Book Review: Interculturality and the Political within Education

Abstract

This review provides an evaluation of the book Interculturality and the Political within Education written by Dervin and Simpson. It first gives a brief introduction to the book, the authors, the organization, and the features of the book. After that, the review presents a description and evaluation of the book’s content based on its themes. Through the five chapters, the authors discuss three main issues in interculturality, namely, the notion of interculturality, influences on interculturality, and current interculturality research based on ideologies and economic-political perspectives. The authors suggest that alongside a research trend of (re)defining or (re)negotiating the meaning of interculturality, intercultural practitioners need to be aware of reframing such concepts for use within their own social contexts, since most of the concepts and models that are widely quoted originate with Western scholars and theorists. They effectively frame this problem as the “admire role models” trap in interculturality research. It misleads teachers and researchers into thinking that successful intercultural interaction can be prepared by learning commonly accepted interaction norms and blindly employing Western models to assess students’ intercultural competence. In fact, interculturality is often in the process of developing. Ultimately, working in the field of intercultural studies requires us to be skeptical about everything and to read widely.