An Intercultural Competencies Course Curriculum for Nurturing

Global Citizenshipby Linda E. Fajardo

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MISSION STATEMENT

The mission of this curriculum is to prepare our students to competitively enter the world stage as

individuals who have been unequivocally predisposed to practicing intercultural

competencies through experiential learning.

This curriculum will be implemented within the K-12 Social Studies Core Curriculum of Broward County Public Schools’ Innovative Programs, in any one of

the 21 High Theme programs offered, i.e., International Baccalaureate and Liberal Arts

Programs; Communications; International Affairs and Business, etc.

American students

effortlessly mingling

with the world.

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CURRICULUM NEEDS

No. The Florida Department of Education’s

“CPALMS” website (Curriculum Planning and

Learning Management) indicates there is no

course dedicated to teaching Florida students

intercultural competencies.

Does the FLDOE

currently offer Florida

students this course?

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CURRICULUM NEEDS:EXISTING CURRICULUM

• Currently, CPALMS offers a “Multicultural Studies” course, it simply teaches students the facts of how multiculturalism has impacted American society:

“[T]he chronological development of multicultural

and multiethnic groups in the United States and their

influence on the development of American culture.

Content should include, but is not limited to:

the influence of geography on the

social and economic development

of Native American culture

the influence of major historical

events on the development of a

multicultural American society

a study of the political, economic

and social aspects of Native

American, Hispanic American,

African American and Asian

American culture.”

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CURRICULUM NEEDS

• According to the Center of Intercultural Competence in Switzerland, intercultural competence has become more and more important with the expansion of globalization and worldwide contacts between companies, organizations and individuals who need the ability to communicate in a successful way.

www.CICB.net

Why should the FLDOE

offer this course to

Florida students?

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CURRICULUM NEEDS

• As recent as November 19th, 2014, the Voice of America reported in its “All About America” series that fewer than 10% of American students take advantage of the chance to study in a foreign country.

Americans Studying Abroad International Students Studying in America

vs290,000 886,052

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CURRICULUM NEEDS

• The Institute of International Education asserts that international experience is a key component of a 21st century education, since globalization demands a U.S. workforce with knowledge of other countries, cultures and languages other than English.

SOLUTION: Offer American students a facsimile

experience in their own classrooms by taking advantage of

America’s own wellspring of diversity through…

An Intercultural Competencies Course

for Nurturing Global Citizenship

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CURRICULUM NEEDS: STUDENT SELECTION PROCESS

• As previously explained, the best platform within which to begin teaching this curriculum will be at schools that already support innovative programs with special application procedures, thus allowing administrators to hand-pick an effective combination of students for the success of this course.

• Specific selection criteria are already implemented by the FLDOE for program like STEMand International Baccalaureate.

• With this course, however, student criteria will go beyond traditional rankings and GPA requirements. In addition to those, this curriculum will choose students according their:• gender• race• religion• culture• secondary language proficiency

• Of course, as with the other innovative programs students’ parents/guardians have specifically sought out this kind of intercultural exposure and would be fully aware of the sensitive criteria required to create a global microcosm within one classroom.

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WHAT IS INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCY?

• Evolving one’s intercultural social and communication skills toward a more transparent way of:

• expressing point of view

• being clear with intentions

• aiming to be understood and respected

• The success of such transparent verbal and non-verbal communication with people of other cultures will manifest itself through:

• understanding the behaviors of others

• understanding other ways of thinking

• staying flexible in extrinsic associations

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HOW DO WE GET TO INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE?

1. By inexhaustibly attempting to reduce ethnocentrism whose 3 stages are (a) denial, (b) defense, and (c) minimization of the Other.

• Note: Minimization is defined as thinking that people everywhere are basically the same. Research indicates that many teachers are stuck in this stage, which is a dilemma because this stage causes individuals to treat everyone as if they were the same and yet they are different.

2. By reducing or discontinuing judgment of the Other based solely on one’s own cultural experiences and points of view.

3. By becoming ethnorelative…

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http://prezi.com/izynigebqykd/?utm_campaign=shar

e&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

HOW DO WE BECOME ETHNORELATIVE?

1. Acceptance – takes a conscious effort, e.g., taking an Intercultural Competencies course

2. Adaptation – communicating successfully across various cultures

3. Integration – indicated by those individuals who have achieved multiple frames of reference and who can identify with, and move freely within, more than one cultural group

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CURRICULUM INTENTIONS

The intention of this Intercultural Competencies course is to turn traditionally offered Multiculturalism Studies courses inside out by no longer only examining the surface of a variety of ethnic groups and their influence on us, but instead by allowing our students to enter the bubble--to mingle with, understand and absorb the wealth of what intercultural connections have to

offer our students as individuals, and our American society as a whole.

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SUPPORTING LITERATURE (1)• Sleeter, C. E. (2001, March)

PREPARING TEACHERS FOR CULTURALLY DIVERSE SCHOOLS:Research and the Overwhelming Presence of Whiteness.

Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94-106. doi:10.1177/0022487101052002002

• Purpose: to determine the effects of teacher-training including cross-cultural immersion and multicultural education coursework while addressing attitudes and lack of cross-cultural knowledge of White preservice teachers.

• Findings: (1) that continuing business as usual will only continue to widen the cultural gap between teachers and their students; and (2) the teacher-training programs studied call for either more teachers who are from culturally diverse communities or that try to develop the attitudes and multicultural knowledge base of predominantly White cohorts.

• Conclusion: Sleeter calls for follow-up research that will show public schools how to link teacher training with community-based learning, and school reform to close the cultural divide between teachers and their students.

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SUPPORTING LITERATURE (2)• Mydland, L. (2011, September 15)

The legacy of one-room schoolhouses:A comparative study of the American Midwest and Norway.European Journal of American Studies [Online], 6(1), 1-20. doi:10.4000/ejas.9205

• Purpose: a comparative study of the American Midwest and the country of Norway exploring the one-room schoolhouse in terms of the societies’ differing value systems and the power of the one-room schoolhouse in the indoctrination of a society’s values.

• Findings/Conculsion: that the American schoolhouse has been an object of heritage with high national symbolic values, reflecting the development of the nation and acting as the “impetuses in political society” which were establishing and maintaining national common values.

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SUPPORTING LITERATURE (3)• Aydin, H. (2012, September).

Multicultural Education Curriculum Development in TurkeyMediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 3(3), 277-286. doi:105901/mjss.2012v3n3p277

• Purpose: to examine the state of Turkey’s current multicultural/intercultural education curricula in light of recent developments toward Turkey’s attempt to accede to the European Union, in the shadow of Turkey’s continuing policy of banning the language of Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, the Kurdish people.

• Findings: that experiential plurality is essential for Turkish education which needs to educate the present and future generations to become more tolerant and acceptant of other cultures living in Turkey

• Conclusion: that all states need to create educational policies which depend largely on local knowledge, social heritage, communal experience, and exposure to international audiences as much as they depend on various economic factors such as labor force, economic growth, and commercialization.

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SUPPORTING LITERATURE (4)• Moon, S. (2010)

Multicultural and Global Citizenship in the Transnational Age:The Case of South Korea

International Journal of Multicultural Education, 12(1), 15. Retrieved 2014, from http://www.ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/261/392

• Purpose: to demonstrate the paradigm shift necessary in methods of teaching multicultural citizenship and global citizenship in this world that has “changed from a space of ‘places’ to a space of ‘flows’…[where] people residing in the transnational world need to develop new notions of citizenship.” Moon explains that because the traditional understanding of a nation-state with its homogenous culture and society has been “challenged by a transnational population of immigrants,” multicultural education must now meet that challenge and go beyond the “limited nation-state border to the global community.”

• Findings: that the “global context [of] educating students to function in one nation-state does not prepare them for global citizenship” as this would be “inconsistent with the racial, ethnic, and cultural realities” …as “outside forces of globalization interrupt the nation-state’s position as the predominant unit of social organization.”

• Conclusion: in keeping with the founding ideology of Korea in 2333 BC, which states that “the purpose of Korean education is to cultivate Korean citizens to contribute to democracy and mutual prosperity of all human beings,” Korean “educators and policy makers should think about how to educate citizens that meet the needs of a transnational and cosmopolitan society.”

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SUPPORTING LITERATURE (5)• Dervin, F., Paatela-Nieminen, M., Kuoppala, K., & Riitaoja, A.-L. (2012)

Multicultural Education in Finland:Renewed Intercultural Competencies to the Rescue?

International Journal of Multicultural Education, 14(3), 1-13. Retrieved November2014, from http://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/564/784

• Purpose: to investigate intercultural competencies in the European and Nordic country of Finland, including present uses of multicultural education and the perception of intercultural competencies by decision-makers, researchers and teachers.

• Findings: the Finnish core curriculum approaches multicultural education as if the majority and minority groups were taught separately thereby not taking into consideration the multiple diversities within majority student populations in Finland; “multiculturalism has remained trapped within a set of nation-centric assumptions as it continues to address issues of cultural diversity within a national framework.”

• Conclusion: the way forward in Finland could lie in increasingly glocally-oriented multicultural education that has its roots in cultural-historical analysis and global ethics in terms of ethical engagement with the Other.

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CURRICULUM VALUE AND OBJECTIVES (IMPERATIVES: INTEGRATION

AND RELEVANCE)• To improve American students’ intercultural social skills and intercultural

communication skills by improving their sensitivity and understanding for other cultures’:• values

• points of view

• ways of living

• ways of thinking

• Furthermore, by American students improving themselves by learning to be self-conscious while transferring one’s own values and views in a clear way, yet appropriate for the culture being addressed.

• Overall, students will develop intercultural flexibility, humor, patience, openness, interest, curiosity, empathy, tolerance for ambiguity, and suspending judgment, among others.

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PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS

PRAGMATISM: experiential learning -

focuses on the reality of experience.

Since intercultural reality constantly

changes with exposure to each

different culture, we learn best

through applying the experiences

we’ve had to solve problems, as they

arise.

Becoming interculturally competent

requires learners to adapt to each

other and to their environment.

Give the pupils something to do, not

something to learn; and the doing

is of such a nature as to demand

thinking; learning naturally

results.”- John Dewey

IDEALISM: The search for truth

and values that stand the test of

time.

As we have seen, being

interculturally competent means

having the ability to

communicate one’s intentions

through honesty, kindness,

courtesy, and respect. This

equates ethical reality which in

turn equates idealism.

The shadows of the sensory world

must be overcome with the light

of reason or universal truth. -

Aristotle

Pragmatism

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LEARNING EXPERIENCES:WHAT WILL THEY DO?

• To begin, students will learn the conceptual difference between Multiculturalism Studies and Intercultural Competencies, thereby grasping the purpose and goals of this particular year-long course.

• Next, students will begin by choosing a target culture and its language. [Note: whereas proficiency in a second language would complement the student’s experience, it will not be a curriculum pre-requisite.]

• For the target culture, learners will:

1) explore its Family, Education, Law and Order or Power and Politics;

2) gather material outside the classroom in relation with these cultural topics;

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LEARNING EXPERIENCES:WHAT WILL THEY DO?

3) work with a variety of activities that require their use of listening, speaking, reading and writing in order to develop overall communicative competence, and promote intercultural awareness and understanding, i.e.:

a) Listening: video-taped cultural dialogues, or tape-recorded interviews with native speakers;

b) Speaking: face-to-face tandem learning and role-playingwherein learners focus on body language and helps them gradually assimilate the nonverbal behaviors of the target culture;

c) Reading: critical reading which requires learner to focus not only on what the text says but, most importantly, on how the text portrays the given topic through the author’s choices of language and structure, i.e., when reading situations in which there is a cultural bump, that is, a situation that causes people to become uncomfortable or strange given particular cultural beliefs and attitudes;

d) Writing: tandem e-mail learning, designing stories and story continuation, to develop writing skills with a particular emphasis on the intercultural component.

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EVALUATION APPROACHES• Intercultural competence can hardly be defined in

numbers or in a percentage profile, but many different tools allow for reliability statements:

• computer-based validity-testing by questioning, i.e., Harvard University’s Implicit Association Tests

• structured biographical interviews

• simulation-games by interacting in groups and specific situations

• differentiating between respect/empathy, prejudices, frustration tolerance and contact activities

• analyzing self-assurance and adaptation-tendency

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CURRICULUM’S DESIGN

• LEARNER-CENTERED• Students will be active in their one-world

school room environment;

• Learning will be based on students’ lives, needs and interests;

• Activities will empower students through ownership of intercultural competencies

• EXPERIENCE-CENTERED• Students have ON THE SPOT experiences in

their one-world school room

• RADICAL DESIGN• Students will gain awareness on their own

of interculturalism, intercultural competencies and broadened attitudes that will allow them to become better global citizens.

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SOURCES FOR CURRICULUM DESIGN

• our diverse, multicultural student body—the learners themselves as teachers

• our diverse, multicultural society in our own county

• modeled by the functions of the United Nations, the European Union, multi-denominational places of worship

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IMPERATIVES:SCOPE AND SEQUENCE

• Scope: High School Innovative Programs, Communications/Social Studies

• Sequence:

American

cultures

American cultures and

their own

in American cultures

and compare these with

and in American cultures

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IMPERATIVES:SCOPE AND SEQUENCE

Models:

• Center of Intercultural Competence, SWITZERLAND

http://www.cicb.net/en/home/what-is-it-about

• University of Jyväskylä, FINLANDhttp://www.edicc.eu/

• Alberta (CANADA) Teachers of English as a Second Language Curriculum Framework http://www.atesldocuments.com/cf/icc

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IMPERATIVES:YEAR-LONG PLAN◄1ST Quarter (Introduction to the concept of Interculturalism)

◄2nd Quarter

◄3rd Quarter

◄4th Quarter

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IMPERATIVES:THREE AXES OF ARTICULATION

• VERTICAL: this curriculum can be taught throughout the length of primary and secondary education (K-12) and therefore highlights the continuity and value of learning Intercultural Competencies

• HORIZONTAL: this curriculum is naturally organized with horizontal articulation since several classes across the curriculum can (and should be) planned to simultaneously attempt to accomplish the same objectives as this core Communications/Social Studies course;

• INTERDISCIPLINARY and MULTIDISCIPLINARY: the study of Intercultural Competencies as a school subject will associate with other disciplines in the curriculum as it will reinforce what students are learning in other disciplines that highlight other cultures.

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SUNSHINE STATE STANDARDS• Language Arts:

• LA.A.2.4.8 - construct meaning from a wide range of texts, synthesize information, and draw conclusions

• LAAC.1.4.4 - identify bias, prejudice, or propaganda in oral

• LA.D.l.4.2 - recognize the shifts in language from informal to formal, social and academic; and to refrain from gender and cultural biases when expressing language

• LA.D.1.4.3 - understand that differences exist in dialects in the English language

• LA.D.2.4.1 – understand that language is a powerful tool in shaping the "reactions, perceptions, and beliefs of the local, national, and global communities“

• LA.E.l .4.3 - understand multiple literary forms prevalent in the literature of all cultures

• LA.E.l.4.5 - recognize different styles, themes, and structures of literary forms within a cultural and historical context

• LAE.2.4.8 - think about and respond critically to various texts and forms of literature, knowing that individuals respond differently based on "their background knowledge, purpose, and point of view''

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http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=sferc

SUNSHINE STATE STANDARDS• Social Studies:

• SS.912.P.10.1 - Define culture and diversity.

• SS.912.P.10.11 - Discuss the psychological research on gender and how the roles of women and men in societies are perceived.

• SS.912.P.10.12 - Examine how perspectives affect stereotypes and treatment of minority and majority groups in society.

• SS.912.P.10.2 - Identify how cultures change over time and vary within nations and internationally.

• SS.912.P.10.3 - Discuss the relationship between culture and conceptions of self and identity.

• SS.912.P.10.6 - Discuss how privilege and social power structures relate to stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination.

• SS.912.P.10.8 - Discuss psychological research examining diversity in sexual orientation.

• SS.912.P.14.4 - Explain the role of culture in human motivation.

• SS.912.P.15.5 - Explain how culture and gender influence emotional interpretation and expression.

• SS.912.P.16.11 - Analyze how individualistic and collectivistic cultural perspectives relate to personality.

• SS.912.P.6.17 - Describe social, cultural, and emotional development through childhood.

• SS.912.P.9.5 - Describe effects of others’ presence on individuals’ behavior.

• SS.912.P.9.8 - Discuss the nature and effects of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.

• SS.912.S.1.8 - Identify, evaluate and use appropriate reference materials and technology to interpret information about cultural life in the United States and other world cultures, both in the past and today.

• SS.912.S.2.1 - Define the key components of a culture, such as knowledge, language and communication, customs, values, norms, and physical objects.

• SS.912.S.2.12 - Compare and contrast ideas about citizenship and cultural participation from the past with those of the present community.

• SS.912.H.3.3 - Identify contributions made by various world cultures through trade and communication, and form a hypothesis on future contributions and changes.

• etc., etc., etc.

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http://www.cpalms.org/Standards/Standards_Coding_Schema.aspx

WIGGINS AND MCTIGHE: UNDERSTANDING

• This Intercultural Competencies curriculum will give students knowledge, understanding and skills that will lead them to have sophisticated insights and abilities in intercultural communications and social skills.

• Students’ skills will be reflected in the context of the successful intercultural connections they build throughout their K-12 experience with which mastery will come as a result of their experiential learning in their one-world schoolroom and beyond.

• This curriculum will move students through knowledge acquisition toward understanding by (1) inexhaustibly attempting to reduce ethnocentrism, specifically minimization of the Other, (2) by reducing or discontinuing judgment of the Other based solely on one’s own cultural experiences and points of view, and (3) by becoming ethnorelative…(see Slides #10-11)

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McTighe & Wiggins

ESTABLISHING CURRICULAR PRIORITIESWorth Being Familiar With:

- Sensitivity and understanding for other cultures’: values, points of view, ways of

living, ways of thinking

- Improving themselves by learning to be self-conscious while transferring their own

values and views in a clear way that is appropriate for the culture being

addressed

Important to Know and Do:

Acceptance: which takes a conscious effort

Adaptation: communicating successfully across various cultures

Integration: achieving multiple frames of reference and identifying with, and moving freely within, more

than one cultural group

=

ETHNORELATIVITY

Enduring Understanding:

Valuing Everyone’s Values as Relevant - regardless of

gender, race, culture, religion, age, or political

leanings

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McTighe & Wiggins

WIGGINS AND MCTIGHE:TWO SAMPLE ASSESSMENTS

• Students will read about human rights violations and will engage in several activities for them to think critically about how the situation might have changed if the violating society had been interculturally competent.

• Involvement in the Model United Nations program: member states (student groups will) realize that the expanding problems of a planet know no national boundaries and understand that poverty, disease and pollution are a few of the plagues affecting citizens of all states. Some policies (official or non-official) of member states do not agree with the stated community goals of the UN. However, all members choose to remain members of the UN despite their differences - demonstrating the importance nations place on the institution. Theories on why states participate are gaining a new focus on the emerging global community and placing less emphasis on the state.

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http://students.jccc.edu/orgs/un/valueMUN.htm#part2 McTighe & Wiggins

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