Understanding and working with the dynamics in cross-cultural education

Abstract

This study explores contemporary cross-cultural education with 19 (nineteen) educators in Australia and the Netherlands who are holistically oriented. It takes as its core focus what happens at the centre of cross-cultural exchanges to give space to the inter-subjective and move forward by attending to feeling. The participants took part in three focus groups and three one-on-one interviews each. The methodology called bricolage was applied to process the data alongside complexity theories and the Performative Social Sciences (PSS). This enabled ways that focus on human dynamics at the centre of which knowledge transfer and dissemination are synthesised in the 'synthetic moment' and where boundaries are blurred to bring people and their landscape together. The reader/viewer is presented with a written and an audio-visual auto-ethnographic account that attributes to self-study. As a multivocality, the accounts reflect this study's focus into the 'Heart' of the cross; an intertextual space, an I-Thou dialogic encounter that emerges from polarities of all kinds (Gangadean, 2004). Here, individual spaces overlap in maieutic inquiry as a way forward for enacting integrality in academic writing (Gidley, 2007, p. 44). Both accounts point to the significance of aesthetic engagement, and are storied within the contemporary world that is in a transition from industrial to planetary awareness (Gidley, 2007). The approach I adopt is interdisciplinary and draws mainly on three disciplines that traditionally rarely communicate with each other: (cross-cultural) education, social ecology, communication and the arts. Though challenging, the attempt to interrelate these disciplines necessitated a praxis of looking that is generative; creating agency and bringing to life the focus on the metaphor cross; a focus central to this thesis by considering it a verb and a noun, both dynamic and fixed and as such a bridge that opens up a space for people to have dialogue whilst attending to and navigating spaces in-between binary positions such as self-other, body-mind, subject-object, feminine-masculine, right-wrong and true-false. With the focus on the entity between the researcher and the researched - both in bricolage and maieutic inquiry as research methodologies - I have been able to explore and report the tension between thinking (head) and feeling (heart, stomach, gut) and subsequent cross-cultural dynamics. With that I found a hybrid application and a focus on the cross most suitable to posit a subtle subject that is inherently inter-subjective, dynamic, creative and open to interpretation; a 'communication about communication' (Capra, as cited in Lowe et al., 2007, p. 240). DVD (filmic part) - The Other Side of Language in X-Cultural Education : Unravelling the Cross (21:45 min.) can be viewed at UWS Library.

Date of Award	2009
Original language	English