The Future of Education

With the growing emphasis on the need for an intercultural approach to modern education (Byram 1997; Nieto, 2004) and the pedagogy of intercultural competence (Huber and Reynolds, 2014), twenty-first century EFL teachers are no longer expected to merely transmit factual information about the target culture; they have assumed the role of a cultural facilitator or mediator through the learning process (Byram et al., 2002). This comes as no surprise given that language is an inseparable part of culture. In the Republic of Croatia, the National Curriculum Framework (2011) presumes a high level of teacher competences and their ability to effectively utilize a range of methods and teaching aids in order to successfully organize the educational process. However, while the need to implement the fundamental tenets of intercultural education across subject curricula and the emphasis on the role of teachers have become the focus of much scholarly effort (Mrnjaus, 2013; Bedeković, 2014; Piršl et al., 2016; Čepić and Kalin, 2019), teachers would benefit from additional encouragement in fostering both their own and their students’ intercultural competences. Therefore, this paper aims to provide an insight into the challenges of intercultural education and opportunities of continuous professional development of EFL teachers that encourage a positive classroom atmosphere and facilitate risk-taking, self-reflection, and development of respect for cultural differences as well as an open and constructive intercultural dialogue.

Keywords: intercultural education, teachers’ professional development, foreign language, pluralism.

References:

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