Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR courses
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Intercultural Competences and Cultural Humility
Intercultural Competences and Cultural Humility
Why intercultural competences & Cultural Humility?
In this text, “cultures” do not only refer to nationalities but rather any group within which ideas, customs, behaviours, values and/or ways of communication are shared and transmitted, e.g., a given “scientific disciplinary culture”.
Intercultural competence can be understood as being able to respond sensitively to situations where individuals socialised with different cultures are present. Responses to intercultural situations include communicative and behavioural responses.
Cultural competence is often described as the ability to interact effectively with people of various backgrounds. We demonstrate intercultural competences when we are aware of how our own experiences and our own cultural lens may influence our perceptions of situations and behaviours, and we adapt our communication, attitudes, and behaviour accordingly to accommodate differences. Cultural humility complements intercultural competence by emphasising the willingness to learn from others in an ongoing process of self-exploration and self-critique, while acknowledging and accepting differences.
EPICUR courses provide opportunities for intercultural communication and collaboration, between students and teachers. When planning for and teaching in an intercultural classroom, the teacher can facilitate intercultural collaboration and provide meaningful learning opportunities for students to practise their intercultural competences and cultural humility.
5 key points about enabling the development of intercultural competences and fostering cultural humility in-person or online classes
- When planning intercultural learning activities, whether in-person or online include time for students to introduce themselves and get to know each other. In the Resources listed below, you will find activities like the Diversity Profile and Story Circles (Deardorff, 2020) which facilitate intercultural interaction.
- Share with students which intercultural competences your course will target and invite them to take ownership of their own competence development. See the Competency Framework, listed in the Resources section for lists of specific competences.
- Developing intercultural competences and cultivating intercultural humility requires communication between culturally different people. In study situations students are simultaneously developing and applying the academic competences. If students feel or are challenged by their linguistic abilities in the classroom language, this will impact on their intercultural competences. As a teacher, providing different opportunities for engagement, e.g., in written and/or spoken formats and or in different languages, can support those who are not comfortable or competent with the lingua franca.
- Facilitate meta discussions between students about the course. For example, early in the course students could share and discuss their course expectations and post questions about the course on a digital discussion board. The teacher can post their responses, pose their own questions on the discussion board and share points from these discussions in the next class. Discussions about common topics which are meaningful for all the students, can help students explain and question educational or societal norms, practices and behaviours.
- Plan for experiential learning opportunities where students from different educational and societal cultures collaborate on a task. Ensure the explanations for the task are clear, and available verbally and in text form. Keep the task straight forward and include time for the group to discuss and review their ways of organising the task and collaborating. Provide tasks where different backgrounds are beneficial, as they provide complementary “expertise” and viewpoints (e.g., experience with different languages, political systems, classrooms, academic fields,…)
Developing intercultural competences in practice
Collaboration Across Cultures: A Case Method Approach – An EPICUR course
This course was co-designed by two educators from different departments at the same university. The mode of delivery was a two-week intensive online course. The course included case-based learning activities with aligned course assessments. The syllabus explicitly informs students of the expectation that they will allocate time between synchronous classes to work with their team on their collaborative learning activities.
Links to resources for developing intercultural competences and cultivating cultural humility
- ‘The Competency Framework for Effective Intercultural Interaction’ lists competences in four sub sections: Knowledge and Ideas, Communication, Relationships, Personal Qualities and Dispositions. Each competence is explained, and the resource includes examples from an international education project. The competences are compiled in this grid for easy reference.
- The Framework of academic and intercultural competences and recommendations to students’ (Drozdova and Taulea, 2022, p.40) may be useful to share with all students embarking on an intercultural learning experience.
- Deardorff, Darla (2020) Manual for developing intercultural competencies: story circles https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000370336 Find out how to use Story Circles as a tool to facilitate intercultural dialogue. Darla Dierdorff provides further insights into story circles in this short interview.
- Diversity Profile provides a framework for facilitating introductions. By following the link you can access further resources which support interaction and collaboration in learning situations.
- This online module, produced by the Educational Quality at Universities for inclusive international programmes (EQUiiP) in on group-dynamics focuses on including all students in meaningful intercultural learning within the multicultural and multilingual classroom. https://equiip.eu/module/group-dynamics/
- The University of Oregon provides explanations and tools regarding the cultivation of cultural humility, also in higher education settings, in their “Cultural Humility Toolkit”: https://inclusion.uoregon.edu/cultural-humility-toolkit
Look for our training offer in the EPiC TLC: “Teaching and learning in intercultural contexts”
References
UNESCO publications on intercultural dialogue https://www.unesco.org/interculturaldialogue/en/publications
Drozdova, Valerija, and Micaela Taulean. "Academic and intercultural competences of international students in higher education." Acta Prosperitatis 13.1 (2022): 25-45.Available at: https://intapi.sciendo.com/pdf/10.37804/1691-6077-2022-13-24-45
Intercultural Classroom
Author(s)
This resource sheet has been co-written or written by
- Donna Hurford (SDU)
- Lisa Hüther-Pape (UFR)
Related Resource Sheets
Next steps
If you need further support with developing your course, please contact your local teaching support unit.
If you need further information on offering your course for EPICUR, please contact your EPICUR institutional coordinator.
Local teaching support units
EPICUR Institutional Coordinators
Adam Mickiewicz University
Karolina Choczaj
karmench@amu.edu.pl
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Nikos Kouloussis
nikoul@agro.auth.gr
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Michael Zacherle
zacherle@kit.edu
University of Amsterdam
Tiffany Boersma
t.a.boersma@uva.nl
Universität Freiburg
Charlotte Langowski
charlotte.langowski@zv.uni-freiburg.de
Université de Haute-Alsace
Léa Ziri
lea.ziri@uha.fr
Universität für Bodenkultur Wien
Nicolas Fries
nicolas.fries@boku.ac.at
University of Southern Denmark
Ida Thøstesen
ilt@sdu.dk
University of Strasbourg
Pascale Nachez
pnachez@unistra.fr
Further use as OER explicitly permitted:
This Resource Sheet within the Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses was created by Donna Hurford, University of Southern Denmark, and Lisa Hüther-Pape, University of Freiburg.
Please attribute according to TASLL rule as follows: Intercultural Competences and Cultural Humility (Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses), by Donna Hurford, University of Southern Denmark, and Lisa Hüther-Pape, University of Freiburg. Any icons included are protected by copyright, © The Noun Project, used with permission.
License: This work and its contents are – unless otherwise stated – licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .
Last edited: 12. Jan 2026, 17:08, Hutz-Nierhoff, Dorthe [dh1076@rz.uni-freiburg.de]