Aspiring to postcolonial engagement with the Other: Deepening intercultural learning through reflection on a South India sojourn

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the pedagogies deployed to raise the critical intercultural awareness of UK-based students who took part in a short sojourn in South India. It then discusses theoretical approach which aims to develop criticality to expose and challenge assumptions in students' thinking. In turn, these challenges may lead to possible epistemological and ontological shifts or, in other words, transformational learning. Two main forms of data are collected in an attempt to explore the participants' learning as holistically as possible. First, with the permission of the participants, their academic written reflections and journals are reviewed and then augmented by interviews that are conducted three to four months after the academic module had ended. The author has been provoked to aspire to a postcolonial engagement not only with the other, but through a continued reflexive reconsideration of himself.