Engaging students as partners in intercultural partnership practices: a scoping review

Higher education communities are becoming more diverse and seeking to create more intercultural interaction and culturally responsive pedagogies. One promising approach gaining scholarly attention is engaging students in intercultural partnership practices. We have conducted a scoping review to investigate theorisations and practices of intercultural partnership in the current literature. In doing so, we identified 19 publications that explicitly explored learner-teacher partnership practices with learners and teachers from different cultural-linguistic contexts. Drawing on both descriptive and thematic analyses, we found an emerging scholarly attention to intercultural partnership motivated mainly by a 'what's working' study design with a tendency toward perceptions-based qualitative research methods. Thus, numerous benefits and challenges were identified, most overlapping with the broader partnership literature. However, there was a consistent undercurrent of culturally situated beliefs that shaped and complicated learner-teacher power dynamics. We encourage future research to focus on the process of intercultural partnership that contributes collective understanding about the unique power dynamics in such practices. Drawing on existing theories of translation and intercultural communication, we can develop new insights that advance the intercultural partnership theory-practice nexus.