Are we competent enough...

The guiding question: "What is intercultural competence?" lead through our Monday's course with Jette. As a preparation we had to read an article about the teacher's intercultural competence. It was approximately as hard to understand as our homework for the citizenship course since it was a rather theoretical approach. Working with the text in a more practical way during the course helped a lot to understand the ideas expressed in the text. Defining intercultural competence as gaining knowledge and abilities concerning your own culture and intercultural learning as learning from people from different cultural backgrounds inavitably lead to the question: "What is culture?" A possible answer to that question was furnished by the onion diagram by Geert Hofstede. Symbols include sights, royal families, buildings, landscapes, flags,... Heroes are persons (dead or alive) who are popular in their own country and who become also known in other countries (e.g. sportsmen/women, politicians, actors, singers, models,...). Rituals could be for example greetings, the celebration of public holidays,... Values finally are freedom, equality, emanzipation,... The onion diagramme shows how the culture of a society is devided into subcategories. The importance and influence of this culture on individuals Hofstede tries to make clear in his mental programme. He distinguishes between inherited vs. learned on the one and universal vs. specific areas on the other hand. At the end of the lesson we returned to the text and had a closer look at the three dimensions of the teacher's intercultural competence:
1. cognitive: knowledge about the world, education, media
2. behaviourial: body language, clothing, rituals, understanding
3. affective: emotional base, self-respect, empathy, curiosity