The potential of pedagogies of discomfort in intercultural virtual exchange

MELINA PORTO; BYRAM, MICHAEL; GOLUBEVA, IRINA

Encuentro; II Encuentro Internacional de Lingüistas para la promoción de la interculturalidad y 5º English Meeting; 2023

The potential of pedagogies of discomfort in intercultural virtual exchange Melina Porto, Irina Golubeva and Michael ByramThe current global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has, at least temporarily, reshaped the landscape of higher education in general, and higher education mobility in particular. What is the pedagogical potential of virtual mobility for intercultural learning and citizenship education?We argue - in the context of the current dominance of the performative and instrumental drives characterizing the accountable university - that language and intercultural communication education in universities should also be humanistic, which means inter alia addressing ‘discomforting themes’ to sensitize students to issues of human suffering and engage them in constructive and creative responses to that suffering. We suggest that arts-based methods can be used and illustrate this with an international virtual exchange project created in response to the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this way language and intercultural communication education can become a site of personal and social transformation, including the development of intercultural citizenship values, attitudes, skills, knowledge and critical understanding. Through arts-based methodologies and pedagogies of discomfort, Argentinian and US undergraduates explored how the theme of the Covid-19 crisis has been expressed artistically in their countries, and then communicated online, using English as their lingua franca, to design artistic multimodal creations collaboratively in mixed nationality groups to channel their suffering and trauma associated with the pandemic. We present the data that comprise the students’ artistic multimodal creations, their written statements describing their creations, and the results of pre- and post-project surveys of students’ perceptions of the traumatic events and their experience of collaborating on this virtual project. Our findings indicate that students transformed disturbing affective responses by creating artwork and engaging in cathartic social and civic participation transnationally, sharing their artistic creations using social media. We highlight the powerful humanistic role of education involving artistic expression, movement, performativity, and community engagement in order to channel discomforting feelings productively at personal and social levels. We discuss the role of pedagogies of discomfort in intercultural citizenship education, and consider the challenges these may entail. Melina PortoUniversidad Nacional de La Plata and Conicet (National Research Council), La Plata, ArgentinaMelina Porto is a Researcher at the National Research Council and Professor at Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia (UK). Her research interests include intercultural language education, intercultural citizenship, pedagogies of discomfort, service learning and ethics, among others.Irina GolubevaUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA)Irina Golubeva is an Associate Professor at UMBC (USA), where she directs the MA program in Intercultural Communication. Golubeva’s main research interests concern the development of multilingual awareness and intercultural competence, internationalisation of higher education, and conceptualization of intercultural citizenship.Michael ByramUniversities of Durham (England) and Sofia (Bulgaria)Michael Byram is Professor Emeritus in the School of Education, Durham and Guest Research Professor at the University of Sofia. He works on intercultural education, foreign language education and the supervision and assessment of the doctorate, and has been involved in the language and education work of the Council of Europe for many years.