Glossary
Glossary
| Active listening | Ability to focus completely on a speaker to understand their message and respond thoughtfully. It involves using verbal and nonverbal techniques to show interest and keep the attention on the speaker. |
| Bias (unconscious bias) | An unsupported judgement, an automatic association in our brain that demonstrates underlying attitudes in favour or against other people. It happens outside our conscious awareness and affects how we relate to and react to others. |
| Critical thinking | The ability to analyse behaviours, events, and observations to understand, relate to, create meaning, address an issue, or find solutions. It requires you to be objective and understand different perspectives and then reflect on them in relation to your own experience. |
| Cross-cultural (e.g., communication, studies, or interactions) | Involves comparisons of different cultures around a particular aspect; for example, work values in Switzerland and in Saudi Arabia, or how people greet each other in Canada and in Spain. |
| Cultural awareness | Cultural awareness refers to the conscious understanding of one’s own culture and how this differs from other cultures. Key to developing intercultural awareness is recognizing that the differences exist, without using one or another culture as a benchmark to judge other cultures. Cultural awareness is also a mindset supporting the continuous development of intercultural competences. |
| Cultural humility | A lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and critique, to redressing power imbalances […] and to developing mutually beneficial and non-paternalistic partnerships with communities on behalf of individuals and defined populations (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998, p. 123). |
| Cultural orientations (or dimensions) | Generalizations or archetypes that allow us to study general tendencies of a cultural group. This is helpful when we are trying to understand how the majority of the people in a cultural group tend to act or tend to think. |
| Cultural universals | Human activities, organizational patterns, characteristics, or traits that are common to all societies around the world. |
| Cultural Values | Deeply held beliefs that we rely on to determine what is “good, right, acceptable, and desirable” and what is “bad, wrong, inacceptable, and undesirable.” |
| Culture | An accumulated pattern of values, beliefs, and behaviours, shared by an identifiable group of people with a common history and verbal and nonverbal symbol systems (Neuliep, 2006, p. 21). |
| Discrimination | An action, the unjust or unfair treatment of a person or a group on the grounds of their identity, for instance, based on race, sex, ability, or origin. Discrimination starts with an inaccurate idea of a group based on a single observation (stereotype), which is repeated thus creating immediate associations in one’s brain associations based on that observation (bias). The result of this affects how we perceive another group and the decisions that negatively affect that group. |
| Empathy | Action of understanding, being aware of, appreciating, and connecting with the experiences, circumstance, and feelings of others. It involves the use of strategies to share understanding and connecting with another person. |
| Ethnocentrism | The belief that one’s culture is better or superior to others, that the way we do things is right, and the way others do things, act, or behave are wrong. It is a very limiting view that leads people to make unfair assumptions about other cultural groups and impedes the appreciation of different ways of being and behaving. |
| Evaluating | The ability to explore and consider various explanations for what is new or different to us and deciding what may be the best way to interpret it. It is part of a process that may require gathering more information to create meaning we can understand. |
| Global learner | A person who develops skills to appreciate other perspectives and intentionally engages with cultural others, seeks to expand knowledge across national and regional lines, and is aware of ways to deal with biases and stereotypes by suspending judgement of others. The ideal global learner is a person committed to engaging with cultural others at home and abroad; it is someone who recognizes the importance of understanding cultural differences and similarities, is centred on creating connections, improving relationships, learning about others, respecting people’s experiences, and aims to continue developing their intercultural competencies. |
| Iceberg theory (Culture iceberg) | Visual representation developed by anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1976) to explain how at the top of the iceberg there are cultural elements that are easier to understand, they are learned or acquired consciously, involving our immediate senses (e.g., food, music, dress, rituals, accents, and greetings). At the bottom of the iceberg, there are elements learned or acquired unconsciously, they are hard to change, intangible, and one cannot understand without having more in-depth knowledge of another culture (e.g., values, concept of death, approaches to marriage, sexuality, and ageing, family organization, and rules of courtship). |
| Intercultural (e.g., competence, communication, engagement) | Focuses on a deeper understanding of interactions between cultures and the mutual exchange of ideas from a more holistic and comprehensive perspective. |
| Intercultural competence | The ability to develop targeted knowledge, skills and attitudes that lead to visible behaviour and communication that are both effective and appropriate in intercultural interactions (Deardorff, 2006, p. 241). |
| Intercultural knowledge | A set of cognitive, affective, and behavioural skills and characteristics that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts (Bennet, 2008, p. 97). |
| Intersectionality | Based on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Theory of Intersectionality (1989), the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines intersectionality as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.” |
| Microaggression | A subtle, but offensive comment or action (including nonverbal expressions) directed generally at an individual or non-dominant group based on a bias or stereotype. |
| Nonverbal communication | The communication we use every day that includes everything that is not said in words, but that conveys a message between people that expresses intention, identity, some cultural orientations, values, and so on. For example, pointing, winking, shaking hands, physical distancing, facial expressions, and so on. |
| Objective observation | The ability to use our senses as a spectators, eyewitnesses, or participants focused on what happens around (actions and behaviours), noticing details, taking in new information, and being able to describe them without added judgement based on our reactions and value systems. |
| OSEE tool | Developed by Darla Deardorff (2012), this is a tool for creating objective descriptions and alternative explanations that lead into a better understanding of an event or situation. The tool includes the following steps: O – Observe (and listen to) what is happening, S – State objectively what is happening, E – Explore different explanations for what is happening, E – Evaluate which explanation(s) is the most likely one(s). |
| Prejudice | Preconceived opinion of a group that is not based on reason or derived from experience through interactions. This is the result of relying on unfair representations of a group, giving way to attitudes and actions that directly affect members of the group. |
| Stereotype | An overgeneralization of a perceived behaviour applied to an entire group based on limited observations or an oversimplification of ideas. Stereotypes can support a vicious circle of false beliefs directed at different cultural groups while creating a social stigma among those very groups. |
| Sociolinguistic knowledge | This refers to learning another language to communicate with speakers of that language and to better understand how the language reflects socio-cultural norms and interactions; it also refers to knowledge about other languages to better understand how people communicate and how each language’s norms, the type of interaction, and one’s heritage affect the way we speak. |
| Sympathy | Act of commiserating with someone else’s feelings or struggles in a way that whatever affects one person will affect the other. It involves a shared mental state instead of developing an understanding. |
