This chapter aims to help you to begin a journey towards self-awareness, curiosity, and empathy (SACE) around intercultural relations and to support your understanding of why and how you can work to enact a culturally responsive pedagogy in your classroom.

In this chapter, we seek to:

1. Reflect on and situate one’s self (locating one’s self);
2. Understand what intercultural pedagogy is and what culturally responsive pedagogy means;
3. Consider the ways that this learning and reflection might be applied in your instructional context as TAs, lab demonstrators, marker-graders, and instructors.

Exploring Your Identity

To understand culturally responsible pedagogy and intercultural pedagogy, it is helpful to reflect on one’s own identity. Please feel free to complete the following activity. Note that there are 5 pages to complete. Advance to the next page by clicking on the blue arrow on the bottom right of the window. At the end you have the option to save your responses to an external file.

Cultural Iceberg

“Culture can be compared to an iceberg, because so much goes undetected. So that within our lives and work it is often ignored. The influence of culture on the elements of communication need to be explicitly explored rather than taken for granted or ignored.”

Hanley, Jerome. “Beyond the tip of the iceberg.” Reaching today’s youth. The community circle of caring journal 3.2 (1999): 9-12.

The Importance of the Cultural Iceberg

It is important to appreciate and understand the surface and deep elements of culture in order to:

1. Avoid cultural insensitivity
2. Improve cultural awareness and respect
3. Increase the ability to navigate and understand different cultures
4. Inform good cross-cultural practices and techniques
5. Avoid “crashing” into the cultural icebergs of others

The Cultural Iceberg Activity

In the activity below, practice identifying the surface and deep elements of culture by sorting the given aspects of culture by dividing them into the surface level (tip of the iceberg, easy to notice elements) and deep level (below the water, difficult to notice elements) of culture.

The Values of Intercultural Pedagogy

1. Intercultural pedagogy pursues equity and inclusion in the classroom – a proactive rather than reactive approach
2. Intercultural Pedagogy recognizes that expertise is fluid and developmental – there is no final state it is an ongoing process
3. Intercultural Pedagogy relies on and fosters reflection and revision – reflection is key to intercultural pedagogy as a deliberate consideration of the past to conceptualize a future

The Intercultural Development Continuum

Now that we know how to avoid making automatic judgments, and have become more self-aware about our natural biases, let us concentrate on how we can develop intercultural competence in a sustained and continued manner. In this section, we will learn about the IDC or the Intercultural Development Continuum model which provides us a distinctive roadmap for developing intercultural competence in a progressive manner.

You can see the Intercultural Development Continuum PowerPoint presentation in pdf form.

Related Resources

Below are some resources and readings which may be valuable if you are interested in exploring more about culturally responsive pedagogy.

It can be said that the K-12 sector has more resources and considerations available on the topic though more and more culturally responsive pedagogy is being discussed and explored in the context of higher education.

Teaching in Higher Ed Podcasts

Community Building Activities – with Maha Bali, Autumm Caines & Mia Zamora
(Please see Community Building Activities Transcript)

Intercultural Learning – with Maha Bali
(Please see Intercultural Learning Transcript)

Additional Reading

Teaching to Transgress  (bell hooks, 1994)

Diversity in Higher Education: Creating Culturally Responsive Classrooms (Seale, 2019)

But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995)