Introduction: Unravelling

The inception of our book resulted from various discussions on the ‘nature’ of the world and how best to describe it. Our discussion revolved around issues of agency; colonial encounters resulting in colonialism, decoloniality and postcoloniality; culturality and the link to pluricultural societies; dimensions of teaching and learning; identification, inclusivity versus exclusivity; internationalisation; ‘new’ and alternative knowledge systems, protocols of Indigenous research and knowing, our sense of who we are leading to our ‘becoming’, ‘unbecoming’ and ‘to be’.

Overarching this was our multifaceted positioning which indicated the various trajectories that brought us to the ‘here and now’. Our backgrounds as determined by history introduced us to the multilevels of our cultural and scholarly backgrounds. These comprised migration to another country: for Thushari, this was the UK and for Margaret this was Australia. Journeying across geopolitical borders informed our hybrid cultures, or the cultural interfaces we occupy, our educative and postcolonial reflections as well as our multilayered attributes. An enlightening focus of this journey was the emphasis on the educational as acquired through our relationality on how best to facilitate the learning journeys of students from diverse cultures, in varied cultural and educational environments.