Intercultural Competence

The goal of improving intercultural skills can present a bit of a moving target, since the work is never realloy complete. Just when you think you’ve got it mastered, another culture will emerge or a current culture will change. It’s a lifeflong pursuit demanding constant evoloution. As such, effective intercultural skills aren’t measured in terms of “complete” but rather as a degree of competence in a given context.
This mini-lecture discusses a framework for pursuing and measuring intercultural competence. Darla Deardorff’s Intercultural Competence Model (2006) has become a standard in the field and conceptualizes the inherent components of intercultural competence in pyramid form and also as a process, both of which are covered here.