Internationalism, Migration and Education: Development of a Pluralistic Disposition in Multilingual and Multicultural Contact Zones – Northern Cyprus

Northern Cyprus has always witnessed an influx of refugees and migrants as a contact zone with a conflictual context (Tüm & Kunt, 2016; 2021) and become a destination country for many international students for the last two decades. In the age of an unprecedented diversity and accentuated internationalist theories worldwide, pluralistic pedagogies embellished with nationally monoglossic discourses have become iconized pressing trends in education precipitating a dichotomous doom‐loop vis‐à‐vis multifaceted parameters of learning environments. Linking critical race theory with internationalism, document analysis, semi‐ structured interviews, field notes, observations, and informal chats were deployed for an elaborated scrutiny of students’ perspectives through a normative‐ humanistic lens. The results signified that in conflictual contexts, policy‐making may surpass basic humanistic norms such as equity and social justice where parental involvement, sustainable integration, discursive ideological orientations, coproduction among stakeholders, Western‐propelled content revision, preparatory language courses, and teacher education predominantly reconceptualize indispensable aspects of curricula. Based on this part, the second part of the study aimed at empirically developing and validating a critical instrument to measure foreign language teachers’ (FLTs) awareness on the inclusion of multilingual learners for an integrated language policy in a unique context with omnifarious entanglements.Interiorising the critical viewpoint of the 21st century, items capturing the concept of critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) were generated through a postmodernist and normative-humanistic lens based on neoliberalism, internationalism, and pluralism. The 48-item 5-point Likert scale was tested by 254 FLTs and Exploratory Factor Analysis suggested a final 28-item multidimensional scale composed of six factors. The Cronbach’s alpha internal consistency coefficient for the scale was determined as 0.811. Thus, the scale is potentially useful for assessing pre-service and in-service teachers’ level of CMLA ameliorating the literature on know-how of teacher education. The findings are especially conspicuous for social partners, policy‐makers, and educators.