Foundational Intercultural Teaching Competency
Building Blocks for TAs
Teaching Assistants hold a uniquely valuable position within a teaching team in university classrooms. Situated between instructors and students, TAs are able to see classroom dynamics through both lenses because they themselves are both teachers and students. Additionally, their working environments are equally unique and varied—labs, tutorials, seminars, office hours, and even occasional guest lectures. Each space presents different expectations and interactions. TAs themselves represent a wide range of academic, social, and cultural backgrounds, both from within Canada and beyond. At the same time, today’s classrooms are more diverse than ever. The intersection of all these elements highlights the growing need for TAs to build an understanding of culturally responsive pedagogy and develop intercultural teaching competencies.
In this article, I share a narrative account of my recent engagement with TAs, where I introduced them to the Intercultural Teaching Competency (ITC) framework and supported them in exploring how it can meaningfully enhance their teaching practice.
At this year’s CLT’s TA Days event, I co-facilitated, with two other Educational Developers from the Centre for Learning and Teaching, a session on creating an inclusive classroom climate. We offered TAs in attendance some pedagogical tools they can use to make their teaching engaging, inclusive, and culturally responsive. As we were preparing for the session, I asked myself if ‘Intercultural Teaching Competency (ITC)’ would be a useful tool for TAs to use in carrying out their teaching responsibilities, and the answer was, “Perhaps.” My skepticism stemmed from the assumptions that, (a), TAs’ mandate of teaching and facilitation of learning does not have the scope to dig deeper into pedagogical tools; and (b), TAs, most of whom are graduate students, might not be ready to be exposed to theoretical frameworks this early on in their teaching careers. Nevertheless, the definition of ITC in Dimitrov et. al.’s (2014) article, “Developing the Intercultural Competence of Graduate Students” changed my mind:
“ITC is an instructor’s ability to interact with students in a way that supports the learning of students who are linguistically, culturally, socially, or in other ways different from the instructor or from each other”
Gloria Ladson-Billings (2014), the most well-known scholar in the field of culturally responsive pedagogies, in what she calls “the remix” of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), says that those involved in providing education in academic contexts must take on two key responsibilities: (i) provide high-quality education for students who have been historically marginalized by educational systems, and (ii) support mainstream students in developing the critical capacity to recognize and interrogate their own privilege and advantage. Ladson-Billings proposes that culturally responsive pedagogy offers a way to meet both of these objectives.
“Teachers undertaking culturally informed pedagogies take on the dual responsibility of external performance assessments as well as community- and student-driven learning”
Keeping these views in mind, I offered the following five building blocks as essential strategies to practice CRP/ITC at the TA Days session:
Be aware of your own biases & assumptions
Know your students
Respect and reinforce student culture
Involve classroom as a community
Adapt pedagogy as you reflect on course content, methodology and assessments
ITC has twenty competencies under three components: (i) Foundational Competencies (ii) Facilitation Competencies, and (iii) Curriculum Design Competencies. For the sake of this session and for TAs as my audience, I delved only into Foundational Competencies that I think would help TAs understand the building blocks that I presented earlier better.
Foundational Competencies
This set of competencies refers to an instructor’s own intercultural awareness and ability to model intercultural competencies for their students. Interculturally competent instructors are able to:
1. Develop an awareness of one’s own cultural and disciplinary identities and positionality in the classroom.
o Write and share: Write and share your teaching philosophy statement/positionality statement with your students explaining how your cultural and academic background, personal and lived experiences have shaped the way you teach.
2. Anticipate, value and accept differences among learners and ways of learning in order to create cultural safety and trust.
o Make space for this: Allow multiple ways to participate in labs and tutorials. Co-create participation guidelines with your students.
3. Model and encourage perspective taking in the classroom.
o Acknowledge and validate: When a student shares their perspective, acknowledge and show respect, and at the same time, invite students to offer their perspectives.
4. Model and encourage nonjudgmental approaches to discussing cultural, social, or other types of difference.
o Try doing this: Co-create 5-10 ground rules for respectful engagement. Ask students to add 1-2 rules for themselves, creating agency for their participation and engagement.
5. Model tolerance for ambiguity and help learners deal with the uncertainty involved in exploring difference.
o Try saying this: "This topic doesn’t have one clear answer, and that’s okay. Let’s explore different perspectives together and see what we can learn." Reflect on creating more of these language tools that are culturally responsive.
Author bio: Shazia Nawaz Awan is the Educational Developer for Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) and Global Engagement (GE) at Dalhousie University’s Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT). She works across faculties, departments, and units to create learning environments where diversity, equity, cultural responsiveness in teaching, and global learning are integral to teaching and learning. Her focus is on supporting educators to design and deliver courses that are not only globally relevant but also culturally responsive—valuing multiple ways of knowing, dismantling systemic barriers, and integrating underrepresented voices.
References
Baranova, L. N. (2019). Developing the intercultural competence of graduate students. In International Scientific Review of the Problems of Philosophy, Psychology and Pedagogy (pp. 27-32).
Dimitrov, N., Dawson, D. L., Olsen, K. C., & Meadows, K. N. (2014). Developing the intercultural competence of graduate students. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 44(3), 86-103
Faculty Focus. (2020). Five essential strategies to embrace culturally responsive teaching. Faculty Focus. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/equality-inclusion-and-diversity/five-essential-strategies-to-embrace-culturally-responsive-teaching/
Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: aka the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84.