Page 14 - Diversity in Action

Martina Irsara

and knowledge necessary to interact with people from different cultural
backgrounds. As ICC is not an inherent outcome of language teaching, lan-
guage teachers should include ICC as a key objective in their curriculum
and consciously choose to teach languages for intercultural communication.
The key to improving social interaction and learning about interculturality is
through direct experience, which can be face-to-face or online (Gatti & Irsara,
2022; Irsara et al., 2023). However, Byram (2009) states that one only becomes
intercultural when the experience is analysed and reflected upon, leading to
subsequent action.
Practitioners and researchers are encouraged to promote ICC by designing
experiential activities, using a variety of high-quality, authentic learning ma-
terials, and developing intercultural training programmes that address the
various aspects of IC and ICC, while documenting the challenges and details
of implementation. Promoting IC and ICC while analysing and document-
ing the rationale, details, and challenges of intercultural communication pro-
grammes and experiences was one of the key objectives of the DivA: Diver-
sity in Action project, presented in the next section.

The Diversity in Action Project: DivA
Linguistic and cultural diversity is increasingly reflected in classrooms at all
levels of education, from primary to tertiary. Teaching in today’s multilin-
gual and multicultural environments requires educators to possess specific
skills and competences to manage and promote this diversity effectively.
Although the concept of superdiversity in contemporary societies has be-
come somewhat of a cliché in sociolinguistics and intercultural communi-
cation research, and while digital communication enables global connec-
tions, the skills needed to teach in heterogeneous classrooms are not inher-
ent. They need to be developed through experience, ongoing reflection, and
continuous refinement. It is essential to integrate issues related to linguistic
and cultural diversity into pre-service and in-service teacher education pro-
grammes. Additionally, multilingual and multicultural approaches and ma-
terialsshouldbeactively researched, updated, anddiscussed. Whilegen-
eral national cultural frameworks have traditionally played an important role
in language teaching, for example in the teaching of English, it is now es-
sential to move away from essentialist perspectives based on simplistic na-
tional language-culture correlations or native-speaker models of communi-
cation. Instead, fostering an understanding of multilingual and multicultural
resources, while encouraging critical and inclusive approaches, is essential
for contemporary education.

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