Imagining hospitality using digital storytelling by MSc International students: Interculturality, identity, space and othering

In the past ten years, there has been an increasing interest in the ‘entanglements’ of language, mobility, space, transcultural identities and creativity (Jones, 2019) using the arts. This study adopts a relational approach (Martin & Pirbhai-Illich, 2016), research-led teaching and learning using creative art-based methods to decolonise teacher education (Andrews and Almohammad, 2022; Pirbhai-Illich, and Martin, 2020) and prepare MSc international students for interculturality and reflexivity on self-other relationships. To enhance students' reflexivity on the complexity of concepts (e.g. hospitality, migration, interculturality, hope, diversity, racism, inclusion, among others), their meanings and embodiment as a social practice, the course prepared learners to con-construct and transform their selected concepts, into digital stories to critically address issues of social justice, inclusion, diversity and equality in specific times and spaces. The learners come from three master programmes in language and intercultural communication, language education and TESOL. Learners produced twenty digital stories for assessment, drawing on their funds of knowledge, including mobility, digital culture, transcultural identity, translanguaging creativity, embodiment and symbolic resources (Kramsch, 2021). The stories were about how they imagined and experienced hospitality in their study abroad: how they imagined people in the UK before and after their arrival questioning their stereotypes, how they experienced hospitality and inhospitality concerning COVID and being Chinese race, how they experienced sexuality and isolation, how they imagine peer exclusion based on physical appearance, and how linguistic bullying happens online and offline, to mention some. The findings reveal that language, space and body are entangled when co-constructing transcultural identities, ‘intra-actions’ (Barad; 2003; 2007) and creativity. Translanguaging creativity works as a symbolic resource for learners to negotiate inter/trans/cultural identities, dialogical self-other relationships, shifting across multiple positioning, national identities and their multiple intercultural spaces (physical and virtual) with conflicting responses to imagined hostility/hospitality and othering
Keywords: identity; hospitality, art-based methods, translanguaging creativity, mobility, space

References:
Andrews, J. and Almohammad. M. (2022). Creating Welcoming Learning Environments: Using Creative Arts Methods in Language Classrooms. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Sings: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3).801 – 829.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NYL Duke University Press.
Jones, R. H. (2019). Creativity in language learning and teaching: Translingual practices and transcultural identities. Applied Linguistics Review; 11(4): 535–550
Kramsch, C. (2021). Language as Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press
Martin, F. & Pirbhai-Illich, F. (2016) Towards Decolonising Teacher Education: Criticality, Relationality and Intercultural Understanding, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 37:4, 355-372, DOI: 10.1080/07256868.2016.1190697
Pirbhai-Illich, F. and Martin, F. (2020). Understanding Hospitality and Invitation as Dimensions of Decolonising Pedagogies When Working Interculturally. In Philip Bamber Teacher Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship: Critical Perspetives on Values, Curriculum and Assessment. ABINGDON: Routledge.