Intercultural Communication in Teacher Education - the Participative Approach

Abstract

The British Council in Sofia originated and assisted a project, under which British and Bulgarian students training to be teachers exchange visits and teach secondary-school pupils in the host country. The project was designed to supplement teacher-training with an intercultural and interdisciplinary perspective. The British representative was the School of Education at Durham University, and on the Bulgarian side five Universities with teacher-training strands took part .
The students’ task was to prepare and teach lessons presenting their country to the pupils in the host country. Teaching culture as a part of foreign/second language instruction is quite common. However, the genre of presenting cultural issues without the link to language learning made the classroom (referred to here as project classroom) quite specific.
This paper discusses how otherness affected the situational context of the project classrooms taught by the Bulgarian Student Teachers (ST). The data come from the STs’ diaries, the tutors’ observations and discussions with staff members at the schools and the STs. The instrument is Hymes’s cross-section of communicative events in Kramsch’s1 interpretation.