Intercultural Higher Education Campus, Creating the

What is Interculturalism?

While multicultural frameworks have sought to add the stories of marginalized voices and eliminate a one-culture perspective, an intercultural approach seeks to bring all cultural voices together on a level playing field where learning and sharing can occur across differences. First borrowed from work on race and ethnicity in performance studies by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, an intercultural approach to education now encompasses the construction and sharing of meaning in relation to gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, ability/disability, and immigrant status. In its most ideal form today, each individual would be given the opportunity to develop her or his own voice and meanings in all these subjectivities; that is, each person in an education context is invited to become a “subject and agent” of her or his own meanings rather than remain an object who passively accepts the meaning systems of someone else.

This form of intercultural education is best developed through small-group storytelling that invites all participants to listen to and support each other as they construct and share their own meanings. In this way, each storyteller comes into being by helping other storytellers also to come into being, and learning is subject-to-subject. In a shrinking global human society, it is a “mutual immanence” of storytellers who help each other achieve full voice as agental subjects that patterns an alternative to selfish individualism (magnified under free market capitalism) and constitutes an antidote to xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and so forth. This approach is also distinguished from diversity frameworks that exclude asymmetry and agency from their analysis and as a result leave current inequities unchallenged.

Through the shared interaction of individual storytelling and dreaming, participants learn to leave behind “essentializing” understandings of diversity that view all members of one group as the same. Although a category-based analysis had once been necessary to prove harm under Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and its progeny, the United States is now in a different era, in which an expanded notion of agency is needed to encompass the bringing together and collaboration of diverse individuals in what is increasingly a global human society.

The storytelling approach used here similarly departs from current movements based on resistance or binary oppositionality. Thus, while approaches like intergroup dialogue can reveal how power operated historically to harm some groups while favoring others, they do not always help those who have been harmed to exit their oppression/victimology, nor do they help those who have been privileged to discover new meaning systems that give them a positive way of belonging in a more egalitarian society. In the absence of positive meaning-making, the latter can fall prey to fear-based, pandering movements that reach out in fleeting and superficial ways by resurrecting romanticized memories of privilege [Page 1221]while offering them no new meaning in the global era.

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