Pedagogies of discomfort in intercultural citizenship education

IRINA GOLUBEVA; MELINA PORTO; MICHAEL BYRAM

Simposio; CULTNET 2021; 2021

In our presentation we plan to engage the Cultnet meeting participants in a dialogue on pedagogies of discomfort and intercultural citizenship education. We will first define these pedagogies and we will then illustrate them briefly with an intercultural telecollaborative project completed by university students from Argentina and the USA in May-June 2020, which dealt with channelling the discomfort caused by the COVID-19 crisis through the arts. Our purpose is to use this example to illustrate how humanistic perspectives in higher education can and should involve discomforting themes so as to sensitise students to issues of human suffering and foster their sense of belonging to the global community through collaborative creative work. We will discuss the role of pedagogies of discomfort in intercultural citizenship education and consider the challenges these may entail.