Intercultural Competence in the Classroom

Is “being intercultural” a personality trait some teachers just have, or a set of skills that can actually be taught? Michael Byram’s answer, laid out in his 1997 model of Intercultural Communicative Competence, is unambiguous: it’s skills, and they break down into parts specific enough to plan a curriculum around — knowledge, attitudes, and the ability to interpret, relate and question your own assumptions.

Byram’s four “savoirs” — attitudes (savoir être), knowledge (savoirs), the skill of interpreting and relating (savoir comprendre), and critical cultural awareness (savoir s’engager) — give the training its backbone, translated here into classroom-ready strategies rather than left as academic vocabulary.

Day one puts the model to work immediately: participants map their own cultural assumptions through a “Cultural Mosaic” exercise before ever discussing a framework, then build outward into definitions and cross-cultural interaction activities grounded in UNESCO’s work on diversity in education. By Day 3, the focus shifts to application — a “Cultural Mapping” exercise and hands-on development of multicultural lesson plans, presented to and critiqued by the group.

The distinction Byram insists on — and the one this training keeps returning to — is between knowing facts about other cultures and being able to actually interpret and relate across them in the moment a lesson is happening. Teachers who complete the course don’t collect a list of do’s and don’ts; they take home a framework for reading a classroom that keeps changing every September.