Intercultural Competence Toolkit

Wondering how to engage students of vastly different economic, social, racial and cultural backgrounds in the classroom? Interested in becoming more skilled at communicating across cultures? This collaborative webpage offers resources, strategies and activities to develop intercultural competence.

Key concepts

Both intercultural competence and cultural humility presume that it is not possible to become competent in someone else’s culture. Instead, they focus on the lifelong learning that begins with understanding of one’s own cultural positionality.

Intercultural competence

A set of cognitive, affective and behavioral skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts.

Cultural humility

Originating in the healthcare field, cultural humility is an approach to engaging with others that requires self-reflection and self-critique, includes the desire to fix power imbalances where none ought to exist, and involves aspiring to develop partnerships with people and groups who advocate for others (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998).

Cultural Iceberg

Like an iceberg, only a fraction of culture is visible, manifested through customs, language, physical appearance. The majority of culture is hidden from view and expressed implicitly, through deep-held values and preferences.

The iceberg analogy was first proposed by Edward T. Hall in his 1976 book, Beyond Culture. The Cultural Iceberg shows explicit culture as the small visible area of an iceberg that includes behaviors, attitudes and beliefs. While below the surface is a much larger area we cannot see, the implicit culture, which includes our values.

Activities to develop intercultural competence

Cultural Awareness Self-Assessment

To begin to assess your cultural self-awareness, ask yourself these questions:

1. What are some of my core beliefs and how have they been culturally influenced?
2. How would I describe my worldview?
3. How would I describe some of the students’ worldviews?
4. How might these differ from the ways in which I see the world?
5. How much do I know about my students’ cultural backgrounds?
6. What information am I missing and how can I get that information?
7. How can I incorporate my students’ worldviews into my course materials?
8. What worldviews are demonstrated through the course materials I currently use?
9. How can I enhance those materials so that other worldviews are represented?

Activity: Mapping Your Cultural Orientation

This simple Mapping Your Cultural Orientation activity is a great way to engage participants in a conversation about cultural values and appreciate how these relate to others. It can be done as an individual, written reflection or be “acted out” by participants lining up along imaginary continuums.

Strategies to engage culturally diverse students in the classroom

While mainstream American academic culture prizes individual accomplishments and promotes an egalitarian treatment of others, individuals from many other cultures find it highly awkward to be singled out in front of a group, challenge their instructor, or call their superior by their first name.

To increase engagement of culturally diverse students, try these specific classroom strategies, developed by a group of faculty and staff from the University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia College during a workshop in October 2013, and during the Teaching in Progress Series in Spring 2017:

1. Set clear expectations. Use your syllabus, a collaboratively-developed community agreement and modeling desired behaviors for class participation and the value of sharing cultural perspectives.
2. Model the learner mindset. Share your awareness of personal limitations and worldview.
3. Take time to get to know students as individuals. For example, have students complete a short questionnaire or notecard during the first week of class; use nametags with gender pronouns throughout the quarter.
4. Think > pair > share
5. Vary forms of classroom participation. This can include:
   • Working in dyads and small groups before reporting out to large group
   • Using clickers
   • Utilizing responses from course website/discussion board during in-class discussions
   • Having students write individual contracts that allocate points based on categories of skills they want to develop
6. Communicate on an individual level. For example, require students (or give them specific incentives) to sign up for office hours during the first two to three weeks or walk around the room to engage with students or student groups on a more individual basis.
7. Arrange seats in a circle and pass around a “talking” object.
8. Plan time for reflection before soliciting responses from the class. For example, assign a free-writing prompt to stimulate thinking.
9. Raise the status of students with lower language skills.
10. Use show and tell activities to highlight culture. For example, incorporate “artifacts” in e-portfolios.
11. Be intentional in the design of groups or assignments. For example, assign specific roles; use playing cards to assign students to groups randomly.
12. Allow moments of silence instead of rushing to fill it.

Resources

• Approaches to Teaching Non-Native Students Across the Curriculum. Sigsbee, David et al. 1997. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco. Available as an eBook from UW Libraries.
• Chavez, Vivian. Cultural Humility video.
• Cultural Humility Versus Cultural Competence: A Critical Distinction in Defining Physician Training Outcomes in Multicultural Education. Melanie Tervalon, Jann Murray-García. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, Volume 9, Number 2, May 1998, pp. 117-125. Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Developing Intercultural Competence for International Education Faculty and Staff. Bennett, Janet, PhD. 2011. AIEA Conference Workshop. Also found in: Bennett, Janet. 2008. Transformative training: Designing programs for cultural learning in Contemporary leadership and intercultural competence: Understanding and utilizing cultural diversity to build successful organizations, ed. M.A. Moodian, 95-110. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Exploring Interculturally Competent Teaching in Social Science Classrooms. Deardorff, Darla, EdD. 2009. ELiSS, Vol 2 Issue 1.
• The Rationale for Developing Global Competence. Parkinson, Alan (2009) Online Journal for Global Engineering Education: Vol. 4: Iss. 2, Article 2.

*Note: If you have resources that you would like to see added to this toolkit, please send to Natalia Dyba (nataliak@uw.edu), Director of Global Initiatives.