Introduction

Internationally, developing young people's intercultural understanding is advocated and increasingly identified as a policy priority. The Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (1997) centres this as a component of ‘social competency’, ‘social skills’ and ‘soft skills’ (p. 12).The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Intercultural Dialogue (2019) statement argues that, in the current, turbulent global landscape, intercultural dialogue has become more crucial in promoting and disseminating values, attitudes and behaviours seen to be conducive to dialogue, international cooperation and non-violent exchange. The underlying premise is that humanity needs to live together with our differences—of gender, race, language, religion or culture—and advance universal respect for justice and human rights on which such coexistence depends.

Emphases and nomenclature have shifted, variously including anti-racism education; peace education; multicultural education; and intercultural education. The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (2008) provided the basis for the Australian curriculum by first, promoting intercultural understanding alongside other general capabilities including critical and creative thinking, social, personal and ethical capabilities. More recently, the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration (2019) emphasises students as active and informed community members who respect cultural diversity, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Nationally, building intercultural understanding is recognised as an important component of twenty-first century capabilities and is now embedded in both the Australian and Victorian curricula (ACARA, 2014; VCAA, 2015). Despite the rhetorical commitments and the emergent mandated curriculum, research on how the Intercultural Capability is understood and enacted by teachers in Australia remains limited.

In Australia, intercultural understanding was first included in the national curriculum in 2012 (ACARA, 2013) and was re-badged as Intercultural Capability (IC) in the Victorian [state] curriculum in 2015. In a landmark moment, the Victorian Department of Education and Training introduced mandated reporting of compliance with the IC curriculum in 2018 (VCAA, 2017). The aims and rationale for IC curriculum are as follows:

Intercultural capability enables students to learn to value their own cultures, languages and beliefs, and those of others. Students learn about diverse cultures in ways that recognise commonalities and differences, create connections with others and cultivate mutual respect.

The intercultural capability curriculum addresses this role, developing students who are active and informed citizens with an appreciation of Australia’s social, cultural, linguistic and religious diversity, and the ability to relate to and communicate across cultures at local, regional and global levels. (VCAA, 2017)

In light of schools’ imperative to teach IC because of the requirement to report on it, this article investigates how three teachers make meaning of a curriculum in this emergent area. This article is situated in an interpretivist paradigm and employs a narrative inquiry approach (Clandinin & Connelly, 1990) that engages the concept of curriculum-as-lived (Aoki, 2005). In doing so, we develop an analysis of the dilemmas three teachers confronted and the pedagogical decisions they made when implementing a new Intercultural Capabilities (IC) curriculum.

Themes in the intercultural classroom literature

A key argument in curriculum reform is that school teachers have an important role in fostering understanding for a more just society, with related curriculum initiatives including peace, multicultural and anti-racist education and more recent imperatives to teach for international understanding (Nussbaum, 2006; Zembylas & Papamichael, 2017). Yet, in a nation with a culturally diverse population, Australia’s teaching workforce is clearly less diverse than the society it serves. The Australian Teacher Workforce Data (Australian Teacher Workforce Data National Teacher Workforce Characteristics Report, 2021) reports the teaching workforce is less likely to have been born overseas than the overall or working age Australian population; 83% of teachers were born in Australia compared to 71% of the Australian population. Furthermore, teachers identifying as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander comprise only 1% of the teaching population compared to 5.5% of Australian school students. While this is useful data, it can obscure the diversity of cultural backgrounds and experiences that teachers, including Australian-born teachers, bring to the classroom. These are important considerations when exploring teachers’ experiences in relation to teaching intercultural understanding.

To date, much of the international research that relates specifically to the experience of teachers in IC education has tended to be Euro-centric in focus but reveals common themes, namely a critical focus on teacher ethnocentricity and encounters with the ‘other’, and the discomfort and confusion this can produce for teachers (Hajisoteriou & Angelides, 2016; Israelsson, 2016; Jokikokko & Uitto, 2017; Rissanen et al., 2016; Zembylas & Papamichael, 2017). Indeed, Hajisoteriou and Angelides’ (2016) work reveals that the very understandings of what ‘multi-’ and ‘inter-’ cultural mean differ across European socio-historical contexts. In other work, semi-structured interviews and narrative approaches enabled close interrogation of challenges faced by teachers linked to their biographical context (Israelsson, 2016; Peiser & Jones, 2014). Peiser and Jones (2014) found, for example, that how teachers translate IC education into their pedagogical practice is highly idiosyncratic and intuitive, with biography, personality, educational values and interests more influential than immediate contextual factors. Similar themes resonate in the Australian research literature, see for example, Halse et al., (2016).

One commonality across Australian and international scholarship is the conceptual and definitional confusion as to what, precisely, is encompassed by the IC curriculum. However, several localised themes are specific to the Australian nation-state (Cloonan et al., 2017; Halse et al., 2016; Toner, 2010; Walton et al., 2013). The notion of cultural deficit as reported by teachers who were also from the dominant Anglo-Australian culture resonates with ethnocentric ideas circulating in Europe. In particular, this applies to the widespread notion that the majority culture is ‘without culture’ and the aim of the IC curriculum is to learn about ‘other’ cultures (Hajisoteriou & Angelides, 2016; Toner, 2010). Cloonan et al.’s (2017) narrative approach within teacher workshops provides an effective method to interrogate the idea of culture with teachers to cultivate a more open and historicised sense of the dynamic nature of culture. Yet Cloonan et al.’s research does not extend to examining how teachers approach the IC curriculum in the classroom. In contrast to international research, there is little in-depth Australian research that draws on the experience of teachers in understanding, planning, and teaching the IC curriculum. Our study seeks to offer new insights into intersections between curriculum reform and professional identity formation by investigating dimensions of curriculum making for three teachers from different socio-geographic school contexts who were early adopters of IC curriculum.

Methodology

Conceptual framework

In his seminal work, The Child and The Curriculum (1902), the philosopher John Dewey problematised the teaching of a narrow curriculum against a child’s ‘individual peculiarities, whims and experiences’ (p. 8). Schwab (1978) built on Dewey’s work to focus on the teacher’s interpretation of curriculum and developed the concept of ‘practical deliberation’. Through ‘practical deliberation’, teachers take part as practitioners who are fully knowledgeable of their students’ life and work in classrooms. Schwab (1978) and Elbaz-Luwisch (2012) lend broad support to our approach to taking into account the lived experience of children and teachers in the classroom.

This study adopted a narrative inquiry approach based on Clandinin and Connelly’s (1990, 2000, 2006) methodological and theoretical traditions in teacher narrative research. Narrative inquiry is based firmly on the premise that we come to understand and give meaning to our lives through story. Such research seeks to understand how stories are constructed, the contexts in which these narratives emerge and their subjective and social meanings (Andrews et al., 2013). Thus, narrative inquiry can offer rich insight into teachers' subjective experience in enacting and making meaning of a new curriculum area. This has the potential to be of value for practitioners and researchers alike, with the researcher also offering narrative accounts back to practitioners that help them to understand, deconstruct and ask what is next (Lather, 1986). We explored the ‘social, cultural and institutional narratives within which individuals’ experiences are constituted, shaped, expressed and enacted’ (Clandinin, 2006, p. 42) using the constructed stories to interpret and analyse the experiences of early IC curriculum innovators.

To refine this broad approach, we turned to Aoki’s (2005) concept of ‘curriculum-as-lived’. We saw this as complementary to Clandinin and Connelly’s (1990) more sequential framework of understanding curriculum reform according to the steps of ‘broadening’ the notion of school context, ‘burrowing’ into the curriculum enacted in the classroom, and ‘re-storying’ as part of a reflective process. Aoki’s concept of curriculum-as-lived draws on Deleuzian theory and argues for a ‘multiplicity approach’ to curriculum development. Aoki argues this offers a way to interpret ‘lived experience’ within spaces of difference. Aoki’s notion of curriculum-as-lived enables pivotal teaching moments (such as specific events) to be interrogated. This can, in turn, deepen understanding of what it means to be a teacher. Thus, a multiplicity of understandings emerges in a site of relations between the curriculum, the teacher and the students which, following a Deleuzian (1987) analytic, are not separable from each other. For Deleuze, a multiplicity of planes refers to a philosophical site, which includes aesthetic, affective and social dimensions (Semetsky, 2006). Put simply, these refer to the feelings, emotions and perceptions within the context of the IC classroom.

Aoki’s (2005) approach to how teachers think and feel in the lived experience of teaching is a method drawn upon by researchers to trace discomfort and empathy in the classroom. The notion of pedagogies of discomfort (Boler, 1999; Boler & Zembylas, 2003) provides a framework to engage teachers (and students) with issues of difference, race and social justice by troubling their emotional comfort zones. Zembylas (2012) presents pedagogies of empathy to connect teacher discomfort in a productive and transformative way. Boler (1999) championed the importance of challenging dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices that sustain stereotypes and social injustice and in creating openings for empathy and transformation. A major challenge in intercultural education is how to connect the experience of discomfort with that of fostering empathy (Zembylas, 2012). These concepts thus provide a useful lens through which to make meaning of the events that, we argue, contributed to a destabilisation and renewal of the professional and personal identities of teacher participants.

Study design

Three teacher participants were purposively selected from three contrasting government schools in the state of Victoria, Australia (Table 1). The teachers shared characteristics of being early innovators in implementing IC curriculum and were also active in teacher professional networks. Each participant was interviewed twice for 1 h, before and after teaching an IC curriculum unit. The first interview included semi-structured questions focused on the teachers’ understanding and approach to planning the ICC unit. The second interview, conducted after the completion of the unit, focused on teacher reflections about the unit, and questions to elicit how the unit might have shaped their sense of being a teacher—in other words, their teacher professional identity.

Table 1 Participant information
Full size table

Data analysis

Our analysis of the interviews aimed to provide an account of key events and relational episodes in each teacher’s experience. One challenge for the narrative researcher is how to position themselves in the data analysis in a way that captures and honours the ‘voice’ of both the researcher and participants. The data analysis in this study is structured to include the researcher's voice as a narrator and interpreter and the participants as storytellers of their immediate and recollected experiences.

In the first stage, the interview transcripts were analysed using a narrative approach (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) where ‘a research text looks for patterns, narrative threads, tensions and themes either within or across an individual’s experience and in the social setting’ (p. 132). We then shaped the narrative meaning by organising the teacher’s experiences into temporally meaningful episodes (Polkinghorne, 2007). Led by the first named author, we followed Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) narrative coding approach when building the analysis, reading and re-reading the interview transcripts to generate a summarised account that included actions, tensions, continuities, discontinuities and events and storylines that interweave and interconnect. Our data analysis is informed by an approach developed by Riessman (2008) whereby theory aids in zooming in on certain events and themes.

In the second stage, our analysis followed an inductive process in which the rich narratives constructed from each interview were interrogated for meaningfully experienced events or moments that emerged from each participant’s story. Then, we identified pivotal characteristics of the narratives, initially seeking themes that resonated among and across the three cases. For example, participants all reflected on their perceptions and assumptions of their personal culture and how it shaped their implementation of the IC curriculum work. The researchers engaged, iteratively and dialectically, with the narratives, the theoretical framework, and their composite experiences as teachers and researchers (Riessman, 2008). Hence, interpretation continued through every phase, from writing the narratives of each interview, coding the themes of the narratives, and drawing meaning from the narrative themes. The reliability of the thematic categorisation was strengthened and refined by ongoing discussions among the three researchers to test divergent and shared interpretations.

We now present our three cases of the teachers as they navigated the intercultural curriculum. In each case, we draw out the socio-cultural and geographic context of the specific school in interaction with the teacher’s biographical experiences to show how these, combined, create an unsettling experience that can also stimulate professional identity renewal for each teacher.

Findings: meaning making by three teacher participants

Paul—a rural school

Paul is a passionate and committed teacher, focused on developing student literacy and dedicated to challenging students’ attitudes as well as his own. Paul had been teaching for 33 years, mostly in rural schools in what he described as culturally homogenous areas, at the time of interview. Paul’s teaching domains are English and Drama, and he is Head of the English Department. He accepted his school leadership's invitation to participate in the Victorian Intercultural Teacher Pilot Program, deciding to trial the IC curriculum with a Year 9 English class that the school had classified as having low literacy levels. Paul’s school community is predominantly Anglo-Australian, with only 2% of students speaking a language other than English at home (ACARA, 2020).

Paul describes the school families as ‘middle class’, with half involved in agriculture, and the student population as ‘largely monocultural with 15 Indigenous students, five EAL [English as an Additional Language] students from Asian backgrounds—mainly second generation, with also a number of Pacific Islander’. Paul shares a similar cultural-ethnic background to most of his students, stating he ‘came from an incredibly limited, monocultural background’ in what he sees as a ‘predominantly white Anglo-Saxon’ community.

In terms of developing the IC curriculum, Paul says he felt ‘very much blinkered’ and frustrated that he was ‘working solo with a lack of resources’ throughout the whole process, even though he considers that the IC curriculum has ‘the potential to promote productive discussions and support literacy initiatives’ in the school. He thinks that ‘the tyranny of distance’ from the metropolitan centre is a disadvantage for students at his school who, consequently, have less exposure to diversity. Paul observes that his classroom group ‘did demonstrate what I [he] felt were attitudes, views, and values that would simply not stand in a Melbourne high school’. Paul describes his students as coming from a rural, ‘bubbled background’ who demonstrate ‘attitudes of ignorance and also hostility on discussing issues of culture’; furthermore, he believes his students ‘think that a lot of the teachers are lefty and wanting to change their viewpoints’. In a self-critical vein, he offers his understanding of the General Capabilities in terms of the teaching of ‘cultural dispositions’ as limited. In planning how the IC curriculum could be incorporated into his Year 9 English low-literacy class, Paul departed from the set curriculum to focus on concepts including ‘empathy and human rights’. In a conference call with the program team overseeing the IC Capabilities pilot program, he was told he ‘had a fair way to go before [unpacking] a lot of the intercultural capabilities stuff’. Paul realised that he had not been teaching to the formal curriculum specifications due to his prioritisation of engagement and literacy over developing knowledge and skills in the IC curriculum. The intersection of the curriculum demands of IC Capability with the particular community and location of Paul’s school contributed to what he experienced as a destabilisation of his professional identity, leading him to draw on other pedagogical approaches.

Paul’s sense of curriculum-as-lived (Aoki, 2005) was to step away from rigid adherence to the set syllabus. Rather his approach was to create opportunities for his students to engage with other cultures and ‘challenge them to seek experiences outside of their community’. For Paul, an empathy-building approach using drama-intense pedagogy was most effective in complementing the human rights and civics focus expressed in the memoir, I am Malala (Yousafzai et al., 2014) written by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb, one of the texts for an IC unit of work. Key themes in this text included religion, education, and women’s rights. Paul’s initial attempts at classroom discussion of this book revealed his discomfort when discriminatory or prejudiced views held by many of the students in his class surfaced, and he observed that this was a key driver for him to experiment with drama-based methods. For example, in an attempt to elicit discussion on key themes in the text, Paul initially showed news clips of refugees from the Syrian conflict which was in the news at the time. He recounts posing the question ‘What comes to your mind?’ concerning cultural practices when showing a young woman in Syria wearing a niqab. Paul hoped the students would respond with references to recognition of cultural differences but, instead, some students responded with ‘no, no, we see the towel head’. As a result, Paul shifted his pedagogical focus from discussion-based activities to the deliberate use of drama to avoid the airing of intolerant comments such as these. Paul expressed his view ‘in the power of drama to challenge beliefs and promote empathy’. For Paul, when reading and reflecting on the IC curriculum, ‘the last thing I want these students to do is to feel they're being hectored or lectured or [told] ‘your attitudes are bad’; I really wanted to give them that idea about empathy’.

Paul’s interpretation of the IC curriculum corresponds to the findings of key international (Peiser & Jones, 2014; Zembylas & Papamichael, 2017) and Australian research (Halse et al., 2016; Walton et al., 2013), which has identified how teachers understand and enact the IC curriculum through related concepts. Paul is a school leader who supports institutional initiatives to develop, document and report on curriculum. His reflections highlight his sense of personal failure as he was told by the program leaders that he ‘had a long way to go’ and he was keenly aware that he was not following the curriculum. Paul’s approach is consistent with Byram and Risager’s (1999) argument that a wide range of factors, including curricular guidelines, attainment targets, and the students in the classroom, influence IC teaching approaches. In Paul’s case, the main factor influencing his approach was his concern for the students which led him to explore the power of drama pedagogy to effectively support the delivery of the IC capability curriculum.

The experience of planning a unit and then departing from the plan was isolating for Paul but it also became a story of professional growth and renewal. Paul reflects, ‘It’s encouraged me, I think, to be much more flexible… when they are behaving badly or when they, you know, are frustrated…I'm wondering now how much of it is fear or how much of it is based on feeling uncomfortable’. He discovered that teaching IC Capability had helped him ‘reconsider the cultural isolation’ he had felt while living in rural Victoria for 35 years. For Paul, the IC curriculum provides an opportunity to not only study the perspectives and experiences of other cultural groups but also to study the self: ‘You have to accept that these people, they've all got their life story, and these stories can teach you so much about your own self’.

Paul places significant value on the IC in terms of his own personal and professional development. His initial uncertainty and confusion when planning the IC Capability curriculum, along with the attitudes of his students and lack of school support, were catalysts for Paul to re-imagine the persona of the traditional classroom teacher. Paul’s experience reveals how the IC classroom's interactional and relational elements can impact the teacher’s understanding of the self. For Paul, the aesthetic experience of the classroom-as-lived (Aoki, 2005), with all its raw emotion, prompted him to depart from the planned curriculum to centre on what these students needed for their intercultural growth rather than strictly following what the curriculum prescribed. Paul trusted in the power of drama to challenge beliefs and promote empathy, enabling him to develop what he believed was the purpose of IC Capability. This, for him, became far more important than struggling through what he found to be a complicated curriculum that also met with resistance from students. Paul’s intercultural teaching experience has re-positioned him as a teacher who is ‘more sensitive to how students are feeling and what they're thinking’.

Mary—a suburban school

Mary is an English and Humanities Teacher. She was in her first year of teaching at a suburban school when interviewed, following three years of teaching experience at an inner-city school. She has attended extensive professional development in multicultural and IC education and has developed her own diversity curricula and initiatives. Mary describes her current school as largely monocultural, with only a few students in each year level who are not of Anglo-Australian or Anglo-European background.

Implementation of the IC curriculum in Mary’s school was driven mainly by Mary herself and the English Department. Mary believed the existing curriculum was aimed at celebrating diversity and ‘appreciating people’s idiosyncrasies’; she saw the focus as more social than academic. Mary first encountered the IC curriculum documents when researching for her Master of Teaching degree and interpreted the IC curriculum's main themes as ‘challenging stereotypes, confronting discrimination, and celebrating diversity’.

Mary’s previous experience and understanding of the IC curriculum were significantly influenced by her intellectual interests in this area, coinciding with her moving from an inner-city school, with a more culturally mixed student population, to a suburban school. As we show, this was a destabilising factor that parallels Paul’s experience in that Mary also strengthened her capacity to work productively with prejudiced and xenophobic views in the classroom. Mary describes her previous inner city and diverse school as having a school culture in which she perceived a worrying ‘culture of censorship’ whereby controversial or unpopular views related to race and gender ‘were not tolerated by students and teachers in line with the school’s anti-racist and anti-transphobia campaigns’. Kamler (cited in Toner, 2010, p. 8) warns of the dangers of the ‘right voice’ and argues that ‘asking students to publicly reveal information about their lives and cultures in the presence of others—including teachers—is at best voyeuristic, and at worst a dangerous form of surveillance to see if students produce the right voice’. In her interview, Mary grapples with the progressive cosmopolitan purpose of the IC curriculum and what she perceives as a potential tension with issues of censorship and freedom of speech that can arise in educational institutions.

When Mary was interviewed, she was planning the next curriculum unit based on an English text in which the central theme is racism. She expresses concern that the culturally diverse voices in the text are far removed from her students' direct experiences. Mary is teaching two Year 10 classes, in one of which is a student with an African background. As she plans the unit, Mary is conscious of ‘not speaking over him’ or ‘singling him out’ and trying not to allow situations in the class to develop in which he might ‘feel uncomfortable for who he is’. In her other class, ‘a lot of students are quite openly against certain ethnic groups’. A key challenge for Mary is working with students whose attitudes affront her personal values: ‘I ask them questions about where they are getting those views as well and give them the opportunity to question mine as well so they can understand the text… It has been a challenge’. Mary contrasts several challenges in teaching the IC Capabilities curriculum at her current school with her experiences at her previous inner-city school. She describes herself as essentially ‘preaching to the converted’ in the previous school. In contrast, at her current school, she is aware of what she sees as prejudiced views in her classes which present challenges for her in the curriculum planning stage. Yet, looking back, she reflects, ‘that's my weakness. I shouldn't have assumed that everyone would have a similar viewpoint to me’.

These fresh experiences of teaching the IC curriculum in her current school have made Mary more conscious of the range of student perspectives which became a key destabilising factor in her experience of curriculum-as-lived. She reflects that she was complacent at her previous school in assuming that ‘all students had similar views to the ones she held’. Her recent experience has underlined for her that it is vital to ‘welcome all voices in the classroom because that is a critical part of developing IC capability’. At the same time, she recognises that her priority to make space for diverse opinions to be expressed without anyone feeling judged makes curriculum planning and IC teaching both ‘challenging and exciting’. Mary’s reflections tell a story of the students' influence on the unsettling of her professional and personal expectations. Her initial discomfort dealing with prejudicial views in the classroom has been replaced with an energetic commitment and a sense of professional renewal in working through the discomfort and trying ‘to be open to diverse views’.

Mary persisted in challenging her students and her own attitudes. In the classroom, Mary gave her students ‘the opportunity to question’ her views and felt that she was experiencing different and more confronting IC encounters with the students in her current school compared to those at her previous school where there was more of a sense of shared views. In the suburban school, Mary’s professional identity was enriched by being more accepting of students voicing their opinions, even when at odds with her own views. The combination of media analysis and open and honest discussion between the teacher and the class gave Mary the confidence to ‘break down issues as they arise’. The shift from an inner-city school, which was somewhat constrained by what she sees as a dominant political view, to a suburban school led to Mary questioning some of her earlier assumptions and pedagogical approaches and becoming less judgemental of the views held by students in her class. The location of the school had a profound impact on Mary’s professional identity, as she moved away from a dominant political view and ‘the right voice’ to developing a pedagogical approach that was more comfortable with discomfort and debate.

Mary’s re-storying of her own experience highlights how the diverse, dynamic and unpredictable nature of the IC classroom can affect curriculum-as-lived; in particular, the confidence she required to deal with difference as it arises in the classroom. As happened with Paul, it reveals how feelings and emotions triggered by key moments in the classroom (Aoki, 2005) can impact pedagogical approaches and curriculum decisions. The experiences of both Paul and Mary resonate with insights from the research literature on the discomforting and idiosyncratic nature of IC teaching and how this can be intensified depending on the teachers’ personal and professional biographies (Jokikokko & Uitto, 2017; Peiser & Jones, 2014; Zembylas & Papamichael, 2017). The narratives of these two teachers also reveal how the destabilising process is affected differently by the school location and community in which they work.

Mark—an inner-city school

Mark has been teaching for 8 years and is the acting Head of the Humanities department in an inner-city school in Melbourne. The demographics of the school, as well as Mark’s previous professional experiences, including his role as wellbeing coordinator and the award of fellowship at an international university to support his research on citizenship education, influenced how he made meaning of the IC curriculum. In 2022, 63% of students in Mark's school speak a language other than English at home, and 1% are Indigenous Australians (ACARA, 2020).

Mark portrays his school as ‘the most diverse school in the state… with the majority of the student population being non-white’. Mark worked alongside two other teachers for 2 years to develop a Year 8 subject based on the four capabilities in the Victorian curriculum—Intercultural; Ethical; Personal and Social; Critical and Creative (thinking). In his reading of the IC curriculum documentation, Mark was struck that race theory and gender were not explicitly mentioned. Issues of both race and gender are topical among the student population at his school and were issues he explored during his academic studies. Mark labels the curriculum as ‘very broad’ and decided, with his team, to include issues of race and gender in the IC unit. This reflects the influence of personal biography in understandings of and approach to the IC curriculum.

In contrast to Paul’s destabilising experiences that led him to avoid direct discussion in the classroom, Mark embraces dialogue. The socio-cultural climate at his school led Mark to believe that, as a teacher, he should ‘get out of the way’ and create an environment where the students could learn from each other. He reflects on the pedagogical benefits afforded by the diverse student population: ‘It is very easy at this school for students to encounter other cultures. If I was teaching in a monocultural school, I wouldn’t know what to do’. Further, Mark highlights the important role dialogue plays in IC classrooms as a means for students to express themselves. Like Mary, Mark also identifies the dangers of particular students being viewed as the ambassadors for their cultures (Kamler, 2003; Toner, 2010), saying,

I think one of the problems is that stereotypes naturally come from people around them. So, if you are one of the Indian kids in your class, whether students are studious or lazy, it doesn’t matter what you are, chances are that students will think that is what the entire subcontinent of India is like.

Mark sees his main challenge as working with prejudicial voices as they emerge in the classroom. A significant, unsettling event in the IC classroom left him with the question: ‘What do you do with the homophobe?’. Mark was challenged in his teaching practice by the expression of a minority belief that he was confident conflicted with the stated ideals of the school and the broader community, including the ‘Safe Schools’ (2016) curriculum that aims to end discrimination against the LBGTQIA + community. On reflecting on the views held by some of the students in his class, he observes, ‘as much as we were teaching gender and sexuality as part of the intercultural thing, they are also steadfastly taking a homophobic view, which they blame their religion for. They say, “Well, I'm Muslim, so I'm homophobic”’. As he recounted, this dilemma made him reflect on the whole purpose of the IC curriculum.

In comparison to Mary’s dialogic and teacher-centred approach to dealing with prejudicial and discriminatory views as they arose in the classroom, Mark’s cultural identity and interpretation of the IC curriculum led to his belief in the need for a more student centred focus in the IC classroom. Mark reflects:

When you are the only white person in the room and you're talking about intercultural capability, I think you’ve just got to take your hands off the steering wheel, really, as quickly as possible. Because, really, you don't know what you're talking about in a way that I think a 14 or 15-year-old person of colour just does… So, whether we like it or not, we’re like the dominant or the desired culture.... But then, similarly, we're the yardstick. We are the without culture.

He was keenly aware of his Anglo-Australian identity as part of the dominant culture and believed that, in the eyes of his minority students, this positioning gave him ‘authority in terms of knowledge, as well as authority as a teacher’. At the same time, and as Santoro reported (2014) in an earlier study, Mark believes that his cultural identity could also be a barrier to developing empathy for students from ethnic minority and Indigenous backgrounds. As the IC unit progressed, Mark ensured that culturally diverse students in these classes spoke for themselves. Mark believes a key development for him professionally was the importance of learning how to enable students to voice their views in a classroom that promotes respectful and participatory dialogue.

Mark learned, from his IC teaching experience, the importance of not ‘preaching culture’, leading to his belief that the focus of IC was on ‘What are the different influences that individuals have on their lives that make them who they are’. Mark’s observations that he represents the normative culture or the identity seen to be ‘without’ culture corresponds with the important work by Cloonan et al. (2017) highlighting the specific challenges faced by Anglo-Australian teachers in reflecting on their cultural identity and the implications this has for their professional development as an IC teacher. That study found that teachers who had lived in Australia for over three generations positioned themselves as lacking cultural identity. In relation to this it is important to note that the Australian teaching workforce remains predominantly mono-cultural, with more than 80% of Australian teachers who are of Anglo-Australian background (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022; Hartsuyker, 2007), The three teacher participants in this study all identified as part of this majority ethnic group. While this of course affects how they engaged with intercultural curriculum, as we have shown above, it was a deliberate decision to focus on teachers in this majority ethnic group precisely to illuminate these challenges. Other studies are also needed that take up these questions with teachers from more ethnically diverse backgrounds.

Mark’s curriculum-as-lived experience was dominated by key, unsettling events in the classroom that raised fundamental questions for him about the purpose of the IC curriculum. His initial experience of pedagogical disruption led to some discomfort related to students’ views on sexuality which they attributed to their religious beliefs and, hence, not open for debate. He was further unsettled by reconciling his cultural identity as it relates to being an IC teacher. In contrast to Paul’s experience working in a rural school, the politically progressive cultural milieu of Mark’s inner-city school projected a kind of ‘right voice’ in the school community. Kamler’s (2003) argument that the idea of a ‘right voice’ can also be a dangerous form of surveillance highlights why discomfort and confusion are common teacher responses to IC curriculum and pedagogy. However, in reflecting and re-storying his experience, Mark conveyed a sense of professional renewal and was more alert to creating pedagogical approaches across all his teaching subjects that enabled students from diverse cultures to ‘speak for themselves’.

Bringing together insights from the three case studies

Teachers’ practical deliberations during curriculum reform are vitally connected to their personal and professional biography and the cultural milieu of the school; both influence curriculum interpretation and pedagogical decision-making. Engaging Clandinin and Connelly’s (1990, 2000) narrative framework, supported by Aoki’s (2005) notion of curriculum-as-lived, helped bring to the surface the affective and social dimensions of three early innovators as they navigated a complex and uncharted curriculum space. Our analysis of the interview data revealed how teachers’ sense of who they are as teachers and how they teach became disrupted and unsettled in different ways amid planning, teaching and reflecting on the teaching of their IC unit. However, the three teachers’ narratives reveal different reflections on how teaching IC capability has renewed their professional identity.

Specific events in the classroom contributed to the destabilisation of professional identity. Paul’s sense of isolation left him under-resourced and unsupported to deal with prejudiced and discriminatory comments in discussion classes. For Mark, homophobic comments left him unsure of the role of the teacher in delivering the IC curriculum. Mary was confused by the purposes of the IC curriculum due to her previous progressive school championing the ‘right voice’ and grappled with the place of her political views in the face of contrasting student perspectives.

We have characterised the experiences of these teachers as representing a form of pedagogical renewal. This was evident in how the teachers developed a heightened empathy for their students and allowed students to speak on their own terms while reserving judgement. In different ways, these teachers created a safer learning space where contested views and discomfort were accepted and welcomed—both teachers’ own discomfort and that of their students. Paul strengthened his capacity to suspend judgement through a process of developing empathy for his students in the course of teaching the unit. Mary believed she had developed a safe space where all views could be voiced and respected. However, while Mark had some positive encounters with the IC curriculum, he remained suspended in a state of confusion as to the purposes of the curriculum and how to deal with attitudes in conflict with the school’s ‘right voice’.

Framed by the concept of pedagogies of discomfort (Boler, 1999; Boler & Zembylas, 2003) we claim that the participants in this study experienced both a sense of professional unmooring and renewal in their first encounter with IC curriculum in the classroom. In these case studies and narratives, the metaphor of unmooring became useful in interpreting the professional journey of the IC teacher. We define unmooring as the insecurity, confusion, or disconnection felt by teachers in relation to previously held ideas regarding diversity and interculturality. Unmooring, in these case studies, represents a departure from a familiar curriculum and pedagogical repertoire. Amid confusion and left mainly on their own, these three teachers were able to adapt and interpret the curriculum, influenced by their understanding of their cultural background and positionality, and that of their students, and their previous personal and professional experiences. Each participant was challenged to adapt their pedagogical approach to better engage students in the IC curriculum. While described as often an uncomfortable process, we saw and examined these processes as ultimately productive encounters with the curriculum generating valuable insights into the personal and professional development of the teachers.

A key finding of this study is the impact of the school's location and cultural milieu on how participants negotiated and made meaning of the curriculum. Mark valued the ethno-cultural diversity of the inner-city school and believed it was best for the teacher to get out of the way and promote student dialogue. In contrast, Paul, in a largely culturally homogenous school, could not trust his students in discussion-based classes for fear of it surfacing racist and prejudiced views. Mary’s meaning-making across a journey from an inner-city to a suburban school raised questions regarding whether a teacher should insert their political and ethical beliefs in the IC classroom, particularly when these aligned with what they see as the aims of the curriculum.

Zembylas and Papamichael (2017) argue that educationally safe spaces should not dismiss discomfort but rather encourage thinking, feeling and acting that foster teachers’ critical rigour and empathetic understanding. Insights from this study suggest that the IC curriculum needs to be clear about what is a safe classroom, in the sense of being safe from what and safe from whom (Flensner & Von de Leppe, 2019). The teacher narratives portray varying levels of teacher comfort, and of notions of safety, in allowing students to speak openly on issues of culture. Callan’s (2016) distinction between ‘safe’, as in ‘dignity safe’, and ‘intellectually safe’ provides a productive categorisation for the IC classroom. Intellectually safe presents the danger of promoting close-mindedness, where students are less likely to learn and develop new understandings. Participants referred to this in the IC classroom as the ‘right voice’. Callan’s promotion of ‘dignity safe’ based on ideas of virtue and civility warrants further investigation and experimentation in the IC classroom so safety can co-exist with liberty.

Conclusion

The narratives discussed above highlight the dynamic nature of IC pedagogy and the importance of focusing on the ‘inter’ or the ‘doing’ in IC education. Conceptual confusion emerges from the ambiguous nature of the curriculum, often leaving teachers with more questions about its purpose and little support on how to tackle prejudice in the classroom. Navigating what has been a politically vexed curriculum was a challenge that invited teachers to focus on relational pedagogies. The analysis of these narratives echoed McCandless et al. (2020) call to entwine the IC curriculum with the Personal and Social Capability curriculum to promote more relational and agentive encounters. This paper supports the hitherto predominantly European scholarship as well as the emerging body of scholarship in Australia (Davies, 2023) on the unintended effects of mandated IC curriculum, with emphasis on the productive effects on professional identity.

This study has charted how negotiating a new IC curriculum destabilised teachers’ professional identity. Through the process of re-storying classroom events, these early innovators were forced to confront the situatedness of their own cultural identity. We found that what was first experienced as an unsettling or unmooring experience ultimately became a positive encounter. These three teachers reported a sense of identity renewal in which they became more reflexive and flexible in their approach to IC pedagogy as a deliberate response to the unpredictable pedagogical challenges that emerged.

In summary, whilst initially a disruptive and unsettling experience—an unmooring—we have shown how teaching about cultural diversity and global citizenship in the IC curriculum also had productive effects. It created encounters in which these teachers expanded their pedagogical repertoire beyond the IC classroom and in ways that renewed their sense of professional identity. This reflective narrative analysis, of teachers interpreting the formal curriculum and how they developed and taught their curriculum unit, contributes new perspectives on IC professional development and course design. It also provides policy makers with valuable insight into how curriculum is interpreted in teachers’ enactments in classrooms.

We recognise that this study has investigated three purposively chosen early adopters of the IC curriculum who were different in terms of their school settings, years of teaching experience, qualifications and life experiences. All three identified as belonging to the majority culture of Australia which is representative 80% of Australian teachers. Yet in doing so, the study has not offered insights of how teachers of minority cultures experience teaching the IC curriculum and how it may shape their teacher professional identity. Further study is warranted to investigate how minority culture teachers may re-story their cultural identity and its relation to majority culture through teaching the IC curriculum.