ABSTRACT
Language and culture have a very close relationship; a language has to be taught in relation to its culture. In an increasingly multilingual and multicultural world, it is crucial for people to have the ability to interact in complex cultural contexts among people who hold more than one cultural identity and language. The data from the Critical Connections project drawns upon to illustrate how the project facilitated intercultural competence, international partnerships and active citizenship. The Critical Connections project enabled the students to explore culture, community, society in a flexible and critical way. A group of students from the Peace School created a bilingual Arabic-English film about how to make profiteroles'. The Critical Connections project enabled the students to acquire a very good understanding of the traditional lion dance: its history, meaning, the different kinds of lions and how a lion dance should be presented. Cultural learning will only be truly meaningful if it is comparative and contrastive.
