Upon the completion of a graduate course on intercultural approaches to language and literacy education, several key ideas became apparent to me as a practicing teacher and emerging scholar in facilitating intercultural competence in education: There exists the need to become aware of the subjectivity and multiplicity of perspectives, to accept ambiguity in teaching and learning, and to take responsibility for the disruption of normative discourses and practices that perpetuate inequity in the classroom and beyond.

Liddicoat & Scarino (2013) define intercultural competence as “being aware that cultures are relative…that there is no one ‘normal’ way of doing things, but that all behaviors are culturally variable” (p. 24). This illustrates the notion that perspective is inherently subjective, and that normative views, especially of cultural discourses and practices, should be critically evaluated and challenged. Moreover, Fantini (2009) summarizes his model of the dimensions of intercultural competence and places awareness in its own category, emphasizing its reciprocal relationship with knowledge, attitudes, and skills in that these three dimensions “promote enhanced awareness—fostered through introspection and reflection—while enhanced awareness, in turn, stimulates development of the…three dimensions” (p. 459). Thus, developing awareness is a key starting point for students to engage interculturally; with such awareness, students can be enabled to question, evaluate, disrupt, and resist normative cultural discourses and practices that reinforce social inequity.

Theoretically and in practice, there should be ongoing attempts to foreground complexity, fluidity and ultimately ambiguity to disrupt essentialized and normative ways of thinking about culture and intercultural competence. In addition, opportunities to decenter and to include multiple perspectives should be seized whenever possible as these intercultural encounters encourage students to see the multiplicity of views and how such views can be influenced by factors such as history, language, culture, and gender. Taking advantage of these opportunities allows students to recognize the uncertainty and often arbitrary nature of normative perspectives. Dervin (2016) injects a sense of inherent ambiguity in understanding intercultural competences, proposing a “(liquid) realistic perspective…composed of contradictions, instabilities, and discontinuities” and arguing that an “awareness of instability can help people to accept that the world, and especially self and other, are neither programmed nor better than others and urge them to revise their power relations” (pp. 82–83). Such complexity and ambiguity in the understandings of intercultural competence necessarily indicate that approaches to intercultural education are likewise unstable and subject to constant reflection and development.

Moreover, critical notions around relations of power, inequity, and collective responsibility for addressing these issues likewise need emphasis, along with a rejection of Dion’s (2009) notion of being a “perfect stranger” or one who exhibits “passive empathy”; being neutral, as argued by Gorski (2008), is equivalent to reinforcing the status quo through inaction. Though it can be challenging to take steps toward the ambiguity that is intercultural pedagogy, questioning normative perceptions and heightening awareness and sensitivity are good starting points; making mistakes is part of the process, because that means one is no longer masked as the “perfect stranger” and is taking responsibility for the way one interacts. Teachers in particular have an imperative role to play: They are the frontline that facilitates intercultural encounters. Hoff (2016) notes that an exposure to a diversity of perspectives does not automatically lead to the dismantling of normative ways of thinking: In fact, alternative perspectives may “serve to uphold…stereotypes rather than countering them, unless prejudiced attitudes are explicitly brought out in the open and challenged in the classroom” (p. 55). Though the content is important, such as the inclusion of discourses from multiple perspectives, it is the meaningful engagement with these perspectives that enables intercultural competence to develop. Additionally, Holliday’s (2011) notion of “neo-essentialism” is troubling, where despite a recognition of essentialist notions and their associated problems, there are forms of reinforcement through classroom discourse and practice that do not deeply engage with problematic issues because of a number of factors such as imposed standards and difficulty of pedagogical application.

To conclude, it becomes apparent that the development of intercultural competence in the classroom relies on thoughtful engagement with intercultural content, such as through the explicit foregrounding of awareness, ambiguity, and a sense of collective responsibility for equity.

References

Dervin, F. (2016). Interculturality in education: A theoretical and methodological toolbox. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave MacMillan.

Dion, S. D. (2009). Braiding histories: Learning from Aboriginal peoples’ experiences and perspectives. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press.

Fantini, A. E. (2009). Assessing intercultural competence: Issues and tools. In D. K. Deardorff (Ed.), The SAGE handbook of intercultural competence (pp. 456–476). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Gorski, P. C. (2008). Good intentions are not enough: A decolonizing intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 19(6), 515–525.

Hoff, H. E. (2016). From ‘intercultural speaker’ to ‘intercultural reader’: A proposal to reconceptualize intercultural communicative competence through a focus on literary reading. In F. Dervin & Z. Gross (Eds.), Intercultural competence in education (pp. 51–71). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Holliday, A. (2011). Intercultural communication and ideology. London, England: Sage.

Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Lucy is a secondary English teacher in Metro Vancouver and MA student in literacy education at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include intercultural pedagogy, critical literacy, and literature education.