Abstract:

The course “Cross-cultural competence in social preventive and rehabilitative work” is a component of the master’s program for students of social rehabilitation pedagogy at the Institute of Education of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. The main idea of the course is to prepare students to work in conditions of cultural diversity of their future service users. In the academic year 2021/2022, for the first time, the course was carried out in international cooperation as part of the POWER Integrated Project – Comprehensive Programme of Development for Jagiellonian University, co-financed with EU funds under the European Social Fund, Operational Programme Knowledge Education Development. This means that 50% of classes were conducted stationary by a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University, and the remaining 50% remotely by an addiction prevention expert at Mondriaan Zorggroep/Maastricht and Nijmegen University in the Netherlands. It required the development of a joint program and then constant verification of the assumptions. At the end of the course, the students were asked to fill in a self-report Questionnaire of Cross-Cultural Competence, developed and improved over the last ten years by the author of the paper on the basis of the “IOM Self-Esteem Questionnaire”, Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) and author’s own work. The second method of course evaluation was participant observation and thus a quantitative – qualitative research strategy was used. The obtained results indicate that course made it possible to achieve the assumed learning outcomes, and therefore developed the students’ cross-cultural competence in the area of self-esteem, language competence, and social action skills. In addition, the students indicated that the experience of classes with a foreign lecturer strengthened and enriched the scope of their knowledge and expertise. A very important from the perspective of the subject of the course is that its implementation has also become a platform for cross-cultural experience between the two lecturers. It turned out that the Polish and Dutch realities differ in some dimensions, which resulted in the necessity of cross-cultural interaction the lecturers (including the administrative staff of the project). Thus, the interaction of the lecturers ran in parallel with the process of teaching cross-cultural competence of the students.

Keywords:

International cooperation, common teaching, higher education, cultural diversity, cross-cultural competence, evaluation.