Читать книгу Ugandan Children's Literature and Its Implications for Cultural and Global Learning in TEFL - Stephanie Schaidt - Страница 17

This overview of important concepts and developments in the field of cultural and global learning leads us to a reflection on the importance of selected discourses and approaches and their relevance for my study.

The present study is based on a broad understanding of culture and considers transcultural competence a desirable objective in the EFL classroom. While the approaches of Fremdverstehen and intercultural learning focus on the negotiation of meaning between separate cultures and so inevitably adhere to the ‘self’ and ‘other’ binary, the transcultural approach strives to take cultural transgressions, diversity, commonalities and the individual with its multiple identities into account. In our postmodern society, which is characterised by blurrings and hybridity, and also against the background of prevalent power asymmetries, I regard the transcultural approach as more appropriate for the foreign language classroom. It has to be acknowledged, however, that it is the intercultural approach that is mainly reflected in German educational documents and materials today (see Chapter 2.2). Furthermore, binary oppositions are an inherent part of human thought (see Bauman, 1991, p. 8). Consequently, it can be expected that students (and teachers) often remain caught in binary comparisons and nationalist thinking in the EFL classroom. The aim of the present study is to reconstruct students’ approaches to otherness and to discuss implications for cultural learning in the EFL classroom that evolve from the results of the research.

Furthermore, constructivist ideas of learning and understanding otherness strongly impact my study. My research does not focalise an allegedly given objectivity but instead puts the subjective experiences of the students in the centre of the investigation. However, since I also consider the social framework, i.e. school, media, socialisation, etc. to play an important role in the meaning creation process of the individual student, my study is informed by a rather moderate constructivist approach (see Wolff, 2002a, 2002b) that mediates between subject and context and attempts to balance both poles. The aim is to find ways of how the students’ mental processes of construction and deconstruction may be effectively negotiated in the classroom.

In my research, approaches critical to racism are also taken into account. As my study focuses on postcolonial literature and a country that was a British protectorate for almost 70 years, which continues to be of political, social and cultural impact today, I consider the reflection upon the history of colonialism and the prevalence of neo-imperialistic power asymmetries and racist structures as very important in this context. The students’ prior knowledge concerning these aspects and their reflection processes need to be given attention in my study. From this, implications for cultural and global learning will be developed.

A further focus of my study is placed on global education. As elaborated on in Chapter 2.8, global education in the German EFL classroom is commonly concerned with ‘global’ risks. Since ‘Africa’ is often mentioned in the context of crisis, it frequently serves as an object of study in global education approaches. Wars in African countries and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa are made topics of classroom discussion.1 So called ‘global topics’ are treated also in Ugandan narratives; there is, for example, a remarkable amount of Ugandan children’s narratives that focuses on HIV/AIDS (see also Chapter 4.4.2.3). Therefore, it is the intention of the present study to provide empirical insights into how students deal with topics of this type and, also taking problematic aspects mentioned in theoretical discourse (see Chapter 2.8) into account, to suggest implications for a different approach to global education (see Chapter 8.2).