Reorienting ourselves to various multisensorial experiences, this panel brings together concepts, applications, and unintended consequences of sensory education from three different fields of intercultural learning: communication studies, language studies, and an international exchange program. To explore the ways of attuning to what is otherwise insensible or unintelligible, Sekimoto will propose multisensory literacy as a pedagogical concept for cultivating an awareness of affective and aesthetic dimensions of intercultural difference. Using the example of an advanced Japanese language course, Hoshi will explore the pedagogical application of the aesthetic dimensions of learning through embodied experiences of language learners as multimodal, multisensory subjects. Yoshimizu will reflect on unsettling moments in discussing (settler) colonialisms with international students and explore generative possibilities of negative emotions and discomfort experienced in the classroom for cultivating decolonial learning practice. This panel represents new pedagogical directions towards informing unexplored areas of intercultural teaching and learning through interdisciplinary approaches to sensory education.

Sachi Sekimoto ∆ (Communication and Media, Minnesota State University; USA)

Multisensory Literacy for Intercultural Communication

I propose the concept of multisensory literacy as a pedagogical tool for cultivating intercultural awareness. Growing up in a culture, we internalize and embody its sensory order with its rules, nuances, and subtleties. The sensory order of a given culture shapes our communication by privileging certain modes of sensory engagement while minimizing others (Howes & Classen, 2014). Through repetitive practice, we come to inhabit a body that is attuned to the specific cultural sensorium (Böhme, 2017; Rancière, 2004; Stwart, 2007). Culture, in this case, is a felt and kinesthetic environment in which particular relations of sensing, moving, and being are cultivated, enacted, and reciprocated. Intercultural communication is a site where our differently habituated bodies encounter one another, bringing differing sensorio-material arrangements of reality. To facilitate a greater awareness in these affectively charged and uncertain interactions, I conceptualize multisensory literacy by exploring the ways of attuning to the affective and aesthetic dimensions that emerge when multiple cultural sensoria meet, collide, and merge.

Keywords: Intercultural communication, multisensory literacy, attunement
 

Saori Hoshi ∆ (Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of California Santa Cruz; USA)

Subjective Self beyond Words: Learners of Japanese as Sensory Ethnographers

Through the example of a third-year, advanced Japanese language course, this paper explores the pedagogical application of the aesthetic dimension of learning (Kramsch, 2009), which regards language learners as multimodal subjects whose experience is not grounded primarily in the mastery of grammatical rules, but rather in subjective learning of the new language with “all their senses” (Kramsch & Gerhands, 2012, p. 76). While the second language acquisition (SLA) research primarily focuses on the development of learners’ communicative and informational value of utterances, it has not explicitly addressed the association of affect, emotions, and identity to language learners’ lived experiences with the new language. Inspired by the insights from the work of sensory ethnography (Elliott & Culhane, 2017) and which is “not easily or even possibly expressed in written or spoken words” (Pink, 2015, p. 164), this paper is an attempt to uncover how the learners of Japanese are becoming “sensory ethnographers” to narrate their subjective language learning experiences through the use of artistic mediums such as poem, photography, music, video, and other non-verbal forms. The learners of Japanese language rely on the embodied aspects of the cognitive and socialized self of emotions, feelings and memories with the new language to express who they were, are, and aspire to be.
Keywords: Pedagogy, subjectivity, sensory experience

Ayaka Yoshimizu ∆ (Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada)

Bad Feelings, “Wrong” Temperatures, and Decolonial Pedagogy

In this paper, I reflect on my embodied experience of feeling and sensing the classroom, both alongside students and separately as an instructor, in undergraduate courses aimed at unlearning colonial ways of knowing and relating to the Indigenous Lands in the place colonially known as Vancouver, Canada. I focus specifically on a course called Introduction to Canada, which is primarily (but not exclusively) designed for exchange students from Japan, based on my teaching experience since 2019. I discuss how I have facilitated student (un)learning when they come from different geo- politico-historical contexts and may not have a shared language—both English as a common classroom language and the decolonial, anti-racist, critical conceptual framework and vocabulary—to critically engage with settler colonialism, its ongoing legacies, and our complicity within them. Rather than highlighting a pedagogical success story, I focus on my/our multisensory experiences, which are often “negative” or anti-enlightening in nature, ranging from emotional dissonance, awkwardness, boredom, and chilliness. Instead of proposing a conceptual solution to suppress or resolve these bodily responses, I build on the works of Ngai (2005), Diabo (2019), Hong (2020), and Sekimoto and Brown (2020) to explore the generative possibilities of negative emotions and sensations that keep us unsettled, compelling me to continue my reckoning with decolonial pedagogy.
Keywords: International education, colonialism, negative emotions