REFLECTING BEFORE DEPLOYING INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCY PROGRAMS
Intercultural Competencies Training
About
Like reading, writing, or doing mathematics, acquiring intercultural competencies is essential if one is to understand and make sense of today's world. These new skills, aptitudes and behaviours are the intangible building blocks that equip entire peoples to work together in order to address challenges that are no longer exclusively local.
While technologies, international practices and rules, and interconnected economies define and shape our local realities, the more a society is critically aware of its own strengths and limitations, the more it can improve its own intellectual, social and moral traditions.
For a person to become intercultural competent is to continuously interact with inspiring and different perspectives, which develop empathy for appreciating new experiences, and build the required commitment to reach mutually beneficial outcomes when confronted with multidimensional global issues.
The search for new frameworks and concepts by experts has improved our current teaching and learning abilities regarding intercultural fluencies. Despite the work of scholars over the last 5 decades on the subject, there is still little consensus on the foundational learning outcomes that can be imparted to the vast number of students, who inevitably belong to different linguistic, and worldview traditions. The abundance of intercultural competency concepts and their applicability have created a large number of assessments resulting in headaches for institutions who need to decide what assessments to choose.
Self Transparency: Higher education institutions that accurately measure the impact of intercultural training on their students, including its future applicability, foundational assumptions, conceptual weakness, cultural and time focus, etc. will be better able to inform them on what their new skills will prepare them to do. Without a detailed understanding on what students are trained on, institutions fail to situate the performance of their intercultural training against the practicability of its use.
Understanding students’ knowledge of their own cultures: Intercultural competency scholars and practitioners tend to disregard the level of students’ own knowledge of their own culture, and assume that acquiring new cultural knowledge will sufficiently influence them to critically reflect on the new traditions. Higher education institutions need to assess to what extent their students are completely aware of the foundations that define their culture from historical, social and many other perspectives. Doing such assessments will better prepare students to critically observe other cultures, especially their own.
Students at the centre of their own intercultural learning journey: The current paradigm for higher education institutions is to impart the intercultural knowledge (courses, seminars, conferences) and offer experiential learning opportunities (student exchanges, service learning activities, student international research), while measuring the completion of those school activities as institutional achievements. Doing this ignores the extent that students have acquired meaningful intercultural abilities. In other words, being exposed to foreign cultural facts and being able to observe other cultural traditions can’t possibly prepare students to reassess their own worldview for the purpose of effectively navigating other cultures. Instead, higher education institutions can opt to create the platform for their students to test new knowledge during their school training. Currently, students are assessed by completing programs not by encouraging to act on their new knowledge in ways not traditional in other fields. This approach would abandon the search for intercultural competencies “standards” or accepted modes of understanding, and would favour placing students as the teaching agent able to test their own learning.
Intercultural Fluency Training: Considerations
Reference:
Zotzmann, K. (2015). The impossibility of defining and measuring intercultural competencies. In Resistance to the known: Counter-conduct in language education (pp. 168-191). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Deardorff, D. K. (Ed.). (2009). The SAGE handbook of intercultural competence. Sage. Chapter 27: Assessing Intercultural Competence Issues and Tools Alvino E. Fantini
Intercultural competences: conceptual and operational framework
Corporate author: UNESCO [8455]
Person as author: Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy [5]
Document code: BSP.2012/WS/9 (electronic)
Guillén-Yparrea, N., & Ramírez-Montoya, M. S. (2023). Intercultural Competencies in Higher Education:a systematic review from 2016 to 2021. Cogent Education, 10(1).
