Developing Cross Cultural Competence

This popular reference provides hard-to-find information and practical advice to professionals who are working with children and families from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. It includes facts about the influence of culture on people's beliefs, values, and behaviors; descriptions of the challenges families may have adapting to a different culture; and more.

The updated second edition of this popular resource offers practical advice for working with children and families of diverse heritage. With insight from their own racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, the chapter authors contribute wisdom about the influence of different cultures on people's beliefs, values, and behaviors. Their knowledge helps professionals learn how to embrace diversity in intervention services and foster respectful and effective interactions with people of many cultures. Widely used in preservice and in-service settings, Developing Cross-Cultural Competence is invaluable as a textbook in graduate and undergraduate courses in general and special education, social work, child development, psychology, family studies, and public health and ideal as a guide for human services professionals, home visitors, paraprofessionals, and program administrators who work with children with disabilities.

divdivCross-cultural competence is a skill that has become increasingly essential for the managers in multinational companies. For other business people, this kind of competence may spell the difference between surviving and perishing in the new global economy. This book focuses on the dilemmas of these managers and offers constructive advice on dealing with culture shock and turning it to business advantage. Opposing values can be understood as complementary and reconcilable, say Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars. A manager who concentrates on integrating rather than polarizing values will make much better business decisions. Furthermore, the authors show, wealth is actually created by reconciling values-in-conflict. Based on fourteen years of research involving nearly 50,000 managerial respondents and on the authors’ extensive experience in international business, the book compares American cultural values to those of more than forty other nations. It explores six culture-defining dimensions and their reverse images (universalism-particularism, individualism-communitarianism, specificity-diffusion, achieved status–ascribed status, inner direction–outer direction, and sequential time–synchronous time) and discusses them as alternative ways of coping with life’s—and business’s—exigencies. With humor, cartoons, and an array of business examples, the authors demonstrate how the reconciliation of cultural differences can cause whole organizations to grow healthier, wealthier, and wiser. /DIV/DIV

This book serves as a comprehensive, practical, and workshop-based program that facilitates change agents to help organizations and people develop cross cultural skills and global competence. It is grounded in the most rigorous and relevant theories, research, and learning methods and makes them easily accessible and fun to apply.

For HR directors, corporate trainers, college administrators, diversity trainers and study abroad educators, this book provides a cutting-edge framework and an innovative collection of ready-to-use tools and activities to help build cultural competence—from the basics of understanding core concepts of culture to the complex work of negotiating identity and resolving cultural differences.Building Cultural Competence presents the latest work in the intercultural field and provides step-by-step instructions for how to effectively work with the new models, frameworks, and exercises for building learners’ cultural competence. Featuring fresh activities and tools from experienced coaches, trainers, and facilitators from around the globe, this collection of over 50 easy-to-use activities and models has been used successfully worldwide in settings that range from Fortune 500 corporations to the World Bank, non-profits, and universities. Learn updates on classic models like the DIE (Description, Interpretation, Evaluation) framework and the U-Curve model of adjustment. Engage in new exercises to help build intercultural competence, using the practical step-by-step guidance on how to effectively facilitate these activities. Stay relevant and have positive impact with clients, organizations, and students with these well-organized, easy-to-implement, and high impact collection of frameworks, models, and activities.The new, research-based models work for developing cultural competence in any environment, and for designing effective cultural competence courses. Education abroad administrators will be able to use these activities in their pre- departure orientations for students going abroad. Corporate human resource professionals will find these activities invaluable in cultural competence building programs.

"This book presents a structured yet flexible methodology for developing intercultural competence in a variety of contexts, both formal and informal. Piloted around the world by UNESCO, this methodology has proven to be effective in a range of different contexts and focused on a variety of different issues. It therefore can be considered an important resource for anyone concerned with effectively managing the growing cultural diversity within our societies to ensure inclusive and sustainable development. Intercultural competence refers to the skills, attitudes and behaviours needed to improve interactions across difference, whether within a society (differences due to age, gender, religion, socio-economic status, political affiliation, ethnicity, and so on) or across borders. The book serves as a tool to develop those competences, presenting an innovative adaptation of what could be considered an ancient tradition of storytelling found in many cultures. Through engaging in the methodology, participants develop key elements of intercultural competence including greater self-awareness, openness, respect, reflexivity, empathy, increased awareness of others, and in the end, greater cultural humility. This book will be of great interest to intercultural trainers, policymakers, development practitioners, educators, community organizers, civil society leaders, university lecturers and students -- all who are interested in developing intercultural competence as a means to understand and appreciate difference, develop relationships with those across difference, engage in intercultural dialogue and bridge societal divides"--

This collection of essays for human services professionals examines the role that culture plays in families' and professionals' beliefs, values, and behaviors; explores the difficulties involved in adapting to a different culture; and provides strategies for effective cross-cultural interactions with families of infants, preschoolers, and young children who may have or be at-risk for a disability or chronic illness.--From publisher description.

This open access book explores cultural competence in the higher education sector from multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives. It addresses cultural competence in terms of leadership and the role of the higher education sector in cultural competence policy and practice. Drawing on lessons learned, current research and emerging evidence, the book examines various innovative approaches and strategies that incorporate Indigenous knowledge and practices into the development and implementation of cultural competence, and considers the most effective approaches for supporting cultural competence in the higher education sector. This book will appeal to researchers, scholars, policy-makers, practitioners and general readers interested in cultural competence policy and practice.