Becoming Interculturally Competent Through Education And Training

This book demonstrates the complementarity of educational and training approaches to developing intercultural competence as represented by those who work in commercial training and those who work in further and higher education. It does so by presenting chapters of analysis and chapters describing courses in the two sectors.

Intercultural Competence in Higher Education features the work of scholars and international education practitioners in understanding the learning outcomes of internationalization, moving beyond rhetoric to concrete practice around the world. Devoted exclusively to exploring the central learning outcomes of internationalization efforts, this edited volume contains a refreshing combination of chapters and case studies from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural contributors, including: cutting-edge issues within intercultural competence development, such as intersectionality, mapping intercultural competence, and assessment; the role of higher education in developing intercultural competence for peacebuilding in the aftermath of violent conflict; facilitating intercultural competence through international student internships; interdisciplinary and cross-cultural contributions from over 19 countries including Japan, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, and Vietnam; the latest research and thinking on global, intercultural, and international learning outcomes, with a unique emphasis on newer voices. Intercultural competence has become an essential element in international as well as domestic education. This text provides the latest thinking and research within the context of internationalization, presents practical case studies on how to integrate this into the preparation of global-ready students and will be of interest to postgraduate students, international education administrators, and practitioners, as well as scholars and researchers in a variety of disciplines who have an interest in intercultural and global competence.

This book explores the concept of intercultural competence, focusing specifically on education. Intercultural competence can vary depending on the field of research or the context of application and has therefore developed over recent decades. As the world becomes increasingly global intercultural competence has become even more important but it is still not practiced satisfactorily. This book highlights views which are at odds with official and orthodox positions on intercultural competence to encourage fresh approaches to intercultural competence. It will be invaluable for researchers, practitioners and students interested in the global possibilities of education.

Do you think that communicating across cultural boundaries is a necessary skill in today's globalized economy? Do you believe that immersion in another culture automatically means becoming interculturally competent? Have you ever wondered why students sometimes come back from their placement abroad with negative stereotypes confirmed? What can universities do to ensure that students develop these skills? If these are issues you want to address, then reading this book may help you in finding relevant answers. This book provides theory-based insight on why intercultural competence acquisition does not happen automatically when a student is exposed to a different organizational and host country culture environment, but requires well-designed intervention measures. The chapters present a comprehensive, but scalable support structure for students on work placements abroad based on the outcomes of the university-enterprise cooperation project SKILL2E. In this project seven universities and five enterprises from Austria, Finland, Spain, Romania, Turkey, the UK, and the US have collaborated in designing a framework that supports intercultural learning for students on work placements abroad. These intervention measures include pre-departure training to raise awareness regarding sensitive issues in different organizational and host country cultures, guided reflection during and after the placement to trigger deeper learning, a model for cultural mentoring and, an evaluation concept to measure the effectiveness of the interventions in order to continuously improve. Real examples demonstrate how universities can prepare graduates for the networked workplace of tomorrow and how enterprises can integrate and benefit from the innovation and productivity potential of diversity.

From language classrooms to outdoor markets, the workplace is fundamental to socialisation. It is not only a site of employment where money is made and institutional roles are enacted through various forms of discourse; it is also a location where people engage in social actions and practices. The workplace is an interesting research site because of advances in communication technology, cheaper and greater options for travel, and global migration and immigration. Work now requires people to travel over great geographical distances, communicate with cultural ‘others’ located in different time zones, relocate to different regions or countries, and conduct business in online settings. The workplace is thus changing and evolving, creating new and emerging communicative contexts. This volume provides a greater understanding of workplace cultures, particularly the ways in which working in highly interconnected and multicultural societies shape language and intercultural communication. The chapters focus on critical approaches to theory and practice, in particular how practice is used to shape theory. They also question the validity and universality of existing models. Some of the predominant models in intercultural communication have been criticised for being Eurocentric or Anglocentric, and this volume proposes alternative frameworks for analysing intercultural communication in the workplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication.

As people move into the new era of the twenty-first century, they will have more and more opportunities to communicate and interact with others using foreign languages. While this will naturally generate wide-ranging intercultural experience, people may not be alert to it in everyday life, and teachers may not know how to address the issues that arise. This book starts by exploring what it means to be intercultural from different theoretical standpoints, before contrasting ways in which people do (or do not) become intercultural in both tutored and untutored ways, inside and outside the classroom. The main purpose of this book is to introduce the concept of interculturality, to examine how it can emerge in an unplanned way and to consider ways in which it can be more systematically addressed through education, particularly through foreign language education.

The volume Developing Intercultural Competence through English: Focus on Ukrainian and Polish Cultures edited by Anna Niżegorodcew, Yakiv Bystrov and Marcin Kleban offers a valuable result of a joint intercultural project between two universities from the neighbouring countries of Poland and Ukraine. Among the mass of books on intercultural communication the proposed volume distinguishes itself by three features: unusual format combining the work of both scholars and students, the focus on the intercultural approach, and practical designation. It also stresses the increasing awareness in the modern world that teaching/learning English serves the purpose of developing general intercultural competence and not building the knowledge about the English speaking world. [...] The choice of topics [...] indicates an interesting cultural difference - Ukrainian inclination to focus on the characteristic and attractive aspects of their own culture and Polish on the problematic and the difficult. Professor Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich, Department of English, Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities Z recenzji prof. dr. hab. Mirosława J. Szymańskiego

This is the third book in the Pestalozzi series. The first, Teacher education for change, dealt with the underlying philosophy of the Pestalozzi Programme and its approach to education in general and teacher education in particular. The second Intercultural competence for all, looked at the various implications of promoting the development of intercultural competence as a main concern of mainstream education. This work takes a step further towards the full integration of intercultural competences as a key element within the education system. It aims at offering an educational rationale and conceptual framework for the development of intercultural competence, as well as a clear description of its constitutive elements to be developed in and through education