Four Canadian Expatriate Women’s Personal History Self-Study Stories on their International-Mindedness (IM) Development and Approaches to Teaching IM
Date
2015-10-08
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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to learn how Canadian expatriate educators, in International Baccalaureate Diploma Programs (IBDP) abroad, could use personal history self-study as a reflective process for understanding their own international-mindedness (IM) development. An additional focus of this study was to understand how participants use this knowledge to make pedagogical decisions about leading their students to develop IB Learner Profile characteristics to become internationally-minded through their English Language B and English A: Language and literature courses. Darla Deardorff’s (2006; 2009) Process Model of Intercultural Competence was used as the theoretical framework for this study to identify the attitudes, knowledge and comprehension, and skills that these educators have acquired through cross-cultural learning experiences while living abroad, leading to cultural self-awareness, and how the ethnorelative views that they possess influence the ways they teach international-mindedness to students’ in four unique contexts: one public school in China, one public school in Azerbaijan, one international school in Singapore, and one international school in the Philippines. Personal history self-study in education was used as the methodology for this study. Data for this study was collected online using D2L during one school semester spanning six months. An adapted version of Weigl’s (2009) cultural self-study method was used to elicit stories on the development of cultural self-awareness of the participants’ and my reflection on professional practice questions were used to examine the ways that their intercultural competence contributes to their pedagogical choices to teach IM in their classrooms. As a co-learner in this study, I shared cultural self-study stories with participants to establish trust, develop a sense of how the participants experience the research process, and to gain a sense of the possible braiding of themes across stories. Findings of this study revealed that the intercultural skills that the participants possessed influenced their pedagogical decisions to foster intercultural understanding among students in their lessons. Barriers that were identified in leading students to become internationally-minded include: school context, students’ cultural understanding of the IBDP Western-based programming model, and capacity to adapt to the aims of the programme.
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Education--Language and Literature
Citation
Pitre, N. (2015). Four Canadian Expatriate Women’s Personal History Self-Study Stories on their International-Mindedness (IM) Development and Approaches to Teaching IM (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26218