Identity Work and Intercultural Awareness Through Cultural Excavation: Teacher Candidates Studying Abroad

ABSTRACT

Reflecting upon self-identity is important for teachers and teacher candidates, many of whom have different backgrounds from their multicultural, multilingual students. In this study I analyze data from cultural excavation activities completed by ten teacher candidates during study abroad in Peru, in which they critically reflected upon their own identities in relation to the cultural environments of their study abroad experience. Findings from activities and the Intercultural Development Inventory showed increased intercultural sensitivity among most participants, while focus group responses pointed to the cultural excavation activities as scaffolding this movement. Participant responses also demonstrated increased contextual awareness regarding their and others’ identities, a crucial notion for combatting essentialist conceptions of culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Study abroad
• peru
• intercultural development inventory
• autobiography of intercultural encounters
• teacher education

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the participants of this study for their honesty and thoughtfulness. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their careful feedback on a version of this manuscript. This study was approved by the University of Connecticut’s Institutional Review Board (Protocol No. H19-025).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Two additional assignments, the Home Culture Poem and Project, are not analyzed in this article. This is because participants tended to follow the models of these two assignments quite literally, leading to substantially less critical, open-ended explorations of identity and culture than the “I am … ” “I am a … ” and Autobiography of an Intercultural Encounter assignments.

² With a Cohen’s d of 0.99, 83.9% of the “treatment” group will be above the mean of the “control” group (Cohen’s U3), 62.1% of the two groups will overlap, and there is a 75.8% chance that a person picked at random from the treatment group will have a higher score than a person picked at random from the control group (probability of superiority; Magnusson, 2021).