Fostering Cultural Awareness for a Global Competence

Abstract

The currency of intercultural education has risen worldwide in response to increased diversity within societies resulting from migration and global flows of populations. As intercultural education becomes a core responsibility of schooling, the attention to fostering students' cultural awareness grows even faster. The school and all the educational agencies must find the most suitable tools to adequately address the complex multiculturalism of the third millennium to promote the students' ability to understand one another across and beyond all types of cultural barriers. How can we, as teachers and educators, stimulate reflexivity about cultural identities and intercultural relations? How can we foster interaction, dialogue, mutual recognition, and enrichment of any individual, in respect of the different identities of the other? This chapter offers a reflexive analysis of the efficacy of using frameworks and autobiographical narratives for enhancing students' intercultural awareness.