Dr. Giuliana Ferri
Brunel University London (United Kingdom)
Title: Can we think interculturality ‘otherwise’?
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Addressing this year’s theme of thinking interculturality ‘otherwise’, I will begin by referring to wider debates relating to social justice and representation reflecting on their relevance for the field. I will return to the work of Spivak (1988, 2012) to illustrate the double bind inherent in critiquing an established field ‘from within’, linking to the marketization of the intercultural to promote internationalisation and diversity strategies in neoliberal academia. Drawing from the work of Audre Lorde in The master’s tool cannot dismantle the master’s house (1984), the central question of my talk is whether we can escape this double bind and aspire to what Sousa Santos (2007) calls an ecology of knowledge or epistemic justice. I suggest that our own intersectional positionalities as researches are resources that can help us interrogate some of these complicities and reflect on the complexities and on the double bind of representation. Using my two recent papers on posthumanism and minor literature (Ferri 2020, 2022), I will elaborate on the idea of becoming in relation to ‘minor’ voices and what they tell us about resistance, intercultural translation and languages as sites of struggle. I will conclude suggesting that thinking about epistemological plurality entails a methodological openness to disrupt established hierarchies and conventions, to challenge notions of what is ‘worth’ researching and who benefits from our work.
Dr. María Luisa Pérez Cañado
University of Jaén (Spain)
Title: Rethinking diversity and inclusion in plurilingual education: Lessons learned and ways forward.
This talk will focus on one of the most hotly debated issues affecting language education at present: diversity, inclusion, and elitism in plurilingual programs. The latter have been in place in many parts of Europe for over 20 years and are evolving in exciting new directions. One of the most prominent ones at present involves mainstreaming Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and making it accessible to an increasing range of learners. This new challenge has thrown bilingual education a real curveball and is entailing a thorough overhaul of our current language teaching programs. This presentation will explore how evolving towards a more diversity-sensitive model is affecting language education on ten main fronts: the charge of elitism, the concept of diversity in itself, the role of the L1, materials design, pedagogical and evaluation techniques, the importance of the supranational perspective, multi-tiered systems of support, teacher education, the impact of COVID, and the focus of research. For each one, it will trace where we started out, showcase the current situation, and map out future pathways for progression. The latest empirical evidence on the topic will be used to address each front and the broader take-aways and chief pedagogical implications will be extracted for the frontline stakeholders. A broad array of materials, methodological tips, and teacher development options will be made available to continue addressing the challenge of diversity in plurilingual education in the immediate future and to ensure CLIL for all increasingly moves away from being a mere chimera to become a firmly embedded reality in our classrooms.