Listening Across Difference: Pláticas as a Practice of Connection and Transformation for Adult Learners

Teaching Across Cultures in Music: Rethinking Authenticity and Practice in Initial Teacher Education

In contexts of growing social polarisation and cultural complexity, tertiary educators are increasingly called upon to move beyond celebratory multiculturalism towards critically informed intercultural praxis in preparing students for 21st-century classrooms. Drawing on a sustained transnational collaboration between Australia and Spain within initial teacher education, this paper adopts a collaborative autoethnographic approach to critically reflect on our pedagogical practices and their implications for culturally responsive music education. We examine how intercultural musical encounters, particularly those involving culture bearers, can foster cultural competence and critical reflection among pre-service teachers, while also generating tensions related to knowledge, cultural ownership, authenticity, and appropriation. Building on these reflections, we reconceptualise authenticity as a relational and dialogic process, co-constructed through interaction, mediation, and context-sensitive engagement. We propose a conceptual framework grounded in three interrelated dimensions: collaborative partnerships, relational authenticity, and dialogic mediation through educator facilitation. Together, these principles offer an ethically informed and pedagogically grounded approach to intercultural music education that moves beyond representation towards sustained, meaningful engagement with cultural diversity. By foregrounding the role of the educator as a cultural mediator and drawing on insights generated through sustained intercultural practice and prior research, this paper contributes to ongoing debates on belonging, inclusion, and the development of culturally responsive practices in contemporary music teacher education.

Listening, dialogue, and change

This study investigates how dialogic feedback shapes professional identity, agency, and reflective practice among Arab-Bedouin female pre-service teachers in southern Israel. Using a qualitative interpretive design, 12 participants engaged in semi-structured interviews to explore their experiences with culturally mediated mentoring during practical teacher training. Thematic analysis revealed that mentors acted as cultural mediators, facilitating dialogue that balanced respect for traditional norms with opportunities for critical reflection. Dialogic feedback emerged as a space for professional identity development, enabling participants to integrate inherited cultural values with contemporary pedagogical practices. Moreover, it fostered agency, empowering student teachers to take ownership of their learning, contribute ideas, and exercise leadership in classroom decision-making. A reciprocal dimension was also identified, wherein mentors experienced professional growth and reflective renewal through the feedback process. Cultural challenges, including hierarchical social norms and concerns about respect, highlighted the necessity of culturally responsive strategies to ensure meaningful participation. Overall, the findings demonstrate that dialogic feedback operates as a relational, contextually sensitive mechanism that simultaneously supports professional development, reflective learning, and the co-construction of a learning community.   

From the Hood to the PWI: A Self-Reflective Journey as Learner and Educator

Graffiti as public pedagogy: Cross-institutional collaboration for student expression, healing, and transformation

Higher education in South Africa has been widely critiqued for privileging Eurocentric epistemologies that marginalise local knowledge systems and distance learning from the socio-political realities students inhabit. Such dynamics constrain students’ capacity to critically engage the historical and structural forces shaping identity, belonging, and wellbeing. Responding to these concerns, this study examines how a collaborative, arts-based pedagogical strategy centred on graffiti can advance more inclusive and socially responsive teaching practices for diverse student populations. Grounded in critical pedagogy and decolonial theory and informed by the group psychoanalytic concept of the social unconscious, the study conceptualises a graffiti installation as a participatory archive through which students explore the intersections of identity, power, place, and collective memory. A qualitative, participatory design was employed with 12 postgraduate students (7 psychology and 5 design students) across 2 private South African institutions. Through a series of facilitated workshops, participants engaged in critical dialogue, collaboratively created a graffiti installation in a public campus space, and reflected on the meanings embedded in the evolving artwork. Data were generated through the visual artifact, transcribed discussions, participant reflections, and facilitator notes, and analysed using iterative thematic and visual analysis. Findings indicate that the collaborative process enabled students to articulate complex experiences of identity, belonging, and mental health while situating these within broader socio-historical dynamics. The installation functioned as a dialogical and multimodal learning space that supported diverse forms of expression, legitimised experiential knowledge, and uncovered both visible and silenced tensions. The chapter’s original contribution lies in demonstrating how participatory visual methods can operationalise intellectual decolonisation in practice while advancing inclusive teaching strategies that engage cognitive, affective, and spatial ways of knowing.

“I Want Others to Know:” Digital Storytelling as Participatory Multiliteracies Pedagogy for Refugee Adults

Shifting policies and increased polarization around immigration underscore the need for classroom practices that foster inclusion and resilience, enabling learners to navigate complex sociopolitical landscapes in a new language. Participatory action research has long been understood as a form of adult learning, and participatory arts‐based research (PABR) methods have powerful potential for dispelling stereotypes, cultivating empathy, and highlighting the resilience and cultural, linguistic, and practical knowledge refugees bring to their new communities. Resulting from an ongoing community‐based participatory research project in the Midwestern United States, this paper examines the process and products of a 10‐week PABR workshop with refugee adult English learners through the lens of Critical Refugee Studies. Findings indicate that using photovoice and digital storytelling enabled learners to express complex experiences, affirm their identities as knowledge producers, develop critical consciousness, and challenge dominant refugee narratives by articulating both the structural causes of displacement and their own agency and advocacy for change.

“Not Just Boring Adult Stuff” Issue-Based and Critical Pedagogies for Civic and Political Learning in Welsh Primary Classrooms