Intercultural competencies
'In this new environment, cultures observe
one another, asking the same question: how to coexist
and interact in a more and more interconnected world?'
Four pillars of education:
Learning to know
Learning to do
Learning to live together
Learning to be
Cultural literacy
Conceptual vocabulary :
Culture :
is that set of distinctive spiritual, material,
intellectual and emotional features of a society or social
group, encompassing all the ways of being in that
society; at a minimum, including art and literature,
lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions,
and beliefs
Cultural Identity:
refers to those aspects of identity
shared by members of a culture that, taken as a set,
mark them as distinct from members of other cultures.
Cultural diversity
refers to the existence of a wide
variety of cultures in the world today
Values, beliefs, and attitudes
key aspects of
culture, underlie all communication with others,
whether within a culture or between members of
diff erent cultures.
Intercultural describes what occurs when members
of two or more different cultural groups (of whatever
size, at whatever level) interact or influence one another
in some fashion, whether in person or through
various mediated forms.
Communication often said to be a message conveyed
from one person to another, more adequately should
be viewed as joint construction (or co-construction)
of meaning
Communication
includes language as well as nonverbal
behavior, which includes everything from use of
sounds (paralanguage), movements (kinesics), space
(proxemics), and time (chronemics), to many aspects
of material culture (food, clothing, objects, visual design,
architecture) and can be understood as the active
aspect of culture.
Competence refers to having sufficient skill, ability,
knowledge, or training to permit appropriate behavior,
whether words or actions, in a particular context
Communicative competence implies both understanding
and producing appropriate words and other
communication forms in ways that will make sense
not only to the speaker/actor but also to others
Language is both the generic term for the human
ability to turn sounds into speech as a form of communication,
and a specifi c term for the way in which
members of any one group speak to one another.
Dialogue is a form of communication (most often
linguistic, though not always) occurring when participants,
having their own perspectives, yet recognize
the existence of other, diff erent perspectives, remaining
open to learning about them.
Intercultural dialogue specifi cally refers to dialogues
occurring between members of diff erent cultural
groups.
Universality, refers to those elements common to all
cultures – such as having a language, or having values
and beliefs.
Intercultural citizenship refers to a new type of citizen,
the one required for the new global village
Intercultural competences refer to having adequate
relevant knowledge about particular cultures, as well
as general knowledge about the sorts of issues arising
when members of diff erent cultures interact, holding
receptive attitudes that encourage establishing and
maintaining contact with diverse others, as well as having
the skills required to draw upon both knowledge
and attitudes when interacting with others from different
cultures.
Intercultural literacy, which might be glossed as
all the knowledge and skills necessary to the practice
of intercultural competences, has become an essential
tool for modern life, parallel to the development
of information literacy, or media literacy
Intercultural responsibility builds on understandings
of intercultural competence by considering
the importance of related concepts such as intercultural
dialogue, ethics, religion (including interfaith
dialogue), and notions of citizenship
Reflexivity refers to the ability to step outside one’s
own experiences in order to refl ect consciously upon
them, considering what is happening, what it means,
and how to respond
Liquidity, the term proposed by Bauman (2000)
to describe the fl uid nature of modern life implies
change as a central element of human experience
Creativity is the most evenly distributed resource in the
world. It is, indeed, our ability to imagine that gives us the
resilience to adapt to diff erent ecosystems and to invent
“ways of living together”, the term used by the World
Commission on Culture and Development to describe
culture.
Cultural shifting refers to the cognitive and behavioral
capacity of an interculturally competent person to shift
or switch language, behavior, or gestures according to
his/her interlocutors and the larger context or situation11
Disposition, refers to the mind set progressively
acquired through primary (family) and secondary
(school) socialization.
Semantic availability, proposed by Hempel
(1965), describes the plasticity of ideas: when a concept
is dimly understood, but not clear; pre-emergent,
not yet fully formed; having a word at the tip
of one’s tongue, except that the word has not yet been invented in that language. (АУТСАЙДЕР)
Conviviality is the term Illich provided for “autonomous
and creative intercourse among persons, and the
intercourse of persons with their environment… in
any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain
level, no amount of industrial productivity can eff ectively
satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members”
Resilience is a key characteristic to consider when
addressing cultures in their handling of tradition and
modernity.
A point from last week -
1. The onion - understanding multilyared identities
2. relationships between materiality and immateriality / experience (re: Georgie)
3. Workshop intercultural and transcultural with M
