What does it mean to be culturally competent, one of the 6 Cs that Colorado Academy embraces? How are educational institutions, both high schools and higher education, tackling this topic, and how are they developing these skills in their students? How do they effectively measure whether or not their students have grown in this regard?

 

I sought answers to these and many more questions at the Intercultural Competency Conference, hosted by the University of Arizona this past weekend. Although I had not attended this biennial conference before, I was greatly intrigued, and the program line-up looked promising. Both Daniel Lopez, our global travel coordinator, and Lisa Todd, head of the world language department, had attended in the past and recommended it to me.

 

So off I went to sunny Tucson, not a bad place to be in late January. At this conference the definition was expanded to intercultural competence, which simply means having the wherewithal to navigate multiple cultures and to be sensitive and aware of the multitude of personal identities that exist in the world. For most of the presenters and practitioners at the conference, global travel and cultural experiences were at the core of what they do every day at their institutions, whether at the high school or college level. They are all people who believe that humans benefit from interactions with multiple other humans in different places, of different cultures, with different world views.

 

Over the course of two days, I heard multiple informative and engaging presentations, including “Fostering Global Awareness Through Language and Culture,” “Embodied Narratives: Deepening the Intercultural Journey of Study Abroad,” and “Engaging Global Students in Intercultural Sensitivity.” All of these and many more broadened my view of what other schools are doing to raise their students’ cultural awareness, and how they are doing their best to ensure quality global travel experiences, whether a student is abroad for two weeks, or six months, or anything in between.

 

One topic that emerged in multiple sessions was the need to have students reflect on their experiences in other cultures, both at the time they are encountering this new culture and afterward. What are they feeling and observing? When have they felt “off-center” and why? How do we process the various things we are noticing and discovering? At the college level, many institutions are quite invested in collecting and quantifying this aspect of their students’ experiences, as they seek data through various research methodologies in order to measure growth in the area of intercultural competence. I am interested in bringing some of the research tools back to Colorado Academy as well.

 

I am pleased to report that so much of what we already do is right in line with best practices at the high school and college level. The experiences we are offering our students, and the ways in which we support them before, during, and after these experiences, place us in a position of strength and underscore our commitment to this component of a CA education. But we can always improve. Thus, I was excited to return with some ways to tweak existing practices and with some new ideas to make these experiences even stronger.

 

In addition to the multiple travel and exchange opportunities we make available to students, there are also multiple places in the CA curriculum where intercultural competence is central to the whole endeavor; the obvious examples include Global Perspectives and Coming of Age in the World (our NinthGrade humanities courses), AP Human Geography, Haiti: A Difficult Past with an Optimistic Future, The Cuban Reality, and all of our world language classes.

 

We are fortunate to have such a dedicated group of faculty who understand that in an ever-shrinking, interconnected world, global awareness and cultural competency are vital skills to foster and develop in our students.