Cultural Intelligence 101

  

Intercultural learning and competency is a massive topic, and as a faculty member trying to teach a course in your particular discipline, you can't be expected to also be an expert intercultural trainer. However, as it is a major piece of the Virtual Exchange model, you do need to understand the basic framework so that you can tailor your activities and assignments appropriately. There are many approaches to intercultural learning and competency development. You'll be able to incorporate intercultural learning in many different ways depending on the nature of the topic of your course, but as an example, let's talk about one of the popular methods of understanding intercultural competency today: Cultural Intelligence (CQ).

Cultural intelligence or cultural quotient (CQ) is a term used in business, education, government and academic research. Cultural intelligence can be understood as the capability to relate and work effectively across cultures. CQ is broken down into four "capabilities" - skill areas which can be individually developed and which provide an easy-to-understand approach to intercultural learning.

These four capabilities are:

1. CQ Drive - a person's interest and confidence in functioning effectively in culturally diverse settings.
2. CQ Knowledge - a person's knowledge about how cultures are similar and how cultures are different.
3. CQ Strategy - how a person makes sense of culturally diverse experiences.
4. CQ Action - a person's capability to adapt verbal and nonverbal behavior to make it appropriate to diverse cultures. 
   

 

Watch this video for a clear, concise intro to Cultural Intelligence (CQ):

The CQ capabilities can also be described and modeled in the way shown below:

  

With the framework of CQ understood, individual activities can be tailored to address each of the four capabilities one at a time. For example, a set of discussion prompts to draw out cultural differences around common themes like family or career can help students to develop their CQ Knowledge. Each of these capabilities has subcategories which allow for further tailoring of activities. 

As noted above, there are a wide variety of approaches to intercultural competency, and we will work with you to identify what approach makes sense given your instructional context. The point here is that as an instructor, you also need to understand a bit about how to facilitate activities and approach these concepts as a part of the COIL model.

Now that you have had a short primer on intercultural competency and the Cultural Intelligence (CQ) approach, let's talk briefly about how you can start brainstorming the ways in which you will develop activities around this topic which are complementary to the overall subject of the course. Click "Next" to continue.