P.A.P.E.R – Alessio Presentation
Event 1 – Warm-up
The overall focus of the presentation was on intercultural competence. The presentation began with the class gathering around 4 images projected on the wall (see slides). Each member was to place themselves physically in reference to the image that most appropriately (from their perspective) represented/capture the construct “intercultural.”
As each person described their interpretation of the image and how it represented their meaning of “intercultural” other members could move towards that image or further away considering how well the description resonated with them, concerning the meaning of intercultural.
Since time was limited, he chose not to strive for consensus among the participants.
Event 2 – Alessio’s personal narrative of Intercultural Competency
Alessio began with his own story of becoming interculturally competent and a scholar of IC.
-trainer of in intercultural issues
-growing up in a diverse neighborhood as a child played a significant role
-working at University of Padova continued to motivate his interest in this area
-to truly appreciated IC requires both scholarly and practical experiences
-ultimately there needs to be opportunities to apply what you learn through research
Questions were raised such as:
How do educators help people transform “intercultural attitudes” in formal, nonformal, and informal ways?
What empowers people to become interculturally competent?
What is a broad general definition of intercultural competency?
The participants were broken into groups and discussed the various questions.
After the small groups Alessio synthesized the responses from the different groups (see slides)
Following this discussion different influential scholars and constructs were introduced by Alessio:
Edward T. Hall - Hidden Dimensions (time, space, communication)
Education – IC
Empathy
Active Listening
Humor – ability to laugh at yourself
Bakhtin – Exotopy – “the transformation of the other into the “self-other”
A process implying the effort to adopt the other’s point of view and to identify actual changes in one’s point of view, although maintaining the awareness of the difference between the two points of view, therefore a different process when compared to “empathy” which is usually described as:
putting yourself in the shoes of another;
Imagining to feel what the other person feel.
Embodied dimensions of IC
Body
Non-Verbal Communication
Interested Competences that cut across all cultures – the importance of having direct experience
Darla K. Deardorff – Handbook of Intercultural Competency
3rd Event - PP
Intercultural = Culture of flux – flow
IC – three short definitions
-awareness – an inherited self-sufficient valid model to explain reality
-the capacity to mobilize culturally competent ways of knowledge – the ability to deal with volatile and unfamiliar problematic situations and arrive at shared understandings
-classical – attitudes, knowledge, skills of interpreting; skills of discovery, critical cultural awareness, acceptance, questioning one’s deeply held assumptions
Bennet’s – model
Denial, defense, minimization, acceptance, adaptation, integration
Alessio presented an interesting study in progress where he was using video logs (1-2) minutes focusing on HE students’ critical incidents to identify the degree of and provide a greater understanding of what is meaning by intercultural competency.