Between Intention and Engagement: A Reflective Account of Intercultural Citizenship Education in an Online ESL Context

The purpose of this article is to present a systematic reflection on my experience teaching international English as a Second Language (ESL) students about Indigenous rights and reconciliation in a year-long university ESL course in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teaching materials and activities originally aimed to engage students in a pre-political form of intercultural citizenship engagement with the historical struggles and contemporary realities of Indigenous communities in Canada. Over a six-week period, I engaged in a journaling process to (1) explore the opportunities and challenges of teaching this topic in an online course environment and (2) reflect on my attempts to support and challenge students to critically examine their views and assumptions about cultural diversity in Canada and within their own cultural contexts. A qualitative analysis of the reflective notes revealed that students’ engagement with the course activities designed for this theme was limited. While students completed all required tasks, their discussions and artifacts suggest that engaging with reconciliation from a distance constitutes a complex demand for their intercultural learning. This complexity was reflected in students’ reliance on surface-level engagement rather than sustained critical or dialogic exploration. These findings raise questions about the pedagogical framing of the activities, the temporal and experiential distance of the learning context, and the role these factors may have played in constraining students’ ability to meaningfully engage with reconciliation as a lived and ethically charged process. Drawing on scholarship addressing the ethical challenges of the teacher role and positionality in teaching sensitive topics within intercultural citizenship education (ICE), this article concludes with a reflexive discussion of instructional intentions, ethical tensions, and design considerations that may inform future intercultural citizenship pedagogy in similarly constrained teaching and learning contexts.