Page 330 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

308 Albert Scherr

tural education seeks to respond to the situation of socially disadvantaged mi-
grants and minorities “so that students from diverse racial, ethnic, and social-
class groups will experience educational equality” (Banks and Banks 2001: 3).
What is often overlooked in proposals for multicultural education is the dif-
ficulty of clearly and unambiguously identifying particular cultures and of as-
signing individuals or social groups to closed and clearly bounded cultural
frameworks. Rather, it is necessary to look not just at cultures as a source of
communicative problems, but also at the social conditions and practices by
which cultures are created and differentiated from one another, not as closed
communicative systems but as flexible interpretational frameworks; for every
instance of ‘intercultural’ communication is in reality socially situated, that is,
framed in a single encompassing system of social labellings and cultural differ-
ences, and the participants in intercultural communication operate with knowl-
edge of their cultural membership, acquired in shared processes of socialization
(Hall and du Gay 2002).
Educational socialization is relevant for the study of intercultural communi-
cation in four specific respects:

First, schools are institutions for the presentation and enforcement of national,
ethnic and religious identifications – but also the locus of resistance against as-
similation to the hegemonial culture.
Second, schools are the central agents of socialization, so that much of the cul-
tural background and cultural identification which individuals bring into inter-
cultural dialogue have been acquired not in autonomously native cultures but in
the schools themselves.
Third, schools are social meeting points that are not isolated from the cultural
differences, conflicts and adaptive dynamics found elsewhere; rather, they host
a continuous background of ‘doing culture’, in which the interactions among
pupils and teachers lead the participants to form ideas about various cultures
and to differentiate themselves from others via cultural labels. Recognizing this,
in pedagogical practice, ‘culture’ is often invoked as an explanatory scheme in
reacting to difficult and irritating behavior, when it seems plausible to interpret
the behavior as the expression of pupils’ backgrounds and families.
Fourth, in observations and analyses of interactions it has been shown that at-
tributions to cultural and ethnic factors, ‘enlightened’ by cultural theory, are
often simplistic and that they tend to go hand in hand with projective and
grossly simplifying explanations of the observed behavior (cf. e.g. Schiffauer et
al. 2002).

By contrast, numerous and various criticisms of an inadequately thought-through
multiculturalism have pointed out that individuals in modern societies cannot be
intelligibly understood solely as products of a culture, which alone determines