Teachers’ Intercultural Rights: A Plea by Francisco Gomes de Matos

FÉDÉRATION INTERNATIONALE DES PROFESSEURS DE LANGUES VIVANTES THE LATEST ON LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES

WORLD NEWS: No. 40 October 1997

Teachers’ Intercultural Rights: A Plea by Francisco Gomes de Matos

The XIX World Congress of FIPLV (Recife,March 24 -26 l997) had as its central them Toward Intercultural Understanding for the 21st Century. By stressing such a crucial dimension of language education, that event has helped pave the way for what I would call a movement in favor of the identification, recognition, and implementation of teachers' and learners' intercultural rights. The latter are conceived not only as a new relation of cultural rights or as a kind of residual cultural rights but rather as another growth point from which an ever-broadening and ever-deepening concept of human rights can develop, so that new context be created for individuals, groups, and communities to understand and respect one another's systems of beliefs, values, and attitudes, as reflected by choices made by users of languages.

In order that each teacher and student can develop the maximum of his or her intercultural potential, educational systems and organizations functioning therein should cooperate so that Article 27(1) of the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS "everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community" can be applied cross-culturally, thus leading to what has been highlighted by Article 28 in the 1996 UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF LINGUISTIC RIGHTS : "All language communities are entitled to an education which will enable their members to acquire a thorough knowledge of their cultural heritage (history, geography, literature, and other manifestations of their own culture), as well as the most extensive possible knowledge of any other culture they may wish to know". The UDLR's emphasis on the need for education to "always be at the service of linguistic and cultural diversity and of harmonious relations between language communities throughout the world" (Article 23: 3) is a powerful reminder to all of us concerned with constructing and sustaining a global cross-cultural vision. In such spirit, I have been including the cooperative formulation of language teachers' intercultural rights and responsibilities in workshops for Brazilian teacher trainers and teachers as, for example, in the Seminar for teachers of Portuguese as a foreign language, sponsored by SIPLE - International Society for the Teaching of Portuguese as a FL, held in Nitersi, Rio de Janeiro State, October 1996.

Here is one example of one of such intercultural rights for teachers: Teachers should have the right to be prepared to interpret perceptions of their national cultures by key thinkers( in arts, education, politics, science, etc.), through their speeches and/or written texts and to be able to compare such perceptions with those of corresponding thinkers in other cultures.

Here is an example of an intercultural responsibility of language teachers:

Teachers should challenge their students identify and correct stereotyped perceptions of aspects of their own culture as well as of the culture in which the new language is embedded.

How effectively have we been doing our job as cross-cultural agents? Although over 50 years have elapsed since the phrase "cross-cultural studies" started being used in the literature, and notwithstanding advances in cross-cultural communication research, since Lado's classic ( 4O years old in l997) Linguistics across cultures, much remains to be done by us, either as teacher-educators and/or teachers ourselves, to contribute significantly to making the Intercultural Rights and Responsibilities of students a permanent component in the process of language learning. If, as Kramsch et al cogently put it, "even a first-year learner of a foreign language" is a cross-cultural decision-maker, it follows that the formidable task of preparing teachers accordingly likes on the shoulders of far-sighted, innovative professional communities such as those within the expanding FIPLV network.

May this be a plea for us to do our job as a effectively as possible, so as to live up to the principles of cross-cultural understanding, tolerance, and communicative peace characterizing FIPLV 's organizational vision and mission.

References

Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. World Conference on Linguistic Rights. Barcelona, June 1996. International PEN and CIEMEN. 27-page quadrilingual text:Catalan, French, English, and Spanish. Available on the Internet at this site http://www.troc.es/mercator/dudl-gb.htm.

Lado, R. 1957. Linguistics across Cultures. Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan Press (note the conceptual-terminology vitality of the phrase "across cultures" in the current specialized literature).

Kramsch, C., A. Cain & E. Murphy-Lejeune, 1996. ‘Why should language teachers teach culture? In: Genevihve Zarate, Michael Byram and Elizabeth Murphy-Lejeune (Eds) Special issue on Cultural Representation in

Language Learning and Teacher Training. Vol.9: 1.

Language, Culture, and Curriculum. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, U.K.,p.106

Editor’s note: Dr. Francisco Gomes de Matos is a professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil. He has been advocating a humanrights-and-peace approach to language teaching since 1977. E-mail fcgm@it.com.br, Fax: 55-81-3268670