Intercultural Competence in the Education Process

Abstract

The kind of this paper offers a synthesis about the wide range of psychological variables which influence how a person adapts when they are in a new or unfamiliar cultural context. This study takes as its starting points the educational value of the intercultural experience and the need to study this experience from interdisciplinary and plural focuses that enrich the light shed by different sciences and knowledge in their comprehension, description and explanation. The objectives of this study are as follows: 1) to describe and explain some of the important psychological variables which are influential in the exposure to new or unfamiliar cultural contexts from the perspective of current transcultural psychology; 2) to focus on intercultural competence as a current relevant dimension in the educational process of each person, and specifically in how international university students who are temporary residents of another country manage cultural transition; and 3) to situate intercultural competence in the process of the construction of cultural identities, promoting relationships with higher levels of equality and solidarity between different actors, peoples and cultures. The study of intercultural competence will be applied to the educational process which affects 10% of international university students, with contributions from transcultural psychology. Transcultural psychology offers today psychological tools and a perspective that are indispensable to understand, describe and explain better intercultural competence in the 21st century.