The asset of cultural pluralism: an account of cross-cultural learning in pre-service teacher education

As a preservice instructor in a cross-cultural course, I worked with six of my students to try to understand how we encountered one another's diverse attitudes and values. We paid attention to contexts and choices, presupposi tions and consequences. By inquiring into our curriculum process, I work to ward a theory of cross-cultural education that validates experiential inter actions as moments of learning, These moments occur outside more traditiona l curricula that tend to be based on methodological doubt and argumentation . My work with the students led to a vision of pluralism where diversity is engaged, refined and expanded, to create interpretive competence through e ncounters of difference and self-study. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.