Intercultural Competence in Teaching
INTERACT (Intercultural Competence in Teaching) is a virtual intercultural training course that has been designed as part of the IMPRESS (Internationality via Mobility Projects, Research and Education Synergies) Project of the Centre for Teacher Education and Education Research of the TU Dresden.
This collaborative course is aimed at helping students to understand culture, the effect of cultural imprinting on behaviour and the significance of intercultural competence in order to become global citizens. The course is made up of a series of complementing modules, each ending with activities that encourage the students to reflect on the contents and apply them in practical situations, both in the workplace as well as daily settings. The students work in mixed teams consisting of students from the TU Dresden and our EdUHK students, in order to ensure maximum interaction between the students from different cultural settings.
The course is closely supervised by intercultural trainers who conduct regular mandatory virtual expert sessions for the teams and larger groups (consisting of two or more teams) to foster discussions and a deeper engagement with the subject matter. Depending on the MoUs with the universities, the students can either be awarded credits for the course or receive a certificate of completion from the TU Dresden.
Objectives:
- Understand the concept and models of culture and its anthropological origins
- Understand one’s own cultural characteristics, examine other value systems to achieve a change in perspective
- Understand the scope between interpersonal and intercultural interactions and the need for intercultural competence
- Understand and apply the concept and the principles of the dimensions of culture to cross-cultural interactions encountered in own teaching practice and/or daily life.
- Use the insights acquired during the course to analyse critical incidents from the school setting, putting forth unbiased and reflective hypotheses for the motives behind behaviour and actions.
Partnered University:
Acknowledgement
Source: Dr ZHANG Yuefeng Ellen, Department of Curriculum and Instruction (C&I@EdUHK); for more information, please click MTeach
