‘Taking culture seriously’: implications for intercultural education and training

Albeit indispensable to understanding human action, the concept of culture has suffered from excessive enthusiasm in the fields of intercultural education as well as in intercultural teacher training, leading too often to culturalist stances. These excesses of intercultural education and training as well as their contradictory message (between praising and minimising – even ignoring – culture and cultural differences) have led some scholars to advocate for the abandonment of the concept of culture altogether. Rather than this radical and counterproductive approach, we propose a heuristic tool: the dialectical square of cultural difference, as well as three metaphors of culture, that should help teacher educators to foster a dynamic and complex understanding of culture and cultural difference among pre- and in-service teacher