INTELLECT Research Day
Open University, Milton Keynes, 18 June 2009

The INTELLECT Research Day at the OU focused on intercultural issues. There were two presenters, Adelheid Hu and myself.

I opened with a paper entitled Building a Third Space in Intercultural Education, focusing on the need for educators to help students develop intercultural competence and, more specifically, ‘epistemological humility’ (Ess, 2007) – essentially, the recognition that their own perspective on the world is not the only one. My talk reported the results of the 3^rd Space in Online Discussion Project, based on a set of international forums for language teachers run through the University of Western Australia and the University of Canterbury Christ Church, UK, in 2007–2008. It focused on three main aspects of the project:

• the construct of the ‘educational third space’ which, building on Bhabha’s work on the intercultural ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994), is a useful theoretical standpoint from which to analyse the interactions of multicultural cohorts in online forums, and to assess the development of intercultural competence and epistemological humility;
• the value of asynchronous discussion boards in building such an educational third space;
• the application of computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 2004) to asynchronous discussion transcripts in order to reveal key features, including the extent to which intercultural competence and epistemological humility are developing in a given cohort.

I showed that, while a number of factors limited fuller development of an educational third space, there was some evidence of an increase in participants’ intercultural competence and epistemological humility.

Adelheid Hu‘s paper, entitled Intercultural Competences and Language Learning: Empirical Insights and the Question of Evaluation, provided a clear list of key issues around the concept of intercultural competence.  Among the points she raised were the following:

• the lack of connections being made between research on intercultural competence in different fields;
• the disjuncture between theory (often focused on culture as a construct) and practical applications (often focused on national differences);
• the need to obtain empirical evidence of theoretical constructs;
• the question of whether ‘competence’ is measurable and, if so, whether it is at odds with ethical goals of personal development;
• the question of whether ‘competence’ has become another empty term like ‘excellence’;
• the extent to which ‘culture’ should be a universally valid concept or whether we can accept a pragmatic notion of culture which varies from context to context (and may be simplified in some contexts);
• the difference between structure/component and developmental models of intercultural competence;
• the dangers of utopian notions of intercultural competence which neglect factors like power and economics;
• the question of how to empirically identify intercultural learning processes, when & why shifts happen, whether they stay, under what conditions, etc.;
• the connection between intercultural competence and language learning (which don’t necessarily entail each other);
• the connection between multilingualism and intercultural competence.

The papers were followed by extensive discussion, which demonstrated both how important intercultural competence has become – and how problematic it remains as a concept.