Intercultural Sensitivity and Cultural Competence: Perceptions from Pre-Service Teachers Who Completed a Technology-Mediated Community Exploration Project

Abstract

Teachers enter the classroom with different cultural backgrounds and experiences than their students. The course subject content, curriculum, instructional pedagogy, and teacher interactions can either support or impede student learning and development. A qualitative research design and phenomenographic methodology was used to explore the perceptions of Fifty-seven graduate level pre-service teacher preparation students who completed a technology-mediated community exploration project. Bennett's (1986, 2017) Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) provided the conceptual foundation for the study. The purpose of the study was to use a phenomenographic methodology to explore pre-service teacher preparation students' perceptions about the influence of culture on instruction, interpersonal interaction, and learning within a culturally diverse classroom environment. Emergent perceptual categories of description identified are organized and discussed in the context of the conceptual framework of Bennett's (2017) ethno-centric and ethno-relative stages of increasing sensitivity to cultural differences. Five categories of description included: (a) failure to recognize the relevance of culturally different others; (b) recognizing biased and stereotyped views of other cultures; (c) minimizing cultural differences; (f) acceptance of cultural differences; and (e) adaptation to cultural differences.