Romani Women and Health. The Need for a Cultural Safety-Based Approach

The Romani are the main European ethnic minority. The Romani people’s situation of social vulnerability and their difficulties in accessing the health system, make their health indicators worse than those of the non-Romani population. The present study will delve into the health beliefs and experiences with health services and their professionals through the perspectives of Romani women. In this qualitative study, 16 women of different ages were interviewed in a city located in the South of Spain. Four themes emerged from the analysis of data: the construction of the identity of Romani women, difficulties in life, health and disease beliefs and barriers in the access to the health system. We conclude that every project for the improvement of the health of the Romani community must take into account the active participation of Romani women and must consider the principles of Cultural Safety, by delving into the intercultural training of health professionals and addressing the social determinants of health which affect the Romani collective.

Practical applications of naturalistic inquiry in intercultural education

In recent years, the field of intercultural communication has seen a remarkable shift characterized by a growth in publications that distance themselves from the traditional, essentialist understanding of culture. In research, this shift is reflected in approaches that appreciate culture-in-action instead of taking culture for granted as a stable entity that pre-exists social interaction and predicts as well as explains human behavior. However, despite attempts to introduce differentiated views on culture and interculturality in education, concrete options for critical intercultural training are scarce and often remain abstract, which makes their application challenging. This article argues for the use of naturalistic inquiry in intercultural education. This pedagogical choice may provide students with access to authentic data and allow them to observe and analyze facets of interculturality by themselves while working out practical solutions collaboratively. Advantages of naturalistic inquiry include independence from theoretical presuppositions, approachability for facilitators and students alike, and applicability to a wide variety of naturally occurring social interactions. The article proposes that naturalistic inquiry enables students to identify and analyze practices that may be problematic with respect to cultural attributions or categorizations and encourages them to notice and discuss the meaning of culture as it dynamically surfaces in interaction.

An auto-ethnographic narrative of corporate intercultural training: Insights from the genealogical reordering of the material

Intercultural training is common practice in many organizations. By cross-cultural management scholars, intercultural training is often critiqued as overly simplistic. The argument is that intercultural trainers lack sophisticated cross-cultural management knowledge. Based on 6 years of ethnographic and auto-ethnographic research, I argue that such a categorical rejection of intercultural training practice as inferior functions as a closure mechanism towards higher scholarly relevance: The problem is not that intercultural training practice is overly simplistic but rather that cross-cultural management scholars fail to consider the actual processes of how intercultural training emerges in a certain (simplistic) and not in another (sophisticated) shape. What is required, is thus an investigation of the actual contexts, actors and chains of events, and of the power-relations underlying them, that bring a certain reality into being. To achieve this goal, I propose a practice approach to genealogy (based on Foucault) which I apply to rich auto-ethnographic and ethnographic material. In doing so, I work with ethnographic material in novel ways and move beyond a previously held, more structuralist, archival and textual approach to genealogy. Exemplifying the benefits of genealogy, I show how intercultural training is implicated by other, more intertwined and local, power-effects than those considered by academia, such as intersections of gender (women trainers), job precariousness, dominant male professionalism, organizational pressures and personal agendas. In walking the reader through the construction of a sample genealogy, I provide academics with a concrete approach of how to challenge taken-for-granted scholarly assumptions and make more impactful contributions to practice.

Maltese as a foreign language educators’ acquisition of intercultural capabilities

This study sought to understand how teachers of Maltese as a foreign language (MFL) develop intercultural capabilities by exploring the importance of intercultural competence (IC) to MFL teachers, the characteristics of interculturally competent MFL educators, and the ways in which educators develop IC. The study adopted the interpretivist paradigm and a case study research design to collect qualitative data. Seventeen MFL teachers of adult learners were purposefully selected because they all taught MFL to non-native adults. These educators were interviewed, by answering the researcher’s ten unstructured questions. A smartphone was used to record the interviewees. Findings regarding the perceptions of the teachers who were interviewed are as follows. Firstly, the participants stated that IC is important for MFL teachers because it helps them to embrace diversity, to help adult learners to learn the target language (i.e. Maltese) better, and to be sensitive and accommodative to learners from different backgrounds. Secondly, according to the participants, an interculturally capable person is one who knows their own culture and others’ cultural aspects, respects and accepts other cultures. It was also found that teachers develop intercultural capabilities through learning at a school and by visiting other countries and being immersed in the cultures of those countries. The implications of the findings as supported by existing literature, are that IC is important for foreign language teachers and as a result, intercultural training, learning through interactions with others and visits to other countries are necessary to develop intercultural capabilities.

Decolonizing the training of engineers and scientists: The case of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Mathematics at Universidad de Chile

Given current global crises, there is a need to move beyond the anthropocentric, reductionist and short-term vision of the world, imposed through the hegemony of Western culture. Are we still in time to change the prevailing hegemonic vision of the world and better address global crises and their local impacts? What is the role of intercultural higher education in this challenging task? We conceive this type of education for the training of future decision-makers, as well as scientists and technicians who must respond to current and future challenges in society. Therefore, we evaluate the contribution of the Indigenous Peoples Program (PPI) of the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (FCFM) at Universidad de Chile (UCH). We conclude that the PPI opens up possibilities for intercultural training in the FCFM, which can contribute to changing the professional and scientific performance of its graduates, opening their minds to other cultures, worldviews, values and paradigms. Keywords: Indigenous, Higher education, Interculturality, Indigenous communities, Discrimination How to ite this article: Rodríguez-Seeger, C., Sáez-Hueichapan, D., Fuenzalida-Artigas, A., Ñancupil-Quirilao, I., Lienqueo, M.E., Contreras-Painemal, C. & Díaz-Alvarado, F. 2021. Decolonizing the training of engineers and scientists: the case of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Mathematics at Universidad de Chile. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South. 5(1): 87-106. DOI: 10.36615/sotls.v5i1.154. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Maltese as a Foreign Language Educator’s Acquisition of Intercultural Capabilities

This study sought to understand how teachers of Maltese as a foreign language (MFL) develop intercultural capabilities by exploring the importance of intercultural competence to MFL teachers, the characteristics of interculturally competent MFL educators, and how educators develop intercultural competence. The study adopted the interpretivist paradigm and a case study research design to collect qualitative data. Seventeen MFL teachers of adult learners were purposefully selected and interviewed. Findings regarding the perceptions of the teachers who were interviewed are as follows. Firstly, the participants stated that intercultural competence is important for MFL teachers because it helps them to embrace diversity, to help adult learners to learn the target language (i.e. Maltese) better, and to be sensitive and accommodative to learners from different backgrounds. Secondly, according to the participants, an interculturally capable person is one who knows their own culture and others’ cultural aspects, respects and accepts other cultures. It was also found that teachers develop intercultural capabilities through learning at a school and by visiting other countries and being immersed in the cultures of those countries. The implications of the findings as supported by existing literature, are that intercultural competence is important for foreign language teachers and as a result, intercultural training, learning through interactions with others and visits to other countries are necessary to develop intercultural capabilities.

BUILDING INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE. WHAT AFFECTS THE SUCCESS OF INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION?

Objective of the article is to analyze parts of intercultural competence and to develop a system of intercultural exercises and experimentally test its efficiency. To check that teaching Russian as a foreign language using this system positively affects the success of intercultural communication. Applied methods . Description method; method of analysis; generalization and systematization; experimental pedagogical research method; comparison method. Results . There is no unified model of intercultural competence in language teaching. The main criteria for the success of the intercultural competence are its relevance and effectiveness. Conclusion . It has been experimentally confirmed that students living in the country of the target language and undergoing special intercultural training gain an increase in communicative competence. Possible areas for further work may be the creation of a textbook (system of intercultural exercises), the development of online trainings.

The Development of a Language-and-Culture Course Incorporating Intercultural Teaching Materials in the Tunisian Higher Education EFL Context: Challenges and Opportunities

Little data is currently available on course and materials design for in-tercultural competence (IC) teaching in the Tunisian higher education EFL context. The present study aimed to investigate these issues with reference to current literature on intercultural course and materials de-velopment as well as instructional design and affordance theories. In particular, it explored the potential development of an intercultural training course consisting of teaching materials that employ three types of teaching techniques, namely the cultural awareness technique (CAT), critical incident technique (CIT) and cultural misunderstanding tech-nique (CMT). The result was a comprehensive course that included at-tainable goals, realistic learning objectives, conducive learning experi-ences, along with clear assessment criteria, scales, descriptors, methods, and tools for gauging the attainment of achievable learning outcomes. The findings reported in this work are particularly interesting for they could form a critical foundation for further research on the intercultural dimension in various higher education EFL contexts and a tentative blueprint for potential future work on intercultural curriculum, syllabus, course, and/or teaching materials development.