Language and literacy education has long been a site of contestation. Lisa Delpit, an African-American language and literacy educator, shook this contested site in the 1980s and 1990s through her ground-breaking book "Other People's Children: Cultural Conflicts in the Classroom," by centring the voices, discontentment and hopes of…

Translanguaging, the dynamic use of multiple languages, offers a transformative approach to English Language Teaching (ELT) in multilingual classrooms. This study explores the impact of translanguaging on language acquisition and social-emotional learning (SEL) among multilingual learners. Seventy-five participants from rural colleges in Salem…

This paper explores the long-term impact of study visits to south India undertaken by UK teacher education students from 1999-2002. The research involved students who had been on the study visits ten to fifteen years earlier. All the participants completed an extensive open-ended survey and the themes which then emerged were investigated through…

This paper focuses on an Australian university short-term study abroad programme in India part-funded by the Australian Government New Colombo Plan -- an initiative that facilitates transformative people-to-people encounters. Our chief interest is extending our reach, through photo diaries and interviews, to understand how participants'…

Why do some study abroad students improve their intercultural skills, while others revert to less sophisticated ways of making sense of cultural difference? Both intercultural competence theory and transformative learning theory attempt to explain why student intercultural learning occurs, but they only provide partial answers. Building on our…

This article draws on and contributes to the body of knowledge on the development of cultural competence and study abroad experiences. The study program has been well established for several years and blends a 12-day intercultural immersion experience with preparatory classroom teaching and relevant assessment. This study builds on an earlier…

In this paper we use Transformative Learning Theory as a lens for making sense of teachers' learning from study visits to the Global South. Transformative Learning theory is made up of two main elements: the form of transformations and the processes that support transformations. "Life changing" experiences as expressed by study visit…

This paper documents the impact of a study visit to south India in 2007 on students following courses in initial teacher education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. The research was conducted by the two course leaders and employed a varied methodology, involving open-ended questionnaires, self-reporting of emotions, video diaries,…