Teachers and the foundations of intercultural interaction

With the effects of globalisation, the number of people exposed to intercultural interaction has increased significantly. One of the most affected sectors is education. In parallel to the increase in numbers of students going abroad for tertiary education, primary and secondary education classes have also become culturally and religiously more diverse, mainly due to the effects of migration. With the increase in cultural diversity among their students, teachers find themselves facing new challenges. In order to be able to effectively encourage cultural exchange and intercultural dialogue, teachers need to cultivate their own intercultural competence. However, instead of directly jumping to the end result, this paper focuses on the very foundations of any intercultural interaction, namely self-awareness - of one's own normative settings -, acceptance of the equality of different cultural approaches, and strategies for how these can be transformed into personal attributes. The author highlights the importance of the internalisation of a belief in order to be able to reflect it in one's behaviour and convey to others the sense that they are genuinely accepted as they are. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) provides important insights into how and under which conditions internalisation can take place. Combining the insights gained from SDT with questioning techniques used by coaching experts, the author drafts a set of self-assessment questions which aim to help teachers reflect on the foundations of their intercultural interactions, gauge their level of internalisation and define the areas they have to focus on in order to cultivate their intercultural competence.