Intercultural Competence Workshop #3

What does it mean to be interculturally competent? What skills, knowledge and attitudes do you need to have? How can these be acquired, trained or refined? Inspired by years of training- and consulting practice within different working areas (education, student-exchange programmes, international business, civil society and international cooperation), a theoretical framework was developed by the expertise centre CIMIC (Centre for Intercultural Management and International Communication). The "Frame of Reference for Intercultural Competence" gives us concrete insight into nine relevant components of intercultural competence. Nine components in which a part of the knowledge, skills and attitudes are contained. What do you have to 'know', 'be able to do' and also 'be' in order to act professionally in this multifaceted world?

This will be the third workshop in a series of 4 workshops during the year. Although the topics of each of the 4 workshops are connected, it is not necessary to join all 4 to join the workshops.

Workshop #3, Saturday, December 17th: Exploring a few more of the cultural components in details, while also using your experiences of culture shock to stimulate the conversation.

For this workshop, if you've experienced culture shock before then we ask that you email us with details about this experience so we can dive into a reflection and discussion based on the experiences of the participants. To help you put your experiences into words you can look at this handout and then formulate a response. Feel free to send your responses to ann.tripp@leuven.be or include it when registering via Eventbrite.

Practical information for Workshop 3

- In English

- Free

- Saturday, December 17th from 10:00-13:00

- Location: International House Leuven

- Registration required, via Eventbrite

- Speaker: Professor Gunilla de Graef

Workshop 1 & 2 recap:

In the first workshop we covered the overview the whole model, thus understanding that the development of intercultural competence is a dynamic, lifelong process of transformation. All different components are connected and affected by one another. It is actually a bit like 'chemistry': bringing together the right, often already known components, in the right time, produces a functional process, a qualitative reaction. In the second workshop we discussed the components surrounding conflict management, multi-perspectiveness, and communication skills.

Overview of the 9 components:

· Cultural self-knowledge: knowing your own frame of reference and roots

- Cultural flexibility: willingness to adapt and explore alternatives

· Cultural resilience: ability to overcome stress and negative feelings caused by difficult intercultural encounter

· Cultural receptiveness: openness to listen to other views and capacity to correctly position own views and ideas

· Cultural knowledge: interest in exploring factual knowledge on cultural differences and capacity to use this knowledge in an appropriate manner

· Cultural relational competence: willingness to invest time and energy in the building of trust and willingness to connect

· Cultural communicative competence: ability to explore the particularities of own communication style and approaches, to remediate if necessary and to explore the communication style and approach of counterparts

· Cultural conflict management: consciousness of potential positive forces of intercultural conflict and knowledge of own conflict management style

· Multiperspectiveness: able to view a single issue from different perspectives and appreciating this various perspectives