Browsing by Subject "Interkulttuurisuus"

In recent years we have witnessed an increase of globalization and immigration all over the world, hence the rise of a new popular concept – multiculturalism. Living in a multicultural society requires citizens to have skills and knowledge such as the ability to act naturally in intercultural encounters. For some time now intercultural competence has been a vital concept in the field of communication, diplomacy and business and lately it has become stable also in the field of education. The concept simply refers to an ability to think and act in an appropriate and effective way in intercultural encounters. The field of multiculturalism is however polysemous which highly calls for consensus. In this study one´s are exploring teacher´s intercultural skills and competence in the field of education. The aim of this study is to introduce how teacher´s intercultural competence has been defined in the previous studies and what kind of dimensions the concept incorporates. The main object in this study is to describe the concept of teacher´s intercultural competence in the field of education in the light of previous studies. The type of my research was a literature review. The data of this research was eight international articles which definitions of teacher’s intercultural competence I compared and classified. Hence the research has also phenomenographical features in a sense that I brought together different researchers’ perceptions of teacher’s intercultural competence and I examined what similarities and differences these definitions had. Analyctical method in this research was pretty much as generally used in phenomenographical studies where the analysis of review data lead to the creation of various categories. The results indicate that the concept of teacher’s intercultural competence does not have settled definition in the research field. Different researchers define the term in different ways; some of the researchers define the term more broadly and leave unmentioned something that some other definitions bring up. In my research I have divided teacher´s intercultural competence into various categories which allows to approach the concept of intercultural competence through various dimensions. Based on the analysis, the central elements of the teacher’s intercultural competence were clarified which helps understanding the term and relating its different definitions in the field of education.