Teacher Education and Intercultural Awareness: Needs and Tools

Introduction

Bilingual Education has become more and more popular in Western countries thanks to two factors, mainly. The first one would be globalization, that is, the establishment of alliances that allow people and cultural contents or expressions, among other issues, to cross boundaries and move more or less freely across the globe (leaving aside further considerations and controversies on this topic). The second one would be the generation of norms and standards to be met by the European Union (EU) members regarding the obligatory introduction of, at least, two languages during the early and mandatory stages of their educational systems. The objective of this type of initiative would be the promotion of the above-mentioned free circulation of people, or workers.

This situation has forced many countries to pay an unprecedented attention to second and foreign language teaching and learning, and the last trends, including –especially– Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and active language teaching methods, have turned into the study object of many researchers, who focus on improving the efficiency of these methodologies and aim at demonstrating their benefits. Researchers in the academic fields related to learning and languages have been exploring the different aspects to be taken into account, as well as the influence of discoveries in Neuroscience applied to Education.

In this context, university classrooms have increasingly become part of this Bilingual system, and undergraduate and postgraduate programs have emerged as “bilingual studies”, taught in more than one language and counting on as many international students and teachers as possible. Obviously, some of those programs have been designed for the education and training of educators and teachers. An example of this are the different master’s degrees in Bilingual Education or Bilingualism that have arisen in the last decade in Spain as a response to the needs of teaching staff in every stage.

Those multicultural and multilingual settings can be seen and explored as the wonderful opportunities they are for researchers in Bilingual Education, since a meta reflection on the impact of cultural aspects and frameworks in the classroom can be carried out. The students experience difficulties when trying to communicate with their teachers and classmates, and become more aware of the incredible number of elements involved in the educational context that are culturally driven, eliciting certain strategies and behaviors and generating their own set of tools and resources to face and solve misunderstandings when they become teachers.

The aim of this chapter is to offer a panoramic view of the training programs for bilingual education teachers in Spain, considered as indicators of their needs to face the difficulties and challenges arisen from multilingual and multicultural settings, as well as a reflection on the teachers’ profiles and their knowledge and perception of the relevance of intercultural awareness. Thanks to observation and to the results obtained in a brief survey and informal interviews, we will be able to point out some of the techniques and tools that seem to be more efficient in order to develop the intercultural competence of those teachers.

Thus, after establishing the ground for this research, the first section will be devoted to the analysis of training programs, comparing their syllabuses and pointing out the needs they seem to be detecting and trying to solve. The second section will focus on an in-depth analysis of a specific program, offered by a private university, beginning with a description of the syllabus and following with the students’ profile, which has changed significantly in the last years, so as to establish the difficulties faced by both teachers and students regarding intercultural awareness. Then, the results of observation and of a survey carried out with teachers and pre-service teachers will evidence the lack of preparation in intercultural awareness and the strong and urgent need to include it in an explicit as well as in an implicit manner in their training programs. Finally, we will provide some predictions on the trends in trainees’ profiles and opportunities, together with some recommendations on strategies and resources for a good praxis.