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This contribution provides a best-practice example or case study of a transatlantic online course focused on the integrative acquisition of environmental literacy, intercultural skills, and foreign language proficiency. Through binational and transdisciplinary group and class interactions, students from universities in Germany and the United States learned to identify and negotiate culturally and discipline-mediated perspectives on the more-than-human world. Discussing novels, films, media and cultural artifacts that centrally engage ecological themes, students learned to think of the relationship between nature and culture as deeply imbricated. If human culture is acknowledged as part of nature, and culture as a concept extends beyond the human sphere, intercultural competence as a skill or outcome acquires a new, added meaning. Intercultural competence then includes both the ability to negotiate differences between divergent human cultural viewpoints and practices (Byram 1997), as well as the ability to establish an egalitarian relationship with the nonhuman world that goes beyond anthropocentric extractivism.

It is a difficult and certainly troubling insight that some of the goals or competences under discussion in the context of inter- and transcultural learning can and must be seen as having little in common. They can even be considered as conflicting, contradictory or mutually exclusive – one may only reflect on the discrepant expectations connected with the goal of “critical thinking” (with regard to other cultures) on the one hand and the idea of “emphatic understanding” (of other cultures) on the other (cf. Breithaupt 2017). Such jarring of oppositional phenomena in educational contexts can be explored with reference to Helsper’s discussion of how any kind of teaching or learning in today’s modern, differentiated society takes place within a matrix of oppositional concepts and objectives (cf. Helsper 2002, 2010, Schlömerkemper 2017). Specifically, Helsper uses the term “antinomies” to indicate that pedagogic practice always entails a choice between different options, each “hailing,” so to speak, to be given prominence and each encompassing a different range of specific teaching and learning goals, strategies, techniques and practical steps. This article will apply the concept of pedagogic antinomies to current challenges in the fields of inter- and transcultural teaching/learning., PraxisForschungLehrer*innenBildung. Zeitschrift für Schul- und Professionsentwicklung., Vol 2 No 4 (2020): Standards – Margins – New Horizons. Teaching Language and Literature in the 21st Century