REFLECTING BEFORE DEPLOYING INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCY PROGRAMS
Intercultural Competencies Training
About
Acquiring intercultural competencies is as vital as mastering reading, writing, or mathematics for navigating today's interconnected world. These intangible skills, aptitudes, and behaviors enable individuals and societies to collaborate effectively, addressing challenges that transcend local boundaries.
Global technologies, international norms, and interconnected economies shape local realities, but a society's ability to critically assess its strengths and limitations enhances its intellectual, social, and moral frameworks. Intercultural competence emerges from ongoing engagement with diverse perspectives, fostering empathy, openness to new experiences, and a commitment to achieving mutually beneficial solutions for complex global issues.
Recent advancements in intercultural fluency frameworks have refined teaching and learning approaches. However, despite decades of scholarly research, consensus on foundational learning outcomes remains elusive, particularly for students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The proliferation of intercultural competency concepts has led to a wide array of assessment tools, creating challenges for institutions tasked with selecting the most appropriate ones.
Self-Transparency in Intercultural Training
Higher education institutions must rigorously evaluate the impact of intercultural training, assessing its practical applicability, foundational assumptions, conceptual limitations, and cultural and temporal relevance. By doing so, they can clearly communicate to students how these skills prepare them for real-world challenges. Without a comprehensive understanding of what students are learning, institutions cannot effectively align the outcomes of intercultural training with its practical utility, leaving students unprepared for global engagement.
Understanding Students’ Knowledge of Their Own Cultures
Intercultural competency frameworks often overlook students’ awareness of their own cultural foundations, assuming that exposure to new cultural knowledge automatically fosters critical reflection. Higher education institutions should assess the depth of students’ understanding of their own cultural histories, social norms, and values from multiple perspectives. Such assessments equip students to critically engage with other cultures while fostering a deeper self-awareness that enhances their ability to navigate diverse global contexts.
Centering Students in Their Intercultural Learning Journey
The current approach in higher education emphasizes delivering intercultural knowledge through courses, seminars, and conferences, alongside experiential opportunities like student exchanges and international research. However, measuring success by program completion fails to capture whether students have developed meaningful intercultural competencies. Exposure to foreign cultures or traditions alone does not equip students to critically reassess their own worldviews or effectively navigate diverse settings. Instead, institutions should create platforms for students to actively apply and test their intercultural knowledge during training. By assessing students’ ability to act on their learning—rather than merely completing programs—institutions can shift away from rigid “standards” of intercultural competency. This student-centered model positions learners as active agents, encouraging them to experiment with and refine their understanding in dynamic, practical ways.
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).
