1.2 Multicultural competence

The importance of Multicultural Competence for teachers and mentors is getting bigger and bigger, a.o. because of the globalizing world, where education is no longer exclusively meant for domestic University students or trainees in Working Life Partner institutions. Teachers have to be prepared for international classrooms, coping with students with different cultural backgrounds; or for mentors in the working life environment, supervising these foreign trainees.

Watch this “bird-video”, as a metaphore of a multicultural environment in education:

Watch the short video Cultural Competence – A key competence of the 21st century for a better understanding of the concept.

Many books and articles are written about (multi-) cultural competences. You just type “cultural competence” on Google and many, many hits show up. Also on video. When you add the domain health care, also lot of results show up. That shows the importance. For example this video:

Less results, but still enough, show up if you look for the results in “education”. For example the video about the impact on educators:

Even fewer results if you want to have results for “education in health care”.

Multicultural competences in the Soulbus-e-Coach Programme.

In this Soulbus-e-Coach Programme next model is used to gain the multicultural competence. The final goal is to become competent on multiculturalism, symbolized as the bull’s-eye of the model. This competence needs to be unravelled for the Soulbus-e-Coach Programme, to make it more operational. Therefore six indicators have been defined. These indicators together build up the complex multicultural competence, and can be used in any order. Cultural awareness is the outermost circle of the model. It is not exactly the same as an indicator, but much more a conditional factor to be aware of. It shows who you are; it shows through which eyes you look.

Assignment: Multicultural Competence