The first week of December 2024 we were visited by a language teacher from Sweden who chose to participate in the course Communication in the new multicultural society. To make things more interesting we discovered that she is Canadian with Portuguese descent and teaching French and English to a multicultural class in an English school in Sweden!
This part of her story added many more layers to the discussion as the differences between ideas regarding multiculturalism in general varies greatly between Europe and Canada.
The first session was focused mostly on linguistics, social and linguistic anthropology. We discussed how linguistic family trees can be used to help students understand their own multicultural roots and connect to the students in their class from different backgrounds. Body language, gender and non- verbal and symbolic differences in cultural communication styles were also discussed in depth, together with some interactive ideas for future lesson plans.
The second session was focused primarily on Culturally Responsive Teaching which is a concept born out of the American civil rights movement and designed to help disadvantaged students predominantly from ethnic minority groups or impoverished areas access the same level of education as the more advantaged students. This was very interesting as we could compare the contrasting pedagogical methods of Northern European/Swedish schools with Canadian, British and Italian.
There was a creative workshop focusing on ways to teach and understand the intersectional power paradigms that exist in multicultural societies, how that affects communication and how we can practice self awareness/decentering in relation to people from other cultures.
We also looked in depth at some of the culture clashes that teachers are experiencing with new waves of immigration. The European classroom, maybe once culturally homogeneous, now has refugees from Syria, the Ukraine and Afghanistan. There are the children of economic migrants from African countries or Asia, there are immigrants and expats from all over the world. There are students with trauma from war, students who can speak 5 languages but not the language of their new home. Students from Islamic, or orthodox Christian homes. Students whose understanding of how to show respect towards women differs from modern European values.
The responsibility on teachers to understand the diverse educational needs of all their students is not an easy task due to class size. So we talked about ways to meet the requirements of CRT within the limits of certain styles of educational systems.
She spent one morning in an Italian school learning about the Book Trailers project and comparing the different cultures.
At the end of the course we designed some intercultural/cross-cultural lesson plans for a project that could encourage her students to explore and learn about not only immigrant cultures but also the Indigenous cultures still present in Northern Scandinavian countries- The Saami people.
In all, it was a very intensive course that successfully encompassed a lot more than expected.
Author: Ana Rosa Heath, JUMP Trainer
