Transdisciplinary Teaching in Intercultural Learning Communities

Nowadays, given the globalization in various domains of life, many people are moving from one country to another every few years, and there is a crucial need for further study and teaching methods to accelerate the growth of interculturalism in schools in order to facilitate the development of intercultural communities that are ready to include everyone in all areas of life. Furthermore, relating openly and honestly to the cultural differences among learners and teachers is the basis for intercultural education that firmly relates to all learners, thereby promoting their self-awareness and self-identity while they live and study with learners from cultural backgrounds that are different from their own (Paul-Binyamin & Reingold, 2020). While using the term ‘interculturalism’ throughout this chapter, it is important to mention that some scholars also use the term ‘multiculturalism’ when referring to communities composed of people from different cultures. The main difference between these concepts is similar to the difference between integration and inclusion discussed in previous chapters. Thus, while multiculturalism is expressed by placing different learners in the same educational setting and providing them with differential learning programmes (integration), interculturalism aims to encourage both co-learning and social engagements based on commonalities and allow the promotion of inclusion by implementing individual and group interventions that provide the basic skills for communication and learning together. Nevertheless, each term evolved from a different perspective (Taylor, 2012). Their commonality is the vision of creating a society in which people from different cultures live together and retain their cultural identity while developing reciprocal relationships. According to Banks (1997), intercultural education developed on the understanding that teachers must relate to their learners’ cultural origins from a wider perspective rather than simply placing learners from different countries in one shared educational environment. Additionally, implementing an interculturalist approach in schools helps mitigate racism within the educational setting, because of the reference to learners’ cultural roots from a broad perspective that emphasize their strength and their different learning skills, rather than focusing only on their ethnic backgrounds that is usually overgeneralized and based on stigmas and lack of knowledge. Since both the environment and the culture people live in influence thinking development (Flavian, 2017), learning in an environment where several cultures come together is challenging for both teachers and learners, mainly due to the different languages and cultures that influence learning and teaching processes (Figueredo-Canosa et al., 2020). These possible challenges relate directly to the core approach of transdisciplinary teaching.