This reflective paper reflects on the evolving landscape of Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) in Pakistan's education system. It considers how policy reforms, particularly the Single National Curriculum (SNC) and the National Education Policy 2017, have attempted to address diversity and inclusion in a nation characterised by significant linguistic, ethnic, and religious plurality. Despite progressive policy intentions, systemic challenges including inadequate teacher preparation, centralised curriculum materials that marginalise indigenous knowledge, language policy constraints, and high-stakes assessment pressures continue to hinder the realisation of culturally responsive pedagogy. This reflection examines the tension between standardisation and cultural responsiveness, offering pathways for bridging policy-practice gaps to advance equity and cultural inclusion in Pakistani classrooms.
This study examines intercultural coexistence in an elite international school in Spain with Ukrainian and Russian students amid the Russia-Ukraine war. Using a qualitative approach, the research aims to understand how teachers and school leaders manage coexistence and address intercultural tensions. Analysis of interviews reveals that the war has had a particularly strong impact on the school community, intensifying challenges in maintaining harmonious relationships.Teachers emphasized the need for both formal and informal strategies to sustain coexistence. Three complementary approaches were identified: reactive, proactive, and restorative. The reactive approach focuses on immediate conflict management and containment. The proactive approach emphasizes prevention through training and awareness activities, and it was the most frequently applied. The restorative approach, however, offered the greatest transformative potential, as it prioritizes emotional support, active listening, empathy, and the rebuilding of relationships among those affected by the conflict.Overall, the study highlights how schools can implement diverse strategies to navigate intercultural tensions caused by geopolitical crises. It also underscores the importance of combining structured policies with flexible, human-centered practices. Future research should include the perspectives of students and families to better assess the impact and effectiveness of the school's initiatives.
This case study examines the role of transnational educational contexts in shaping student identity and fostering intercultural competence at Germany's leading private university for international diversity. With 85% of its 2,000 students coming from over 120 countries and no single, dominant national culture, Constructor University (CU) offers a unique superinternational environment to study intercultural competence and identity formation. Based on 15 in-depth interviews with students and meetings with university staff, we examine how intercultural competence is fostered at CU through a mixture of structured intercultural training and everyday ongoing interaction. Students reported moving beyond national stereotypes to appreciate individuals for their personalities, articulating what some interviewees referred to as a 'culture of respect'. Drawing on postcolonial theories of creolisation, we explore how this respect emerges in 'everyday actions' alongside - and sometimes in tension with - the university's structured intercultural initiatives. Our findings highlight the critical role of internationalised higher education contexts in fostering robust intercultural competence among students and contributing to broader Sustainable Development Goals, as well as modelling peacebuilding in highly diverse contexts.
Access to higher education is a critical pathway for refugee women's empowerment, resilience, and long-term integration. Yet, they face intersecting barriers - including legal restrictions, unrecognised qualifications, and gendered cultural expectations - that systematically limit their participation. Traditional educational interventions often overlook these complexities, reinforcing exclusionary practices.This article presents a case study of a longitudinal Participatory Action Research (PAR) intervention conducted in the Netherlands, designed to support refugee women in accessing and navigating higher education. Grounded in intersectionality and Critical Race Feminist, the study highlights how PAR can serve as both a research methodology and a transformative educational practice. By centring refugee women as active participants and co-creators of knowledge, the intervention fostered agency, built trust, and generated institutional insights that contributed to more inclusive educational practices.The outcome of this project shows that PAR fosters educational progress and meaningful social inclusion through participatory, equity-driven approaches. By actively engaging refugee women in the co-design of the intervention's content and structure, the programme cultivates a sense of belonging, agency, and personal relevance. This study contributes to the field of refugee education by offering a replicable model for institutions aiming to advance gender-responsive inclusion in higher education.
In an increasingly globalised world, higher education seeks to develop students' intercultural competence, yet international exposure alone does not guarantee meaningful learning. This article presents Semester at Sea (SAS) as an example of inspiring practice in intercultural education and examines how its multi-country study abroad model supports cumulative intercultural learning through intentionally designed experiential pedagogy. Drawing on the authors' experiences across multiple voyages (2017-2024) and informed by Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory, the article highlights four pedagogical features of the programme: shipboard education anchored in Global Studies, faculty-led field classes, comparative experiential projects, and structured post-port reflection. Together, these practices enable students to engage in repeated intercultural encounters, compare experiences across contexts, and reflect critically on their assumptions over time. The article shows how SAS moves beyond travel as exposure by embedding preparation, experience, comparison, and reflection within a continuous learning process. In doing so, it offers transferable insights for educators seeking to design study abroad programmes that foster sustained intercultural development.
This Research Note examines how one Islamic school (madrasah) in Hindu-majority Bali, Indonesia employs digital platforms - Google Classroom, YouTube, Instagram, and Zoom - to mediate intercultural coexistence between Islamic and Balinese Hindu cultural values. Drawing on qualitative interviews with five key stakeholders and grounded in Allport's Contact Theory, the study identifies four findings: digital platforms function as mediators of cultural convergence through pedagogical reframing of shared values such as gotong royong; intercultural coexistence is co-constructed across digital and physical spaces; religious leadership provides normative scaffolding for culturally sensitive digital integration; and digital mediation is constrained by the digital divide, misinformation risks, and uneven teacher capacity. Theoretically, the study extends Contact Theory to digitally mediated educational contexts through the concept of the 'digital contact zone', contributing to frameworks for digital intercultural pedagogy in minority-majority religious settings.
This paper reports on how two recent studies of Ghanaian Headteacher Leadership contribute to intercultural education. Read together, the two studies show that Headteachers are expected to build school - community relationships, work across different stakeholders and improve learning for all, yet they are recruited unevenly, without pre-headship training and governed by a discourse that allocates responsibility more readily than authority. Through a critical lens, we argue that the problem is not only effectiveness but recognition: who is authorised to decide, whose knowledge counts, and how much professional judgement remains when leadership is scripted. We advance the argument that intercultural leadership in Ghana requires explicit preparation, stronger professional recognition and policy structures that position the community and culture as a resource for judgement rather than a compliance problem.
This paper presents a reflective analysis of a two-day study visit in Croatia (October 2024), organised within the framework of the SIRIUS 3.0 project and led by the Forum for Freedom in Education. The visit facilitated the exchange of knowledge and experiences among experts from several European countries in the field of education for refugee and migrant students. Examples of good practice were examined at the organisation 'Are You Syrious?' in Zagreb and the Antun and Ivan Kukuljevi & cacute; Primary School in Vara & zcaron;dinske Toplice, focusing on holistic approaches to student well-being, individualised support, and community involvement. The paper demonstrates how structured, empathetic, and flexible approaches can contribute to academic success, emotional security, and a sense of belonging among migrant students.
This mixed-methods study examines how preservice teachers in a multicultural Israeli teacher-education college construct and experience Digital Professional Spaces (DPSs), understood as personal - professional digital portfolios. This study explores patterns of personalisation, professional development, and challenges among Hebrew and Arabic-speaking students. Data were collected through open-ended questionnaires and analysed thematically alongside quantitative comparisons. Findings show that students use DPSs as multifunctional environments that support identity construction, creative expression, pedagogical development, and reflection. While participants reported various technical, process-related, and equity challenges, many described these as opportunities for learning and growth. Clear cultural-linguistic differences emerged in how students engaged with the spaces and the challenges they emphasised. Furthermore, active engagement, particularly sharing and interaction was strongly associated with perceived value. This study highlights the importance of culturally responsive design and structured support in implementing digital portfolio initiatives in teacher education.
As the world becomes culturally intermingled, facilitating intergroup understanding and caring has become a key task for the higher education sector to navigate the friction and opportunities brought by multiculturality. Ethnocultural empathy has long been considered an important avenue for this end. However, while it is trainable, ethnocultural empathy development programmes can be costly for educational institutions and students. Thus, an intervention-free approach to ethnocultural empathy development is in dire need as a supplemental and less capital-demanding alternative. Allport's (1954) intergroup contact theory sheds light on the possibility of developing ethnocultural empathy through cross-cultural interactions. To understand how ethnocultural empathy takes shape naturally in intercultural contacts, the present one-year mixed-methods case study used logbooks, the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE), and unstructured interviews to examine the developmental trajectories of ethnocultural empathy of three home students in Hong Kong and how cross-cultural interactions influenced such processes. It was found that (1) cultural contact facilitates ethnocultural empathy development but its effects wane fast, (2) ethnocultural empathy inertia emerges from an inclusive environment, and (3) ethnocultural empathy development can be compartmentalised under home students' intergroup presumptions. Implications are discussed.
Creating classroom environments that ensure equitable participation during group work remains a central challenge in contemporary pedagogy. The Complex Instruction Program (CIP) is a status-sensitive pedagogical approach designed to promote both the inclusion of disadvantaged students and the talent development of high-achieving peers through differentiated tasks and structured interaction patterns. This study investigates how lessons organised according to CIP principles influence the classroom status of disadvantaged students in heterogeneous groups when they are assigned leadership roles, and whether this leads to shifts in their sociometric position. The research was conducted in 2024 in a newly participating school in Central Hungary that had recently joined the CIP network. Data were collected through 11 classroom observations covering 65 small groups of approximately six students each. Among the participants, 39 low-status and 26 high-status students assumed leadership roles. Frequency differences were analysed using independent t-tests. The findings indicate that assigning leadership roles to disadvantaged students in CIP-based lessons produces a significant positive shift in their classroom standing, resulting in a measurable increase in status. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of structured, status-managing pedagogical interventions in promoting upward mobility within classroom hierarchies, strengthening peer cooperation, and fostering inclusive learning environments. The study offers important implications for both classroom practice and educational research.
