of the concept addressed in academia during the past decade (see Lähdesmäki et al. 2020).

The concept of intercultural dialogue was developed to respond to increasing cultural diversity in Western societies and to promote interaction, mutual respect, and understanding between people with different cultural backgrounds. Despite these premises, the concept has been criticized in academia for treating cultures as internally homogeneous. The critics have perceived the concept as categorizing people into separate and clearly identifiable cultural units, although in 'superdiversified' societies cultural differences are intersectional and do not follow any clear demarcations (Barrett 2013, 30).

Most of the critical views on the concept of intercultural dialogue emphasize the power imbalances inherent in discourses, policies, and practices dealing with it. Intercultural dialogue has been perceived as a profoundly Western concept through which Western scholars and societies seek to deal with non-Western 'others', as Lee (2016) notes. For her, research on intercultural dialogue is Western-dominated as, irrespective of countries of origin, most researchers in the field have learned and internalized Western approaches to scholarship (Lee 2016, 240). Western interest in intercultural dialogue has also been critically related to the "Western 'civilising mission' of the past and hegemonic power over language, culture, finance and politics" (Silversti 2007, n.p.) as the concept has been utilized by European political institutions, such as the European Union, to promote European citizenship, belonging to Europe, and a 'new European narrative' as its shared basis.

Scholars have also pointed out how policy discourses on intercultural dialogue include explicit and implicit power hierarchies based on Western or Eurocentric perspectives on diversity and cultural differences. Discourses, policies, and practices of intercultural dialogue have been seen as implicitly consolidating differences between Westerners or Europeans and their 'others'—and thus constructing the positions of 'us' and 'them'—rather than bringing different subjects together (Aman 2012). As Aman (2012, 1010) notes regarding the European Union's intercultural dialogue policies:

Europeans are portrayed as having an a priori historical existence, while the ones excluded from this notion are evoked to demonstrate its difference in comparison to the European one. […] [S]ubjects not considered as Europeans serve as markers of the multicultural present of the space.

The research on European policy discourses regarding intercultural dialogue has also recognized power hierarchies between those who are expected to facilitate the dialogue and those expected only to participate in it (Lähdesmäki and Wagener 2015; Lähdesmäki et al. 2015). As Barrett (2013, 31) notes: "[I]t is those individuals who occupy positions of power and privilege who tend to determine the implicit rules by which dialogue occurs, and their decisions are typically based on their own cultural perspective." Even though policy discourses on intercultural dialogue might explicitly recognize the 'diversity of diversities' and seek to embrace manifold aspects of diversity in contemporary societies, these discourses often focus on migrant and minority ethnic groups, constructing them as 'others' and as the participants in intercultural dialogue. Moreover, the 'others' in these discourses often narrow to mean non-European, non-white, non-Christian, and non-educated migrants and ethnic groups (Lähdesmäki et al. 2015). As intercultural dialogue policies commonly aim to tackle various challenges related to increased cultural diversity in Western societies, their discourses can unintentionally present the coexistence of cultures as a problem and source of conflict, which is contradictory to the fundamental principle of intercultural dialogue as a concept, policy, and practice (Lähdesmäki and Wagener 2015; Lähdesmäki et al. 2015).

One criticism of the practices of intercultural dialogue is that they can be elitist. Lee (2016) notes how various projects, research reports, and data sets on intercultural dialogue, as well as educational programs aiming at increasing it, are filtered through the lenses of the educated elites. She (2016, 239) points out: "Education, indeed, exists where there is money, and it is a privilege."  Similarly, Barrett (2013, 27) shows how disadvantages in education and employment, poverty, marginalization, and discrimination represent structural barriers to practices of intercultural dialogue as people affected by these phenomena are less able to participate in these practices.

The writers of intercultural dialogue policies have been criticized for defining the concept vaguely and explaining it indistinctly and ambiguously (Näss 2010; Lähdesmäki et al. 2015, 2020; Elias 2017). Moreover, these shapers of policy approach intercultural dialogue in a universalizing manner and poorly recognize the societal or historical differences between societies (Lähdesmäki and Wagener 2015), casting doubt on whether the policies can be applied to varying social realities (Elias 2017, 259). Scholars have also noted how policy-makers may load far-reaching expectations on practices of intercultural dialogue and thus underestimate the structural inequalities and disadvantages in Western societies that cannot be solved with intercultural dialogue alone (Barrett 2013, 30). Solving these inequalities and disadvantages requires concrete structural measures and the economic resources to deliver them (Lähdesmäki and Wagener 2015, 27).

Even though researchers in the field often mention empathy as a core aspect of intercultural dialogue, policies on intercultural dialogue emphasize it less. Our previous research on discourses of intercultural dialogue in the Council of Europe's and the European Union's education policy documents indicates how rarely the authors of these documents explicitly address empathy (Lähdesmäki et al. 2020). Yet, empathy can be perceived as a crucial competence and attitude in building inclusive relationships with other people and constructing inclusive societies based on mutual respect and understanding.

#### **4.3 Preconditions for Intercultural Dialogue: Shared and Safe Space**

Both scholars and policy-makers often discuss intercultural dialogue in relation to space: it is seen as requiring a particular kind of space and physical place to succeed. The Council of Europe's "White Paper on intercultural dialogue" (2008) makes an early case for space for intercultural dialogue. It draws special attention to urban planning and design and the management of public space through its spatial agenda, which reaches from commercial to religious and from educational to leisure spaces. The White Paper crystallizes the Council's spatial agenda as follows:

It is essential to engender spaces for dialogue that are open to all. Successful intercultural governance, at any level, is largely a matter of cultivating such spaces: physical spaces like streets, markets and shops, houses, kindergartens, schools and universities, cultural and social centres, youth clubs, churches, synagogues and mosques, company meeting rooms and workplaces, museums, libraries and other leisure facilities, or virtual spaces like the media. (CofE 2008, 33)

The discourse of the White Paper emphasizes 'openness' as the key character of space enabling intercultural dialogue. What 'open space' actually means, however, is not specified in the document (Lähdesmäki 2014).

The idea of 'open space' resonates with other spatial discussions on intercultural ideologue. One of the societal prerequisites often emphasized as key for intercultural dialogue is 'shared space'—whether a physical place or a virtual environment (Wiesand et al. 2008, 10; Barrett 2013, 28; Wilson 2013, 61). Stemming from UNESCO's report 'Our Creative Diversity' (1996), the concept of shared space has been explained as an arena where new ideas and values can be publicly recognized in a dialogue. The ERICart report explains this as follows:

ICD [Intercultural Dialogue] can only take place in an environment where a person is guaranteed safety and dignity, equality of opportunity and participation, where different views can be voiced openly without fear, where there are shared spaces for exchanges between different cultures to take place. (Wiesand et al. 2008, iii)

The main prerequisite to establish a dialogic climate is the attitude that no part/side/partner in the dialogue stays in the center of the world or in an absolute position. On the contrary, the 'center' must be emptied for the sake of dialogue in order for the majority-minority discourse to be overcome (Wiesand et al. 2008, 10).

A non-hierarchical space emptied of power imbalances sounds like an ideal that may be difficult to achieve in practice: space is always determined by complex and transforming social relations, as the long tradition of studies in the sociology of space shows (e.g. Foucault 1984; Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1996; Massey 2005). Recent discussions on intercultural dialogue have recognized this challenge and sought to see differences in how space enables or hinders equal, non-hierarchical encounters. For instance, the European Commission's "Report on the role of public arts and cultural institutions in the promotion of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue" (2014) categorizes shared spaces as "traditional" or "neutral". The former are determined by established social, cultural, and behavior norms, such as normative dress codes, while codes are co-created by people participating and acting in the latter (EC 2014, 62, 78). Recognizing the impact of social relations on space increases the credibility of policy discourses on intercultural dialogue. Interlocutors in these discourses still struggle to explain how spaces become 'shared' and what in fact is shared by people within these spaces.

We argue that the discussion on shared space as a precondition for intercultural dialogue should now focus on the feeling of safety in space. The concept of 'safe space' stems from the 1970s women's movement, feminism and queer activism and was originally used to refer to and discuss physical places where women and sexual minorities could meet and share their experiences in a safe environment (Flensner and Von der Lippe 2019, 276). More recently, various governmental and public institutions have adapted 'safe-space policies' to protect vulnerable and oppressed groups and minorities from discrimination, harassment, hatred, and threats (see Kyrölä 2018). The core idea of safe space is not only to delimit a place where violations are not accepted but to foster social relations between people in a place to make them feel that they can speak freely as all kinds of perspectives and positions are welcomed in the delimited place, whether physical or virtual. However, 'openness' to and 'acceptance' of perspectives and positions has to be structured by rules shared by all to make everyone in the space feel that they can safely exchange ideas and be themselves. The aim of these rules is to ensure an inclusive and respectful atmosphere in terms of civility and sensitivity (Jackson 2014, 48). In reality, these two requirements—openness and regulation—create an inherent tension in the idea of safe space (Flensner and Von der Lippe 2019, 276; see Kyrölä 2018).

Academic discourses on intercultural dialogue have often utilized the concept of safe space when dealing with encounters of religious and non-religious world views in public space and intercultural education (e.g. Jackson 2014; Knauth and Vieregge 2019; Flensner and Von der Lippe 2019). Several studies on classrooms as safe spaces have recognized challenges in making spaces safe and criticized the concept for smoothing controversies that might actually lead to learning, the development of student's world views, and personal growth (e.g. Holley and Steiner 2005; Flensner and Von der Lippe 2019; Halberstam 2018; see also Kyrölä 2018). Callan (2016, 65) has even suggested that education should make students feel "intellectually unsafe" to advance learning and critical thinking (see also Halberstam 2018). Even if this is the case, all education should be based on "dignity safe space" that is "free of any reasonable anxiety that others will treat one as having an inferior social rank to theirs" as Callan (2016, 65) describes.

Discussions on safe space rarely refer to empathy as the basis for social relations that create such spaces. We argue that empathy could be seen as the foundation and defining element of safe shared space. This space is about non-hierarchical social relations that allow agency for all who share the space. In it, individuals should be able to feel safe but they are required to try to ensure that others feel so too. In this, empathy becomes crucial. Empathy has been defined in scholarly literature as a complex concept including different modes of caring for others' viewpoints and 'feeling with' them (for different modes of empathy see e.g. Smith 2006; Aaltola and Keto 2017; Velasco 2019). These studies commonly distinguish cognitive from affective or emotional empathy: the former deals with an ability to understand others' perspectives and feelings, while the latter refers to an ability to share others' emotions based on emotional cognition. Scholars have also identified compassionate empathy that moves beyond understanding others and sharing their feelings to make people take action to help those who need it. What safe shared spaces enable empathy in all its modes? We argue that art has a capacity to function as such space (see a further discussion on psychological safety and group creativity in Chapter 9 in this volume).

#### **4.4 Art as Safe Shared Space and Enabler of Empathy**