VIEWS AND WORKSHOPS OF A MASTER'S CLASS IN INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE: MILL'S MODEL OF INTERCULTURAL ACTION (original) (raw)

This paper is the result of a participative process in which the students of the Master's Degree " Didactique des Langues " (foreign language didactics) at Université du Maine (Le Mans, France) explored through whole-class activities the field of intercultural dialog and intercultural competence teaching. Our approach to intercultural teaching offers a new point of view: it places intercultural competence in a wider context. We consider it to be beyond encounter and dialog, beyond professional skills, and instead an intercultural action: living, accepting and creating together. As Byram (2008) emphasizes, the development of intercultural competence has to lead to a critical cultural awareness of oneself as a citizen. My thesis is that teachers and students who work with their own cultural biography, who keep the social dimension in their minds, can through intercultural competence cause changes in society. We will try to prove that a culture of a given society does not consist, as Descombes states, of whatever one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members (Descombes, 1995), Rather, this acceptable manner takes on a new perspective in language teaching. Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but through the construction of habits, viewpoints, and beliefs from which people construct strategies of action. Mill (1990) suggests that it is important when different ways of living exist, just as it is useful when different opinions are expressed, that different characters should be allowed enough latitude, provided that they do not harm one another.