Intercultural competence : an evaluation of diaries from a Comenius 2.1 project

Abstract

Today’s flow of information and people, across country-borders, has made the world face new challenges. Societies are in need of new expertise and competence to handle these challenges. Focusing on the education sector, teachers need new competence to tackle the multicultural class. This paper is an evaluation of diaries written by teacher students from Poland, the Czech Republic, France and Germany, who attended a course in September 2005 within a Comenius 2.1 project aiming to develop modules to increase the intercultural competence among teacher students. These modules were tested out at this course. The course consisted of combining theory with practical activities.

The objective of my evaluation is to find out if the course reached it’s desired effect: Did the teacher students develop intercultural competence? To find this out, I will read and interpret the participants’ diaries and link it up to relevant literature. The literature review will circle around the terms intercultural competence, difference, identity, strangeness and gender, which are important terms for the course and the project.

Content analysis is the method I have used to treat and interpret the data. Within this method I have used a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, which for me seemed as the most suitable approach to reach the most precise findings.

The result of my evaluation was mainly that the teacher students attending the course developed intercultural competence, but to different extents. I conclude that the course possibly could had received better effects with improved preparation, from the people in charge of the course, concerning issues as language, the practical activities and the intensity of the course.