Intercultural Competence

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Supporting the development of intercultural competence is an important aspect of COIL collaborations. For many students, a COIL enhanced course is the first opportunity they have to engage with peers from another country. It is likely that students have engaged with people from other cultural backgrounds in their home communities, but most students have not been asked to reflect on cultural differences at home, so COIL is frequently the first intentional intercultural communication activity they will undertake.

Our understanding of culture depends on many factors, including our own worldview, academic background, and experiences. For an overview of different perspectives and how this may affect your approach to facilitating intercultural competency development, see “Culture, Identity and Social Realities”, page 15-18, in the Training Toolkit 4: Intercultural Competence, developed by The Council for Europe and the European Commission.

Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity

Milton Bennett has proposed a model of intercultural sensitivity that is “one-way, permanent, and applicable to anything that is considered cultural difference”, including diversity in one’s own culture. According to this model, one starts at a place of ethnocentrism, where the person’s cultural reality is the way the world works, and is the framework they use to understand the world. Through gaining intercultural competence, one can move to a place of ethnorelativism, where the person can switch between different frameworks for understanding a situation, embracing the idea that ways of behaving, understanding and seeing the world is relative to cultural context.

In this model, each category represents a way of experiencing other cultures. The underlying assumption is that as understanding of culture and the way it impacts people’s beliefs and actions becomes more nuanced, intercultural competence increases. In this way, understanding where students are on the continuum allows educators to design experiences that will increase intercultural skills and understanding, moving students along to the next stage.

Denial

In this stage, one’s own culture is the only one known or considered. There is generally little curiosity for other worldviews.

Defense

This is characterized by “us and them” viewpoints. “Us”, or my culture, is the best way to do things. There are other ways, but these are not understood or are considered inferior.

Minimization

This stage recognizes that there are similarities of culture, but tends to gloss over or disregard differences, and does not seek to understand the cultural basis of behavior. Sometimes a different culture may be seen as “the perfect culture” based on appreciated characteristics such as food or attitudes toward a particular aspect of society.

The above three stages are considered ethnocentric. The following stages are considered ethnorrelative:

Acceptance

The person’s culture is accepted as one of many possible ways of understanding the world. No value is attached, that is, one can see positive and negative aspects of different cultures without thinking one is inherently superior.

Adaptation

In this stage, a person can shift their frame of reference to another culture and understand behaviors, attitudes and assumptions from another culture’s perspective. They can alter their behavior and communication, consciously or unconsciously, to be more effective in a different cultural context.

Integration

People in this stage can see themselves belonging to multiple cultures, and have more than one worldview and sense of self based on different cultural frameworks. This is most common among people who have had significant living experience in more than one culture, such as long term expatriates, children of immigrants and members of subcultures.