Summary of Findings

Throughout the different Interventions as described above there does appear to be evidence that that pupils were demonstrating ICC through the process of the Story Tent Intervention as outlined by the Council of Europe. The drama appears to be a

particularly helpful vehicle that enabled pupils to demonstrate Respect, Empathy and Curiosity and to engage with the written text in meaningful ways, whilst the process of working collaboratively together demonstrated pupils’ attitudes of Respect and Openness towards each other. The group discussion demonstrated pupils’ Communicative

Awareness both through verbal discussion and text-based communication. Pupils

Explained and Related their experiences and demonstrated examples of Interpretation as

outlined in Byram’s model. The self-assessment sheet helped pupils to develop the skill of reflexivity and provided useful data on how the pupils were responding to the

Intervention. Finally, the AIE provided rich insights into how the pupils had experienced the Intervention. These proved extremely helpful in processing pupils’ thinking and will be explored in more detail in the next Chapter. This next section outlines some themes that have come out of the research findings so far and these will also be explored further in the next Chapter.

6.5.1 Are some Intercultural Communicative Competence Linked?

It appears that some of the ICC may be linked. For example, pupils who exhibit the most Curiosity appear to make significant Technical Discoveries, whilst those who

demonstrate negative Curiosity make fewer and at times inaccurate Discoveries. Pupils who are Communicatively Aware appear to be able to Explain and Relate their findings. Interestingly during the first Intervention at Middlecity Academy verbal Communicative

Awareness was the only awareness being used to process the events of the day and yet this did not impact their ability to Relate and Interpret their findings. There were very few examples of Critical Cultural Awareness; it would be interesting to explore which competences enabled them to demonstrate this competence. Could it be that Empathy and emancipatory Discoveries are linked to Critical Cultural Awareness?

6.5.2 What Part Does Personal Faith Have in ICC?

During the AIE most pupils expressed some personal faith position: five self-identified as Christian, six as Muslim, three as believers in science and evolution, whilst three did not make any reference to their own faith position. Looking at the results from the data it appears that having a faith position may impact ICC, or perhaps there is a natural link between self-awareness of a faith position and Interreligious Competence. For some their faith position helped them to Interpret another point of view whilst for others it seemed to get in the way and inhibit their responses.

6.5.3 What Impact Does the School Ethos Have on ICC?

The different responses from the pupils at the research schools may suggest that the religious and cultural ethos of the school could have an impact on the ability of pupils to engage with intercultural encounters and subsequent development of competences. The pupils in the two schools with a religious ethos (St Village Church of England and Middlecity Academy) appeared to be more proficient at demonstrating ICC. However, pupils from the non-religious community school (Smalltown School) did appear to develop an understanding over the two iterations, more so than in the other two schools. The multicultural city school scored highly on all areas of competences during both iterations.

6.5.4 What Effect Does the Ability to Tolerate Ambiguity Have on ICC? One aspect that does appear to have a significant impact on a pupil’s ability to

demonstrate the higher order skills of Relating, Interpreting and Critical Cultural Awareness is their ability to Tolerate Ambiguity. Those children who expressed a faith position and were able to Tolerate Ambiguity demonstrated much deeper learning than those who wanted quick resolutions in their learning processes. This might indicate that developing the ability to Tolerate Ambiguity is a target aspiration in achieving ICC.

7

F

AIEI

In Chapter 7 I will provide an overview of each ICC coded for in the data analysis process, these codes can be found in Appendix H. I will look in more depth at the responses of the pupils during the AIE interviews and explore patterns emerging in the light of findings collected during the Intervention day. I will also begin to make links with the literature review and explore possible theoretical insights that have arisen during the research.

7.1

Introduction

Throughout the school-based work I wanted to explore how SR practices might be used to facilitate opportunities which would enable pupils to exercise ICC. To do this, two questions were consistently applied and explored in the following discussion:

1 - Which ICC (if any) were being exercised during the Story Tent Intervention? 2 - How does the Story Tent Intervention encourage (enable) pupils to exercise ICC? A copy of the AIE interview template and the interview coding criteria can be found in Appendix E and H respectively. Whilst Chapter 6 aimed to provide a broad overview of the pupils’ response to the Intervention, this Chapter seeks to explore a more detailed consideration of the pupils’ thoughts and insights surrounding the intercultural encounter.