 Culture: Def. circa 1990s The explicit and implicit patterns for living… the dynamic system of commonly-agreed-upon symbols and meanings, knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, behaviors, traditions and/or habits that are shared and make up the way of life of a people.  Culture: Def. circa 2009 (add to above) …as negotiated by individuals in the process of constructing a personal identity… A response to multicultural contexts we live in nowadays…new contexts which call for new identities and generate new meanings. Culture (Diaz-Rico)

 IC research looks at culture-specific behaviors and the cumulative effect of miscommunication between people perceiving and interpreting specific behaviors differently.  IC knowledge helps teachers and students withhold premature, biased evaluations of unfamiliar behaviors and build awareness and appreciation of other beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral norms.  Students of all cultures prefer specific teaching styles and learning behaviors. Knowledge of IC helps instructors make informed choices. Intercultural Competence (CATESOL)

Denial---->Defense--->Minimization--->|||| (breakthrough) |||| ||||---->Acceptance--->Adaptation--->Integration |||| Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (Bennett)

Ethnocentric people unconsciously experience their own cultures as central. Cultural differences seen as implicit or explicit threats. Ethnorelativists unconsciously recognize that all behavior exists in a cultural context and seek out cultural differences as a way of enriching their own experiences and as a means to understand others.

Ethnocentric Stage 1: Denial No "cultural difference”, no alternatives to own experience. Strangers exist as simpler forms of being, to be tolerated, exploited, or eliminated. People can stay in denial their whole lives, as long as they live in isolation, or by maintaining separation. Expressions of denial can appear thoughtless, but benign, as though ignorance were harmless. People have difficulty differentiating cultures, lumping all Africans, Asians, etc., together.

Ethnocentric Stage 2: Defense More adept at perceiving cultural differences, yet other cultures stereotyped. One's culture still experienced as the only true reality. The world is organized into "us" and "them”: denigration of "them”, superiority of "us.” Polarization of discussions of cultural difference; experience other cultures as attacks on one’s "values.” “Others” may be acknowledged while continuing to avoid contact.

Ethnocentric Stage 3: Minimization  Threatening differences are subsumed into already- existing, familiar categories.  Still lacking cultural self-awareness, base cultural knowledge on categories derived from own culture.  Minimizers act "nice”; motivated to include culturally different people into their activities ("melting pot”); yet failing to perceive that institutions fashioned in their own culture's image may hinder the achievement of those culturally different.

Ethnorelative Stage 1: Acceptance  Discovery of own cultural context, acceptance of existence of different cultural contexts. Acceptance does not mean agreement but judgment is not ethnocentric.  Curiosity about cultural differences, seeking out information and initiating contrasts with own culture.

Ethnorelative Stage 2: Adaptation  Shift of cultural frames of reference to interpret and evaluate situations from more than one perspective.  Intentional change of behavior to communicate more effectively in another culture. Conscious act needs awareness of one’s culture and intercultural empathy.  Someone raised in two cultures does not necessarily possess the ability to understand him/herself or generalize cultural empathy to a third culture.

Ethnorelative Stage 3: Integration  Shift in cultural perspective becomes normal part of self. Identity becomes more fluid. “Move around cultures," no longer completely at center of any.  Positive attitude toward intercultural activities. Increased sophistication in intercultural ethics, deeper crosscultural interpretation, intercultural mediation.  "Who are you?” likely to elicit a long story, filled with examples of intercultural experience.

Goal: integration. Nonlinear process, back-and-forth. Cultural mistakes painful. Need to convert pain to awareness, embarrassment and anger to growth. Teachers especially vulnerable as cultural mediators and socializers. The more experiences emotionally, the more theory is needed! Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (Bennett)

 “The ability to perform effectively and appropriately with members of another language-cultural background on their terms. Competence is abstract and cannot be witnessed directly... In this view, one monitors competence by observing performance, rather than only talking about it in abstraction.” Alvino Fantini Intercultural Competence