Conference Agenda

This paper calls attention to Cross-Culture Kids’ (CCKs) need for cultural transition care in Lithuania by suggesting a cultural narrative intervention approach.

As student mobility becomes ever more common globally, schools are faced with reconsidering their role in identity curation as part of adolescent well-being, directly affecting student performance and learning outcomes (Mahoney and Barron, 2020). Alongside repeated relocation comes significant personal and social difficulties often overlooked by its benefits to the international mobile youth. Ven Reken (2002) termed Cross-Culture Kids (CCKs) as “(those) who are living/ have lived in – or meaningfully interacted with – two or more cultural environments for a significant period of time during the first eighteen years of life". They experience being transience, or, on the move, and are in the constant status of 'transition', which is the change from one place, state, or condition to another (Pollock & Van Reken, 2017). Many see CCKs as victims of globalisation who is left to deal with the consequences of where culture and identity collide (Carter & McNulty, 2012). As the educational needs of CCKs differing from their non-expatriate counterparts is much acknowledged, scholarship has largely investigated four pedagogical consequences due to social and emotional issues as implications of living an internationally mobile lifestyle: 1) identity, 2) sense of belonging, 3) grief & transition, and, 4) coping strategies. Killguss (2008) found that many CCKs suffer from "authenticity anxiety"- and not having solid definitions of one's identity can cause problems later in life, developmental trauma such as high-risk Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) was evident (Crossman & Wells, 2022).

This is especially true as they are considered alien and abnormal in mono-cultural societies like Lithuania (Garšvė and Mažeikiene, 2019). As a historically emigration heavy country (Eurostat, 2015), the Lithuanian context is specific to CCKs care as only in 2018 did Lithuanian schools first experience receiving a continuation of steep increase of CCKs. This included repatriated Lithuanian pupils post-Brexit or due to the COVID pandemic, and refugee children due to the recent European political climate. As the key agent of socialisation, schools are responsible for providing spaces in mainstream classrooms for multi-contextual narratives of identity to be expressed and differentiated cultural representation to be recognised. Changes have been called for with sensitivity, reflexivity and interdisciplinary collaboration (Bagdonaitė, 2020). Yet, a clear framework to aid the integration of these youth whose lives have been utterly disrupted by mobility has yet to be provided to Lithuanian schools (Chu & Ziaunienė, 2021). This paper proposes a cultural and identity narrative intervention as a pedagogical strategy for school agents to foster identity narrative spaces and to provide language for cultural transition care to be explored.

The research question that this paper looks to answer are:

1. How do narrative interventions aid CCKs in Lithuania in developing their identity, belonging and place?
2. How may narrative interventions facilitate the development of cultural transition awareness in Lithuanian educational settings?
3. What are the implications of narrative interventions for Lithuanian educators to better assist CCKs in the process of cultural transitions?

With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2016), international communities should committ to ensure quality, inclusive and equitable education for every individual worldwide and for life. By 2030, it should be possible that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and nonviolence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development. Moreover, international comparative studies from European countries show that educational systems develop their own strategies for intercultural education and promotion of linguistic and socio-cultural diversity in schools (Allemann-Ghionda, 2002; Bežen, 2013; Gomolla, 2005; Göbel & Hesse, 2004; Kramar, 2022). As part of the german Primary School's general educational mission, Foreign Language Education should also contribute to a fair and positive perception of social, ethnic, national, cultural and linguistic diversity and contribute in terms of development of Intercultural Competence in classes (KMK, 1996, 2013).

The introductory part of this paper comprises international models of Intercultural Competence (Bennett, 1993; Erll & Gymnich, 2007; Allemann-Ghionda, 2014; Göbel & Buchwald, 2017), relevant definitions of curricula and a review of European documents related to the development of Curricula for Foreign Languages. The focus of this research lies on the Qualitative Content Analysis of the Curriculum for German as the first foreign language (2019) in the Republic of Croatia and Curriculum for English at the Primary Schools (2021) in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia from the first to the fourth grade of Primary Schools. The main goal of this research is to present the similarities and differences in the framework of implementation of the Intercultural Competence in the Curricula for the analysed foreign language subjects in two European school systems. This research presents the results of the Qualitative Content Analysis based on Intercultural Competence in three categories: (1) Educational goals of learning and teaching, (2) Educational outcomes and (3) Evaluation.

My research study has a three-pronged focus on the intersection of language, class and ethnicity to understand how equitable education and employment opportunities fluctuate for students in Pakistan. The participants belong to lower socioeconomic backgrounds with varying linguistic identities and are studying in various universities across Karachi, Pakistan. The focus is on their experiences in higher education (HE) institutions as they navigate learning in English, which is not their first language.

While language remains the focal point of my research, it cannot be studied without considering the social, cultural, and educational contexts (Valdes, 2004). This is especially true for the post-colonial relevance of English in Pakistan. Language related research in Pakistan has focused on the medium of instruction (Rahman, 1997), language policies (Shamim, 2008) and women’s education (Durrani & Halai, 2018). However, there is a gap in voicing the experiences of linguistically and culturally diverse students in HE, who struggle with English. My research focuses on this gap.

English plays a crucial role in social mobility in Pakistan, where a socially and economically disadvantaged population struggles to access quality education (Mustafa, 2015). While English is not widely spoken in Pakistan, it is used in education, workplaces, bureaucracy, and courts as the country’s official language (Tamim 2014). Therefore, English acts as a “gate-keeper”, affecting the social mobility of students that are not fluent in English. It is the preferred language of the elite in Pakistan, determining a person’s educational background. The status of English makes one’s class status known, because access to English is a privilege only a few can afford in the country. It therefore becomes significant as linguistic capital which students can aspire to in efforts to attain social mobility. It is the medium of instruction in all elite private schools across Pakistan, thereby creating “hierarchical structures in society” (Tamim, 2014, p.8) and reproducing “class cultural power” (Mustafa, 2015, p.189). Social classes are also understood through cultural and economic capital, and it becomes imperative to understand the relationship between these various forms of capital and linguistic capital, especially in a post-colonial context (Simpson & Cook, 2009).

In order to study the impact of English on student experiences and their access to opportunities in HE in Pakistan, Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and linguistic capital have been used to frame my research angle. Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus shed light, and expand on, how some students may have more privilege than others, what these privileges may look like, and how they may translate to an unfair advantage when navigating HE institutions, based on the intersection of class, ethnicity, and language in Pakistan. The elements of Bourdieu’s theories that frame this research are: (a) habitus, (b) field and (c) capital. These elements are interconnected in how they shape our understanding of social inequalities and disadvantages.

The experiences of these students are being explored as part of my PhD study, currently in its second year, through the following research questions:

1. What roles do the students’ linguistic and cultural capital play in their educational attainment?

• What are the linguistic challenges (if any) that students face during their undergraduate degree programs?
• What are the potential challenges that the students face during their degree due to their cultural capital (particularly looking at social class, ethnicity, and language)?

2. How do other cross-cutting factors such as SES factors and economic precarity affect their educational experience and shape their opportunities during and after their undergraduate programs?

I conducted interviews from October 2022 to January 2023. Students shared their experiences of learning in English and its impact on their education, social life and job applications.

Within Physical Education (PE) and Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) research there has been a recent increase in studies looking into policies – here I use a broad understanding of policy as a “set of ideas or a plan … that has een agreed to officially by a group of people, organisation, government, or a political party” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2022) – for instance PE curriculum (e.g., Dowling & Flintoff, 2018; Fitzpatrick & Allen, 2019; Petherick, 2018) or PETE programmes/course syllabi (e.g., Apelmo, 2022; Backman & Larsson, 2016; Philpot, 2017) . Policies are “the operational statement of values”, and they “project images of an ideal society (education policies project what counts as education)” (Ball, 1990, p. 1), in the same way, curricula and syllabi state what is worth knowing and what is not, they prescribe behaviour and action, and create ‘subjects’ and ‘problems’ (Alfrey et al., 2021; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). Since values are always embedded within a cultural context, we need to ask whose values are represented in policies and whose are left out.

In this study I seek to investigate how ethnic and cultural diversity are problematised in PETE policy in three countries: Norway, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Following Carol Bacchi’s (2016) approach for analysing policy ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ (WPR), I take a closer look at programme descriptions and course syllabi from one case PETE programme from each country, additional documents are examined to trace back discourses and examine how a problem is represented as a certain type of problem. The main research question that will guide my investigation is how are ethnic and cultural diversity problematised in PETE course syllabi. This paper is important because it shows how each country’s context can amplify or silence certain discourses and voices (Alfrey et al., 2021) within policy documents. Furthermore, Bacchi’s WPR approach – which is about “teasing out the conceptual premises underpinning problem representations, tracing their genealogy, reflecting on the practices that sustain them and considering their effects” (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 17) – stimulates to think about policies in a different way, with a critical perspective, something that can be helpful for teacher educators who have to interpret these texts.

PETE is changing in many countries, while in Norway a new five-year PE specialist programme was introduced last fall, time and courses are being cut from PE in favour of more ‘sport science’ content in Canada and New Zealand. These changes will of course have an effect on PETE. By comparing different national contexts, I hope to highlight contextual possibilities and constraints of how ethnic and cultural diversity are addressed in PETE, as well as commonalities across borders. What the three countries have in common is that they are all getting increasingly more diverse populations and that all three have indigenous populations. Obviously, there are many differences given that each country is located on a different continent, with different historical trajectories of immigration, multiculturalism and the relation with Indigenous peoples. Both Canada and New Zealand are settler countries and historically have been immigrant countries, but while Canada is set in a multicultural framework, New Zealand is officially a bicultural nation, whereas Norway has only recently experienced immigration on a larger scale. Given the global nature of concerns around how increasing diversity should be addressed in teacher education, it is important to explore how these issues are approached in different contexts. According to Broadfoot (1999, as in Afdal, 2019, p. 261), comparative education research can “enhance awareness of possibilities, clarify contextual constraints and contribute to the development of a comprehensive socio-cultural perspective” of educational issues.