Conference Agenda

This presentation explores innovative qualitative strategies for culturally responsive research and practice in education. It advocates a holistic philosophical and methodological reorientation that deepens understanding of diversity through interpretation, meaning-making, and contextual awareness. The approach known as intercultural qualitative inquiry is interpretive and transformative, examining how learners, teachers, and educational communities from diverse cultural backgrounds experience, construct, and negotiate meaning within educational settings. It recognizes that teaching and learning are culturally situated processes shaped by language, identity, values, and power relations. By foregrounding local voices and emphasizing the dynamic interplay between culture, context, and pedagogy, this inquiry challenges universalist assumptions in educational research. Its goal is to foster equitable, inclusive, and culturally responsive educational practices.
Within this framework, the Forum on Intercultural Dialogue and Learning at the University of Patras has grounded its work in three interrelated strategies: reflexivity, relational ethics, and dialogic engagement. These guide both research and practice, supporting deeper insight into how individuals construct meaning around diversity and human experience.
The Forum’s projects and interventions illustrate these strategies through:
a) Reflexivity—reflexive methodologies, practitioner self-inquiry, and reflective writing;
b) Relational engagement—reciprocal collaboration with students, teachers, and communities, recognizing their agency as co-constructors of knowledge;
c) Contextual immersion—action research, ethnography, and participatory observation to uncover how cultural norms shape educational experience; and
d) Dialogic and multivocal methods—narrative inquiry, storytelling, thematic analysis, collaborative interviews, and the Delphi method that promote intercultural dialogue and multiple perspectives.
By reimagining qualitative inquiry in intercultural education, this work moves beyond description toward active engagement with diversity as a source of learning, reflection, and transformation. It offers a framework for producing context-sensitive, ethically grounded insights that inform culturally responsive pedagogy and policy in an increasingly interconnected world.

In our study on how children exclude or include peers based on gender, ethnicity, social class, language and dis/abilities in early childhood education and care (ECEC) we used short-term, multi-sited ethnography. Multi-sited ethnography was used to include ECEC centers with children from different social class, ethnic and language backgrounds. To ensure diverse geographical representation the study included ECEC centers from the big cities, small towns and rural areas.

Interviews and participant observations of daily activities were conducted for about one month in each in each of the 18 centers in 2022. The researchers conducted participant observations of the centers’ daily activities for 1177 hours over 246 days, but due to the COVID-pandemic, the number of days in each center varied. The researchers interviewed 53 teachers, 11 leaders, and 10 other staff members.

Multi-sited ethnography allowed us to adjust to the needs of the centers. In some centers, staff shortages or the Covid pandemic, made it hard to find time for interviews, but with 18 centers the overall data production was secured. Having a broad geographical representation of centers and children with a variety of backgrounds made the results more trustworthy and relevant for all ECEC centers in the entire region as opposed to studying only one or two centers. Questions or issues emerging in one center would also lead to these being studied in the other centers. Thus, patterns of similarities and differences between the centers could be identified. For the researchers it was challenging to create relationships with new participants, both children and adults, every month. A thematic analysis was conducted of all interview and observational data, but the sheer amount of data was demanding. Multi-sited ethnography posed some challenges, but generated trustworthy and relevant results of how children include and exclude other children based on their backgrounds.

Content at museum exhibits, national parks, and in education curricula in the United States (U.S.) remains caught in political crosshairs; (re)igniting contentious debates around what is worth knowing, who decides, and how this knowledge is and remains legitimized in official, sanctioned capacities. While some might argue these fever-pitch debates have reached a seemingly unprecedented level, Derrida (1994) would argue that hauntings with/in the liminal spaces of the social world illustrate such specters–while not immediately and conventionally visible–represent contours always absent-yet-present and illuminate the not-yets of the past and how these potentialities enduringly haunt the present. In education, public and official knowledge related to U.S. History continues to foment polarizing discussions, especially regarding the country’s history of racism, segregation, and xenophobia. Part of a larger, ongoing qualitative project examining the (non)memorializing of people, places, and events related to the American Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement throughout Kansas and Missouri; this work examines one landmark–the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) historic site–and how such a landmark (pun intended) case in recent U.S. history–and the place commemorating it–remain haunted by specters of exclusion and racism. Particularly given the region’s fraught history with enslavement and notions of “freedom,” this work grapples with historical knowledge and education institutions within the long arc of the democratic project–one that can never quite reach itself (Derrida, 1994).

This presentation does not reject inclusive education, nor propose to fix it; after all, the educational system is not broken but functioning as designed—built on colonial logics that frame inclusion as an unquestioned good while enacting exclusions about who belongs and under what conditions (Murris, 2017; Naraian, 2021; Snaza, 2020; Spivak, 2012; Taylor, 2013). Noticing how material-discursive enactments (Barad, 2007) have produced this system makes it possible to reconfigure inclusion beyond its inherited promises and policy framings (Law, 2015). The presentation introduces the term—distributed inclusion—to reconfigure inclusion not as a fixed policy outcome or best practice but as a relational, emergent, and more-than-human doing (Braidotti, 2013; de Freitas, 2017).

In dialogue with Barad’s (2007) agential realism, Haraway’s (2016) call to “stay with the trouble,” and Murris’s (2017) work on educational philosophy, I diffractively read interviews with educators, camp data generated during a Literacy and Numeracy Summer Camp, policy texts, and posthumanist theory. Rather than treating these sources as discrete data sets, I read them as entangled within an apparatus, producing interference patterns that trouble what inclusion has come to mean.

Vignettes of stillness, acceleration, control, and dis/orientation trace how chairs, policies, hesitations, and refusals co-compose what inclusion does. Rather than offering solutions, the analysis lingers with contradiction and flicker—moments where inclusion moves differently.

By elaborating distributed inclusion as an apparatus that cuts-together-apart bodies, discourses, materials, possibilities, this presentation invites a shift from inclusion as a promise toward inclusion as an ongoing, unsettled practice of world-making. In keeping with the conference theme, the work foregrounds entangled human and more-than-human relations and the ethico-onto-epistemological practice of staying with the trouble of inclusion.

Participants will be asked to take part in the doing of distributed inclusion—through chairs, movements, collaborative noticing—so the presentation becomes a time-bound (but ever-moving) performative practice of inclusion otherwise.

In the context of democracy backsliding and increasing social and political polarization, schools emerge as crucial yet challenging spaces for engaging with socially divisive issues. This exploratory study examines teachers’ beliefs and experiences related to teaching sensitive social issues —defined as issues that generate disagreement and conflict within society and evoke strong emotional reactions. The aim was to explore how teachers construct their professional role in addressing such topics in their classrooms and what educational purposes they consider important. The data were collected as part of the international project T-AP 2023 „Learning Amidst Disinformation and Social Conflict: Young People and Teachers Co-Constructing Curriculum through Transnational Dialogue”, although the findings presented here derive from the Croatian dataset. The research included three upper secondary schools, selected through a maximum variation sampling strategy. Data were collected through seven semi-structured individual interviews with teachers involved in the process of co-construction of teaching and learning scenarios with researchers and students, and three focus groups with other teachers. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. A data-driven, bottom-up coding approach was employed, emphasizing semantic codes aligned with participants’ own expressions and interpretations. Findings indicate that teachers conceptualize their role as active and personally engaged, motivated by a sense of mission, responsibility, and moral obligation. Their main educational aims relate to students’ personal and interpersonal development: fostering cognitive skills such as critical thinking and argumentation, along with empathy, tolerance, and openness toward others. However, broader social and political dimensions, such as understanding power relations, systemic inequality, or fostering civic and political engagement, remain largely unrecognized or absent from their perspectives. Teachers largely approach the teaching of sensitive social issues through the lens of individual growth and respectful dialogue rather than as a means of cultivating collective agency or driving social change.