Intercultural Competence in the Classroom

Is being intercultural a personality some teachers happen to have, or a competence that can be taught? Michael Byram’s answer has organised this field since 1997: it is a competence, and it breaks into five parts specific enough to build a week around. Five parts, five days — attitudes, knowledge, interpreting, discovery in real time, and the critical judgement that holds the other four together.

• Monday starts where the model starts: attitudes — and the harder half of Byram’s definition, suspending belief about your own culture rather than only about other people’s.
• Tuesday is knowledge, and the correction most training needs: half of it is not facts about countries at all, but knowledge of how interaction itself works.
• Wednesday you interpret — taking something from another culture, explaining it, and relating it to something from your own, which is the skill a lesson actually runs on.
• Thursday is the part you cannot get from a handout: acquiring what you need in real time, in the middle of a conversation you cannot pause.
• Friday is critical cultural awareness — judgement made on explicit criteria — and an honest look at where scholars think Byram’s model falls short.

You go home with a worked example under each of the five parts, a document pair you can teach on Monday, a plan for running a structured reflection on a real intercultural encounter with your own class, and the Council of Europe’s Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters, a tool for doing it. The room itself does some of the teaching: open groups are multinational by design, so Thursday’s real-time practice usually happens with people who genuinely read a situation differently from you.

Most courses on cultural diversity ask you to be more open, and leave it there. Openness is not a plan. Michael Byram’s model of intercultural communicative competence, published in 1997 and revisited by him in a second edition in 2021, is a plan — because it takes something that sounds like a personal quality and separates it into five distinct capabilities, each of which can be practised, taught and assessed on its own.

They are usually given in French, because that is how Byram wrote them. Savoir être: attitudes — “curiosity and openness”, and a “readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one’s own”. Savoirs: knowledge of social groups and their practices in your own country and your interlocutor’s, and of the general processes of societal and individual interaction. Savoir comprendre: the ability to “interpret a document or event from another culture, to explain it, and relate it to documents from one’s own”. Savoir apprendre/faire: the ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and to operate that knowledge, those attitudes and those skills “under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction”. And savoir s’engager: the ability to “evaluate critically and on the basis of explicit criteria perspectives, practices, and products” — in other cultures and in your own.

Read those five again and notice how different they are from each other. The second is a curriculum question. The third is a lesson-planning skill. The fourth is tested only while a conversation is happening and cannot be rehearsed from a handout. Treating them as one lump — “intercultural awareness” — is why so much training on this subject produces agreement in the room and nothing on Monday. This week keeps them apart, and gives each one a day.

Thursday is the day worth explaining, because it is the one that resists being put on a slide. Skills of discovery and interaction are what you use when you have no preparation left: a parent says something you did not expect, a student reacts in a way that does not fit, and you have about two seconds. Byram’s phrase for the difficulty is exact — operating knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time communication. You cannot learn that from a list, which is why Thursday is built around live practice — in open sessions, with a group that is multinational by design — and around the Council of Europe’s Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters, an instrument written by Byram and his colleagues that walks a person back through one real encounter, step by step. You learn it in order to run it with your own students.

Friday does something this kind of course rarely does: it argues with its own framework. Byram’s model has been criticised, seriously and from inside the field, for assuming that the goal of an intercultural encounter is agreement — a harmonious resolution of two worldviews. Scholars have questioned whether harmony is a realistic goal, or even a useful one, and have proposed thinking instead in terms of a “community of disagreement”, where a disagreement that stays unresolved can produce more honest engagement than a polite consensus. That argument matters in a staffroom and in a classroom, and you leave able to make it.

The week stays on the competence itself. Displaced and newly arrived learners — the first-weeks routines that get a new pupil enrolled, understood, placed, safe and included — are the subject of Refugees & Migration and Education. Friday’s argument about disagreement concerns what makes an intercultural exchange honest, not how to settle a dispute between two students, which belongs to Conflict Management, Emotional Intelligence and Bullying Prevention in Schools. The whole-school equality project belongs to Inclusive Education for Diversity and Equality. And what you take home is a way of reading a classroom rather than a policy for a school.

No session asks you to bring information about a real student.