Intercultural Maturity and College Students

¶ … Intercultural Maturity In recent years, intercultural competence on an emotional and interpersonal level has been increasingly valued as an important attribute to foster in students, given the globalization of society. Education is not simply imparting knowledge, it is also designed "to adequately prepare culturally competent citizens" (Perez, Shim, & Baxter-Magdola, 2015, p. 759.) The King & Baxter-Magolda (2005) multidimensional framework of intercultural maturity (the ICM model) attempts to answer why some students seem innately more comfortable with multicultural settings.

While some students have reported finding intercultural settings "generally threatening" and either feel "immobilized" or avoid them, others have reported "struggling with di-erence, but remained open to continuing to question their beliefs" while the most culturally competent "gained new insights into their own social identities despite the discomfort of diverse interactions" (Perez, Shim, & Baxter-Magdola, 2015, pp. 761-762). Just like learning new concepts, some students seem innately more comfortable with confronting cultural similarities and dissimilarities.

The King & Baxter-Magdola model suggests that much like Kohlberg's model of moral development or Piaget's model of development of cognitive abilities, there is a similar model for the acquisition of cultural competence (King, Perez, & Shim 2013). For example, students in the early stages of cultural competence tend to view culture in an egocentric fashion as either wrong or right, assuming that their culture is the only correct model and show "difficulty recognizing the concept of culture beyond demography or geography" (Perez, Shim, & Baxter-Magdola, 2015, p. 765).

Students at this stage often express the idea that all foreigners are alike or assume that all members of an unfamiliar group like Muslims share the same ideas (Perez, Shim, & Baxter-Magdola, 2015, p. 766). In their interpersonal interactions, they are more apt to stereotype individuals and to make snap judgments that certain cultures or attitudes are superior to others (Perez, Shim, & Baxter-Magdola, 2015, p.770).

Students at the intermediate level may be naive about differences between, for example, Muslims from different areas of the world, but show curiosity and open-mindedness about learning about different cultures (Perez, Shim, & Baxter-Magdola, 2015, p. 768).

They are also more willing to acknowledge differences exist, versus exhibiting an attitude that 'everyone is the same, can't we ignore color?' Students at the most advanced level are able to apply different lenses with greater nuance -- for example, they can understand the different perspective between a Muslim American and an Iraqi Muslim and the different perspective of males versus females of individuals within the same culture. New approaches have been developed to integrate the acquisition of technical skills like language learning with those of intercultural competency.

This recognizes the fact that simply learning a language does not necessarily mean that an individual has achieved cultural understanding. For example, LITERALIA (Learning in Tandem to Encourage Reciprocal Autonomous Learning in Adults), an EU-funded program, was designed to "facilitate authentic communication between mature learners with partners of similar ages, backgrounds, experiences, and skills in four target languages: English, German, Italian, and Polish" online (Stickler, 2011, p.147).

Creating an online platform where learners could converse with native speakers was designed to facilitate the social components of language learning and break down barriers by creating greater understanding. However, a study of the interactions similarly confirmed the idea that intercultural interactions can exist on a variety of levels: the purely informational versus the desire to reflect on one's own.