ACTIVE MEASURES FOR PROMOTING INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE AND SENSITIVITY IN A FACULTY THOUGHT IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES

The paper is aimed at debating intercultural dialogue and sensitivity within a multicultural learning environment. It supports the idea of diversity management in intercultural educational environment’s focusing on the student’s perspective. The study represents an ongoing research regarding the level of interculturality in University Politehnica of Bucharest and is mainly addressed to national and foreign students. The aim of project is to unify measures, strategies, infrastructure and goals in universities in order to obtain a higher degree of collaboration among national and foreign students. The present paper represents the most valuable step in completing the project. For this purpose the methodology applied consists of qualitative data analysis provided by students enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages. The Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages being the only Faculty in the University who provides educational engineering programs in three different languages, English, French and German. Besides national students in our Faculty we benefit of foreign students enrolled in bachelor and master education as well as Erasmus students. The survey will comprise issues like: active measures for enhancing intercultural dialogue, multicultural work projects, the importance of intercultural academic environment, intercultural competence achievements (Deardorff K,2009), suggestions for curricular improvements (Certificate of Intercultural Competence) and the importance of studying the topics in a foreign language.

Research results address mainly the active measures that the university has to support for intercultural educational spaces. Finally the paper presents a SWOT analysis from the perspective of intercultural education and some future guidelines for the University.