Abstract
The currency of intercultural education has risen worldwide in response to increased diversity within societies resulting from migration and global flows of populations. As intercultural education becomes a core responsibility of schooling, the attention to fostering students' cultural awareness grows even faster. The school and all the educational agencies must find the most suitable tools to adequately address the complex multiculturalism of the third millennium to promote the students' ability to understand one another across and beyond all types of cultural barriers. How can we, as teachers and educators, stimulate reflexivity about cultural identities and intercultural relations? How can we foster interaction, dialogue, mutual recognition, and enrichment of any individual, in respect of the different identities of the other? This chapter offers a reflexive analysis of the efficacy of using frameworks and autobiographical narratives for enhancing students' intercultural awareness.
TopBackground
Key Competences for Life’s Challenges
Contemporary societies place challenging demands on individuals, who are confronted with complexity in many fields of their lives. A research question triggered our study: what do these demands imply for key competencies that individuals need to acquire in an ever-changing society?
Defining such competencies and identifying potential pathways to develop them according to ever new life’s challenges, has been a primary goal for education systems and policy makers in the last decades.
In late 1997, the OECD (the Organization for Economic and cooperation Development) initiated the DeSeCo (Definition and Selection of Competencies) Project with the aim of “providing a sound conceptual framework to inform the identification of key competencies and strengthen international surveys measuring the competence level of young people and adults”. This project, carried out under the leadership of Switzerland and linked to PISA (Programme for International Students Assessment), brought together experts in a wide range of disciplines to work with stakeholders and policy analysts to produce a policy-relevant framework. Individual OECD countries were able to contribute their own views to inform the process. The project acknowledged diversity in values and priorities across countries and cultures, yet also identified universal challenges of the global economy and culture, as well as common values that inform the selection of the most important competencies. In 2003 the OECD’s (DeSeCo) Final Report provided a framework of competency domains divided in three broad categories. As explained in the report:
First, individuals need to be able to use a wide range of tools for interacting effectively with the environment: both physical ones, such as information technology, and socio-cultural ones such as the use of language. They need to understand such tools well enough to adapt them for their own purposes – to use tools interactively. Second, in an increasingly interdependent world, individuals need to be able to engage with others, and since they will encounter people from a range of backgrounds, it is important that they are able to interact in heterogeneous groups. Third, individuals need to be able to take responsibility for managing their own lives, situate their lives in the broader social context and act autonomously. (OECD, 2003, p. 5)
Even then, the focus was on fostering interaction, dialogue, mutual recognition and engagement with others, in heterogeneous groups.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Critical Thinking: Critical thinking refers to the ability to analyze information objectively and make a reasoned judgment. It involves the evaluation of sources, such as data, facts, observable phenomena, and research findings.
Multilingualism: It is the ability to use several languages (not perfectly well), assuming a mutual interaction of languages in the mind of the user, as well as the bulk of linguistic and cultural experience of the user which add to his/her communicative competence. It also refers to the presence of several languages in a given space, independently of those who use them.
Intercultural Encounters: An intercultural encounter can be an experience between people from different countries or it can be an experience between individuals from other cultural backgrounds in the same country.
Global Competence: Global competence refers to the skills, values, and behaviors that prepare young people to thrive in a more diverse, interconnected world.
Bilingualism: It is defined as the ability to build understandable utterances in any of the languages known.
Intercultural Awareness: Intercultural awareness is having an understanding of both your own and other cultures, and particularly the similarities and differences between them.
Narrative: A story, a spoken or written account of connected events.
Active Citizenship: Refers to the status of being a citizen who takes an active role in the community.
Plurilingualism: Does not mean a perfect command of several languages but the attempt to use one’s linguistic knowledge and skills to communicate with others in many different situations. In practice, it means the ability to effectively function in a multinational and multicultural community thanks to a sensitivity to similarities and differences between languages cultures.
Autobiography: An autobiography is a self-written life story.