How do you know that you are becoming more interculturally aware?
You can tackle this question from a quantitative or qualitative point of view.
Qualitatively, there are various approaches you could use as part of your normal professional development. These could include
- keeping a learning journal,
- including it as a topic with your mentor or coach or
- focusing on CRT with colleagues in peer teaching or action learning projects.
Measuring intercultural awareness quantitatively is more problematic because there is no such thing as a meaningful measure of intercultural awareness. There are many organisations out there which claim to have discovered how to measure you intercultural intelligence quotient. Some of these are useful as a way of plotting your own progress and seeing points of overlap and difference when working in a specific team. The most you can hope for is a way of demonstrating progress (or otherwise).
For the Teaching Culture! course, we developed an intercultural competency grid which we felt covered the main areas relevant to adult education teachers. The attainment levels can be downloaded from the link below and were meant to complement the European Language portfolio language learning levels.
Attainment levels of Intercultural Competence
The image below shows the first lines of the attainment levels grid and demonstrates the link to the European language competency grid.
In the Teaching Culture! course we use the grid as a before and after tool with participants completing the grid at the beginning of the course and at the end of the course. participants leave with a concrete plan for how to continue making progress on the grid.
Would you want to measure your students’ intercultural awareness?
In most cases in adult education, probably not. The most you should plan to do is to observe and note cases where your students showed intercultural awareness. In cases where they did not, you could then plan how to minimise or overcome similar examples in the future.
In the spirit of Visible Thinking, it may be appropriate to notice the positive examples out loud so that the whole class is aware that a good example of intercultural awareness just occurred. It would be great to hear what you think about this in the comments.
Image credit: Richard Howes