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>> I’m Kaprea Johnson, and you are listening to the Leadership Podcast, where we delve into the stories, strategies, and insights of experienced leaders who have successfully navigated the challenges and triumphs of their journey. Get ready to be inspired, equipped, and empowered to lead with confidence and purpose. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Faculty Affairs Leadership Podcast. Today, I have Sandhya, who will be talking to us about leading with Intercultural Citizenship: Beyond a Global Perspective in Higher Education. To start us off, Sandhya, do you mind sharing who you are, what you do at The Ohio State University, and a bit about your background?

>> Yes, thank you so much for inviting me today. My name is Sandhya Shanker, and I’m an education program senior specialist at the Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. My background is in world language education, and I’ve taught French for more than 20 years. And my other areas of expertise are in teacher training, language curriculum design, and outreach. I also teach the FRIT 3054 course titled “The 21st Century Intercultural Competence for Global Citizenship,” which is a general education course for undergraduate students here in OSU.

>> Fantastic. It sounds like you wear quite a few hats, and you’ve had a whole world of experience as well. Well, let’s jump right in. What is intercultural competence, and why is it important?

>> So, as a language educator for over three decades, I’ve had the opportunity to oversee and be involved in several academic and outreach programs. In some, I’ve had to work with teaching assistants, of several with undergraduate students, and many with K-12 students. I’d say that intercultural competence is a much-needed skill set for effectively interacting and working with people. And this is not just an informed opinion. Intercultural competence has been rated as one of the top 10 skills for working in the future. And it’s absolutely necessary for career development. So, this is the ability to put aside our expectations, have a clear understanding of the various contexts, and be able to see from different cultural perspectives. It is a lifelong process that consists of the development of four core competencies. So, these are attitudes like openness and curiosity that imply a willingness to move beyond one’s comfort zone, knowledge like cultural self-awareness. So, for example, when I teach my intercultural competence class, students are literally surprised when they are guided to explore their own cultural background that they’ve never before considered. We also need to have the skills to acquire and process this cultural knowledge, like listening, for instance. So, for example, how many times do we pretend we are listening, but we are actually preparing our response? And so that’s one. And we have other skills, like observing, interpreting, analyzing, evaluating. And finally, we need the necessary qualities. So, like adaptability, flexibility, perspective-taking, and tolerating ambiguity. So, again, in my French classes that I’ve taught, students come to realize that they should not get caught up in understanding every single word that I say, and that is perfectly normal to not understand everything, right? So, these are the four core skills that we need. And when we talk about cultural groups, with reference to intercultural competence, we don’t only refer to people from different countries, who speak different languages, and have different sociocultural practices. Our daily lives are filled with interactions with people from a variety of cultural groups. For example, as a parent, I interact with my kids. As a staff member, I interact with colleagues. As an instructor, I interact with students, and so on. So, we are having to interact with people from these cultural backgrounds of social classes, organizations, families, religions, etc. And we need to develop the necessary skills to navigate through them to achieve some of our common goals. And extending this to organizations and institutions, I believe that the most common problems are not technical or administrative deficiencies, though some of them are those, but communication failures or misunderstandings in negotiations, personality conflicts, poor leadership style, or bad teamwork. So, in other words, people interacting inadequately with each other. So by being interculturally competent, we learn to mindfully pay attention to the external situation, monitoring our own thoughts and feelings, and regulating the knowledge and the skills that we are using.

>> Thank you so much for breaking that down. I love how you highlighted not just what it is, but also why it matters. That’s truly important. And I was just thinking about that last piece of information around communication being a common issue. Yes.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. I am truly kind of interested in what are some common misconceptions you’ve observed when people talk about intercultural competence?

>> So in my conversations with people, I’ve heard of several misconceptions, and I’m going to highlight a few of them here today. One is that learning a world language is sufficient to become interculturally competent. Yes, learning a language is certainly very good. It’s a very good starting point to developing intercultural competence, but it is beneficial only if it includes explicit instruction of intercultural competence. So, a research study, in fact, conducted here in OSU a couple of years ago, showed that incorporating explicit intercultural training had a positive impact on intercultural competence development of students and contributed to cultural openness, curiosity, and perspective-taking. So without explicitly including intercultural competence, merely learning a language will not contribute significantly. And this is why intercultural competence is one of the language learning goals in our college. The other one is that intercultural competence is helpful -- it’s a helpful skill only when one is called to interact or work with people from other cultures or when you’re traveling to other countries. So, navigating cultural difference appropriately includes adapting our behaviors and communication styles to achieve our goals in that cultural context. And this includes any cultural context that we frequently come in contact with. For example, when we talk to someone from a different age group. So, for instance, in my intercultural competence class, students have interviewed senior citizens for their group projects, because they represent, you know, a special age group, and they wanted to learn more about them. It can also include people of a different gender, of a different socioeconomic background, etc. So, the aim here is to understand where they come from, so that rather than using the golden rule, which states that, you know, treat others as you want to be treated, we must practice the platinum rule, which is treat others as they want to be treated. So the other misconception is people believe that if we have traveled extensively, or we come from a bi or multi-racial background, or a minority group, or we have friends from different cultures, we automatically become interculturally competent. Yes, these experiences would certainly contribute to the development of intercultural competence skills, but they alone would not help us become interculturally competent. We need to develop the attitude, the knowledge, skills, and qualities, you know, those four core competencies that I mentioned. And that can only be achieved through training. In OSU, we do have trained professionals who can support this process. People sometimes misinterpret intercultural competence to mean that we must accept and adapt to practices, even if it means violating our core values or losing ourselves. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we feel necessary to adapt because we want to fit into the dominant cultural patterns, or out of desire for safety and belonging. However, this is not intercultural competence, but assimilation, which involves adapting because you feel you must. The last misconception that I like to highlight today is that one can develop perfect intercultural competence. I wish that was the case, but we cannot perfectly become interculturally competent. In life, we come across a variety of personal situations, traumas, social circumstances, which can greatly impact our intercultural competence development. We say that it’s a lifelong process because it requires a deep understanding of our own beliefs and behaviors. But you need the mindfulness to understand why you cannot apply those skills in a particular situation and why. So people need to be aware of when they’re having good intercultural competence days and bad intercultural competence days, and that’s a thing. And days when they feel judgmental and are not able to work with people from different cultural backgrounds. So, I feel these are some of the very common misconceptions related to intercultural competence.

>> Wow, I really appreciate you clearing up these common misconceptions, very enlightening. Let’s talk about the flip side. What are some ways that faculty can become interculturally competent?

>> This is a very interesting but very, you know, complicated, complex notion and question. So, I want to start by saying that all faculty members are leaders. They teach, empower, inspire, and educate. They contribute to the institution’s long-term interests and mission and work hard to implement programs that align with them. It is natural for them to feel that they are interculturally competent since they interface with a variety of people, like other faculty members, students, staff, administrators, etc., that come from all kinds of cultural backgrounds. But here’s an interesting finding. Whenever I, as an administrator of intercultural competence assessments, have administered them to faculty and educators, many are surprised to see their results. Many assume that because of the variety of their interactions, they will be placed at a very high level of intercultural competence. But the data shows that about 65% of people that take these assessments place somewhere between a monocultural and an intercultural mindset. And what does that mean? So think of monocultural and intercultural as two ends of a continuum. On one hand, a person in a monocultural mindset looks at cultural differences and similarities through the lens of their own cultural values and practices. And on the other hand, a person with an intercultural mindset makes sense of cultural differences and commonalities based on their own and the other person’s cultural values and practices. So, that is monocultural and intercultural. So coming back to that 65% of the people that I talked to you about that place in the middle, these people are essentially in the transitional phase from monocultural to intercultural, meaning that they are not achieving high levels of intercultural competence. This group tends to focus on commonalities and avoid engaging meaningfully with cultural differences. This is not a bad thing. You know, this is not a bad place to be. This is not a bad, you know, bad thing being in this transition phase. This is a place in which shared commonalities and universal values are highlighted. And this is where you hear things like, “Hey, we are all human. We all need to get along,” right? So, I once did an assessment of a person who tested into this transitional phase, and she said, “I’m so happy to be in this place, and I don’t want to change that. I love getting along with everyone and identifying with what we all share.” But the limitations associated with being in this mindset, that’s believing that people deep down are fairly similar or having the same basic human needs and operating according to certain universal values, preclude us from enjoying the richness of exploring differences. So, they may assume unconsciously or consciously that people from other cultural groups are basically like us, and then extend their own cultural values to other cultures. So, rich differences that can enhance our perspectives and worldviews are ignored and lost. So, while having this mindset can certainly help people get along and avoid conflicts, the exclusive pursuit of common ground can prevent deeper and more meaningful interactions and richer products and perspectives. So coming back to your original question about what can faculty do or continue to do in order to move further along that continuum and become -- have an intercultural mindset is that, so once a faculty member is ready to make a commitment to embark on this journey, the next step would be to take an intercultural assessment that will provide information about where an individual stands on the intercultural competence continuum. And this can happen through the Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, our center, that we do all of these assessments. So once individuals completed, there is a debriefing session to help them understand their scores, and they receive a customized plan, so they can continue working on their intercultural competence development. The CLC, our center, can also set up training sessions to guide development, and depending on an individual’s goals and the nature of their intercultural competence efforts, they can choose to periodically take this assessment tool time and again so that they’re able to continuously gauge their process or progress, I mean. So the bottom line is intercultural competence is a skill that must be developed and practiced. It’s not something that one acquires through experience or study alone.

>> This is really helpful, and I’m really appreciating these concrete next steps. I think that’s going to be really, really helpful for people who are interested, but also trying to figure out what’s their entry point. And so I just -- I think that point of take the assessment, see where you are, and, you know, you have a team that can support you in moving on to whatever else you want to do or whatever you want to accomplish. So I think that’s really, really helpful. Thank you for that. Why do you think higher education leaders need to integrate intercultural competence into their toolkit for effective institutional management?

>> So before I answer that question, I want to recap so far what we’ve talked about. So we talked about the notion of intercultural competence, some misconceptions, and why it’s important for faculty to develop it. So, we know that faculty are in leadership positions in one way or another. So everything that I’ve said so far is applicable to university leadership. Administrators primarily interface with faculty from different intellectual backgrounds, which guarantees a diversity of perspectives and worldviews. People in leadership positions are tasked with bridging differences and motivating engagement. So intercultural competence gives leadership the skills to process, understand, analyze, and then incorporate this rich plethora of knowledge and differing worldviews into the university structure and its educational priorities in order to create a complete and fulfilling educational environment. And in the face of the changing landscape of higher education today, university leaders need to adapt to dynamic institutional transformations, and adapting starts with the development of those core skills that I shared with you, the attitudes, the knowledge, the skills, and the qualities to not only become flexible in navigating these changes, but create an institution that thrives in it.

>> Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. It’s been incredibly insightful. But before we wrap up, is there any final advice or thoughts you would like to leave our listeners with?

>> I’d just like to say that embarking on your journey to develop your intercultural competence starts today. It’s never too late to begin that process.

>> What a wonderful way to close. Thank you so much, Sandhya, for your time and for sharing your expertise.

>> Thank you so much for having me over and for speaking with me.

>> The Leadership Podcast is produced by The Ohio State University’s Office of Faculty Affairs. For more information, visit us at faculty.osu.edu. I’m your host, Kaprea Johnson. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next time.

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