Panel 1.2 – chair Roselinde Supheert

Turkish Transformations Through Italian Eyes. From Cristina di Belgiososo to Oriana Fallaci
– Reinier Speelman (ICON, Utrecht)

Italian travel literature includes a number of important accounts of female life in what is now the Turkish Republic. A central  position in these texts is taken by observations on the women’s revolution implemented by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, that pushed the position of women to the most advanced in Europe. But travel accounts in the Tanzimat period evidence how the Kemalist revolution was anticipated by important changes in Ottoman society. The Italian revolutionary and proto-feminist aristocrat Cristina di Belgioioso had described Anatolian women with new interest in the wake of the 1848 revolts and was rather unique in taking the chance to describe their life and relations with the dominant sex.

No Italians witnessed the Kastamonu and Inebolu nutuklar of August 1925.  But the results of Atatürk’s speeches can be illustrated by their descriptions of Turkish social life in the years to follow. The cosmopolite Sicilian Giuseppe Antonio Borgese had given testimony of the deceased Ottoman Empire in the 1920’s. In the same period, the writer and journalist Corrado Alvaro was much interested in Atatürk’s new Turkey. Neither of both failed to notice the new position of women in Kemalist society.  This can also be affirmed for Ada Supino, whose praise of Kemalism doesn’t present any friction with the Orientalist tradition that provides her with a context and even with inspiration for a tale. Slightly later, though, the philosopher and academician Giuseppe Semerari failed to see or to correctly interpret the city of Istanbul he twice visited. It would be the renowned feminist journalist Oriana Fallaci who described a Turkey which had succeeded were many societies had failed in giving equal rights to women and became an important example of women’s emancipation in an Islamic country, thus confirming the value of the Kemalist approach of women as an important feminist achievement. New interest in Turkish Islamic culture inspired the Italian novelist Cassieri to write a novel on conversion to Islam for sentimental reasons. The stronger visibility and political power of Islamism was, however, seen as a drawback by Fallaci in the years after “Nine Eleven”.

Language use and social integration of Aruban academic migrants in the Netherlands
– Jocelyn Ballantyne and Maud Bijl de Vroe (UCU, Utrecht)

Our study explores the relationship between the social integration of students from Aruba in mainstream Dutch society to their use of multiple languages in different domains. Aruban students are typically multilingual: Papiamento is the home language for 69% of the Aruban population (Censo 2010 Aruba), while Dutch is the language of secondary education; English is also widely spoken, and is important as a language of communication because of Aruba’s economic dependence on tourism.

Each year, some 250 Aruban students come to the Netherlands to pursue higher education (EA, 2012), but frequently experience academic and social adjustment difficulties while studying in the Netherlands. Students are likely to attribute these difficulties to a failure of secondary education to prepare them adequately for study in Dutch, and express fears that the use of English in the Netherlands compounds this (Bijl de Vroe 2015). Our analysis, however, indicates that reported use of English is not associated with poorer social integration. Our questionnaire data reports students’ use of Papiamento, Dutch and English, in the Netherlands and in Aruba, and provides a measure of social integration from responses to questions about sense of affiliation with Dutch society. Responses about language use fall into four domains (personal, study, media use, general). Social integration is positively correlated with the use of Dutch in personal and media use domains while in the Netherlands, but is not correlated with the use of Dutch in other domains in the Netherlands, or with the use, in any domain, of Dutch in Aruba. The use of English in the Netherlands, furthermore, does not show any correlation in any domain with social integration. These results suggest that the use of English does not interfere with social integration in the Netherlands, especially if it ultimately fosters use of Dutch in the personal domain.

References

• Bijl de Vroe, M. 2015. Twisted tongues, hybrid identities: The role language use and identity play in the integration of Aruban students in the Netherlands. BA thesis, Utrecht University.
• Censo 2010 Aruba. 2010. Central Bureau of Statistics Aruba. Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Center. Retrieved from http://www.redatam.org/binabw/RpWebEngine.exe/Portal?&BASE=AUA2010
• Enseñansa Aruba. 2012. Aankomst Arubaanse Studenten in Nederland. Retrieved from http://www.ea.aw/pa/noticia/363-aankomst-arubaanse-studenten-in-nederland

Panel 2.2 – chair Gandolfo Cascio

Multilingualism and Out-group Acceptance: The Mediating Roles of Cognitive Flexibility and Deprovincialization
– Borja Martinovic and Kieran Douglas Mepham (Interdisciplinary Social Science, Utrecht)

In this research we systematically study multilingualism as a predictor of acceptance of ethnic outgroups. It is argued that people who speak more languages are more cognitively flexible, that is, they have an enhanced flexibility in understanding and representing information. Higher cognitive flexibility is in turn expected to be related to higher deprovincialization: a re-evaluation of one’s ethnocentric worldview. Deprovincialization is then expected to result in more openness towards ethnic outgroups, evidenced by a more inclusive notion of the national identity and reduced outgroup dislike. Cross-sectional survey data among a representative sample of native Dutch participants from the Netherlands (N = 792) provide convincing support for these hypotheses and show that multilingualism is an important yet understudied factor in social-psychological research on prejudice reduction.

Intercultural Learning in reflection reports of outgoing Erasmus students
– Jana Untiedt and Annelies Messelink (ICC Master alumna and TLC department, Utrecht)

In 2016 Utrecht University offered a pilot course and “Intercultural Learning” training, open to all students going on exchange in the second semester. While mobility is greatly promoted, research confirms that intercultural contact and experience in itself do not guarantee intercultural learning (Vande Berg, Connor-Linton & Paige, 2009) and could potentially even reinforce stereotypes (Deardorff, 2004). Vande Berg and Paige (2012) therefore suggest the use of interventions as most learning takes place though critically reflecting on the actual experience. Furthermore, while studying abroad is increasingly promoted as a means to gaining intercultural skills and enhancing and employability, students often remain unaware of what they have learned and are unable to verbalise this in meaningful ways (Messelink, Van Maele & Spencer-Oatey, 2015). The Intercultural Learning course as such seeks to both stimulate the learning experience, as well as to enable students to verbalise.

This course was partly based on the Lifelong Learning project IEREST, which provides non-essentialist teaching materials for Erasmus students. Just like the IEREST materials, the Intercultural Learning course consists of three modules:

• Before departure two meetings were organised, focused on preparations and expectations;
• While abroad, students wrote three intercultural ethnographies in which they reflected on their social, academic and cultural life;
• Upon return there were two meetings, one focused on exchanging experiences and a career training which discussed how to verbalise learning experiences.

In her master research, Jana Untiedt focused on the second module and investigated to what extent the ethnographies of students demonstrate intercultural learning. Her aim was both to investigate how learning takes place abroad as well as how this can be stimulated by using interventions. She investigated 27 reflection reports of 20 students from different faculties, ranging from pharmacy to geology, and in different years of their studies. By using content analysis Untiedt investigated how different learning strategies were used in the different phases of Kolb’s learning cycle (1984), namely experience, reflection, conceptualisation and experimentation. She then relates this to the actual learning outcomes that students discuss with regards to knowledge, skills and attitudes (Deardorff, 2004). She clearly demonstrates which strategies students used abroad to enhance learning as well as the importance of reflection in this process. Correspondingly, evaluations of this course also confirm that most learning took place through reflecting on real experience.

References

• Deardorff, D. K. (2004). Internationalization: In search of intercultural competence. International educator, 13(3), 13-15.
• Messelink, H. E., Van Maele, J., & Spencer-Oatey, H. (2015). Intercultural competencies: what students in study and placement mobility should be learning. Intercultural Education, 26(1), 62-72.
• Paige, R. M., & Vande Berg, M. (2012). Why students are and are not learning abroad. Student learning abroad: What our students are learning, what they are not, and what we can do about it, 29-58.
• Vande Berg, M., Connor-Linton, J., & Paige, R. M. (2009). The Georgetown Consortium Project: Interventions for Student Learning Abroad. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 18, 1-75.

Panel 3.2 – chair Olivier Sécardin

You could have very good intentions and do something that bothers someone else. Discrepancies between self-perceived identities and lived experiences of higher education students in an intercultural college and their implications for intercultural educational practices.
– Tatiana Bruni (UCU, Utrecht)

This paper deals with some discrepancies between the constructed self-perception of open-mindedness and the lived experiences of university students who considers themselves to be global nomads.

Global Nomads, Mobile students, Third Culture Kids. They consider themselves global citizens, and their personal narratives elaborate on their open-mindedness and their intercultural awareness and skills. They often seek for an international educational environment where they meet other students with similar backgrounds. Such an environment is provided by international liberal arts and science colleges in the Netherlands. Students at the college I work at have developed strong narratives of the college community as an intercultural arena.

However, in my teaching and tutoring experience at this college, I have noticed that there can be a discrepancy between intent and behaviour. I wanted to investigate how this would influence the learning environment and the social life of our students.

In this paper, I will present the results of a small research based on the textual analysis of some documents produced by students and of a conversation on issues of diversity, inclusion and exclusion that I conducted with four students. First, I will discuss some controversial issues both brought up by students and noticed by me. Using thick descriptions, I will then show how students explain those issues, and what suggestions they have for improving the intercultural experience at the college. Finally, I will elaborate on the contribution that intercultural education and education for global citizenship could make to address the issues discussed. The results presented can be of interest for instructors and policy-makers of international programs and settings.

Assessing and monitoring vocabulary acquisition in a fair way
– Manuela Pinto & Shalom Zuckerman (UiL-OTS, Utrecht)

Assessing the vocabulary of young immigrants is a difficult task. Instructions are often misunderstood, children might suffer from low self-confidence and self-esteem and test items may be unclear or misleading. Current methods appear to be problematic in many ways. They are not adequate to measure bilinguals’ language competence; they require children to perform an unnatural and explicit operation of selecting among candidates; they feel like a test and create anxiety; some items are unclear, outdated or irrelevant; items are tested out of their (cultural) context; and, crucially, they seem to lead to underestimation, especially with young newcomers, and to failure in measuring their progress and in comparing it to monolingual children’s proficiency rates.

This talk introduces a new method – the Coloring Book (authors 2015, 2016) – to test the receptive vocabulary of young L2speakers. With this method children are presented with digital coloring pages containing multiple everyday-life items on a certain theme (classroom, farm, clothes, etc.). Upon hearing a sentence containing coloring instructions (“the ceiling is green”, “the door is red”), children select a color on the touchscreen and paint  the item they think it represents a ceiling or a door. This playful activity implicitly reveals their vocabulary knowledge.

We present new results obtained with this method and claim that reducing anxiety, testing words in their natural context and allowing children to give their first intuitive interpretation makes their performance improve and allow for easy follow up measurements.

Panel 4.2 – chair Jan ten Thije

The Dangers of a Single Story: Researching Women’s Writing and Utopias Across Cultures and Borders
– Barnita Bagchi (Comparative Literature, Utrecht)

In her 2009 TED talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, the Nigerian-American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote about the Igbo word “nkali”, “to be greater than another.” “Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.” (Adichie 2009). In this presentation, I shall draw on aspects of my research into women’s agency and writing and on utopian communities and futures conceived by such women to show how literary-historical scholarship can, in analyzing “stories”, excavate cultural diversity in a context of inequality in power relations, while also analysing transcultural flows. While gender and ethnic/ racial diversity will be in focus, the presentation will understand diversity in a framework of cross-cutting vectors of inequality. My presentation will be partly framed by the work of cultural sociologists such as Michele Lamont, who have shown that culture should not be thought of only as a society’s beliefs, norms, values and attitudes, which are far more contradictory than often supposed,  but also in terms of worldviews, frames and scripts of behavior (see e.g. Lamont and Small 2010). The presentation will examine a number of cases, spanning the period 1790 to our times, and cutting notably across India, Bangladesh, Scotland, England and Antigua.

References

Adichie, Chimamanda. “The danger of a single story.” TED Ideas worth spreading (2009).

Lamont, Michèle, and Mario Luis Small. “Cultural diversity and anti‐poverty policy.” International social science journal 61.199 (2010): 169-180.  

Interpreter-Mediated Communication in Dutch General Practice
– Rena Zendedel, Barbara Schouten, Julia van Weert and Bas van den Putte (Amsterdam School of Communication Research, Amsterdam)

Family interpreters are frequently used in medical settings all over the world to bridge the language gap between the health care providers and migrant patients. In Dutch general practice (GP) family interpreters are present in circa 60% of GP consultations with migrant patients and are especially frequently used by first generation female Turkish migrant patients, because of their low Dutch language proficiency. However, research on interpreter-mediated interactions is scattered, often lacks theoretical base and an overarching investigation of the perspectives of the three interlocutors, that is the doctor’s (i.e., General Practitioner’s (GP’s)), the patient’s and the family interpreter’s.

Therefore, in order to contribute to the development of the research field, the aim of the current PhD project is to study the process of interpreter-mediated intercultural interactions integrating the three perspectives (i.e., the GP’s, the patients’ and the family interpreter’s) and relating the antecedents of communication to the communication process and outcomes (i.e., perceived control, trust in the interpreter and satisfaction with the consultation). We study the family interpreter’s role, control dynamics in the interpreted interaction and trust in the family interpreter using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and mixed research methods. During the presentation, the PhD candidate will provide an overview of the studies and discuss the findings of two qualitative studies (n=22), (n = 54) respectively, a survey (n= 91) and our current observational study (n = 84), based on a sample of audio-recorded real-life interpreted medical interactions. Both, the theoretical, as well as the practical implications of the research findings will be discussed.