Intercultural Understanding, Cultural Encounters and Cultural Competences in Practice

Most educators engaged in Global Citizenship Education share the hope that GCEd can form students who are able and willing to engage in making the world of tomorrow a little better than the world of today. A prerequisite for this positive engagement in the world is students’ ability to communicate in a sensitive and meaningful manner with people from different cultural backgrounds. Positive, global changes for the better will never come about without proficient abilities for intercultural communication. In this chapter, Associate Professor Louise Tranekjær, from Roskilde University, discusses the intercultural dimension of global citizenship with an empirical point of departure in the curriculum and teaching of the Global Citizenship Programme at Rysensteen Upper Secondary School including the ‘stay abroad’ visits of the students to partner schools around the world. Louise Tranekjær analyses the potential and challenges of the relation between critical self-reflection and engaged practice, which is in many ways at the heart of intercultural competence, and which manifests itself in the cultural encounters that students engage in as they go abroad and interact with students from the various partner schools. Louise Tranekjær makes a distinction between different types of cultural encounters that provide different pedagogic opportunities and limitations for teachers. It is argued that the learning goals and criteria of evaluation for the cultural studies course and examination, that students have to participate in as they return from their study abroad experience, should be specifically linked to the challenges and opportunities related to these different types of cultural encounters that students have experienced abroad. It is furthermore argued that the intercultural understanding examination presents an important dialogic and reflexive space and learning opportunity which can be further supported by self-reflexive evaluation tools such as the portfolio and be used to both facilitate and demonstrate the transformation of the students’ understanding of themselves and ‘the other’ which is the goal of the culture-dimension of the programme.