Abstract:

In the contemporary era characterized by globalization and cultural diversity, the importance and necessity of Intercultural Education at all levels cannot and should not be ignored. As students prepare to enter the multicultural and globalized workforce, it is essential that they cultivate a range of soft skills, including the ability to understand and adapt to different cultural perspectives. Therefore, the purpose of this communication is to present a series of good practices in the form of teaching materials for intercultural learning in the context of higher education. Although these materials have been developed with the specific context of higher education in mind, it is nevertheless possible to adapt them to primary and secondary education.

According to Bennett (2012), intercultural learning refers to the acquisition of “increased awareness of subjective cultural context (world view), including one’s own, and developing greater ability to interact sensitively and competently across cultural contexts as both an immediate and long-term effect of exchange’ (p. 4). The main objective of any innovation process in education is to get students to learn more and better. To answer the question of what we can do to help our students learn better in a culturally diverse context such as multicultural classrooms, we need to reflect on our own teaching and assessment processes, as well as on how we can encourage and promote more (and higher quality) interactions with cultural diversity. The didactic materials presented in this communication are one of the outcomes of the research carried out in the framework of the Erasmus+ Multicultural Classrooms: Inclusive Learning and Teaching in Higher Education project. It is important to mention that the planning of teaching-learning activities, taking into account the diversity of our classrooms, can provide students with a solid foundation that helps them, on the one hand, to navigate cultural differences and, on the other hand, to develop their intercultural competence.

Keywords:

Intercultural competence, intercultural communication, inclusive learning, multicultural classrooms.