What does intercultural mean?

 

Being intercultural is a key to living a meaningful life in the current and future world.

Being intercultural is about knowing how human diversity affects one’s identity development, work competence, and life itself. Diversity is all around us. It encompasses both local and global diversity.

Why does the Helix model work?

Your school is enrolling new students and families, whose backgrounds and cultures are not the same as yours; your schools are rapidly becoming multicultural and your teachers are feeling unequipped. You may feel your schools and teachers have done enough diversity training; policy and procedures are in place to deal with racism but you wonder if this is enough—you know that there needs to be more steps to transforming the school environment into an intercultural one.

A school is a community—a community which consists of an impact wide variety of stakeholders. Administrators, teachers, staff, students, families, and community members work together to create a school.

A school is a multicultural community.

Many schools have done much work towards diversity and racism awareness. We have all heard the message: Let’s not discriminate. Let’s be more sensitive. The questions then become: now what? Where do we go from here? Our approach is to be that next step which is to:

  • Instill intercultural knowledge and curiosity for experience,

  • Help identify opportunities for intercultural learning

  • Facilitate reflective dialogue to transfer real-life experience into intercultural capacity building

Building intercultural capacity will help your multicultural school community transform itself, from one that struggles to “deal with” cultural problems to one that flourishes with cultural richness. We can help achieve your goals of:

  • Developing strong leaders in your school, who can lead multicultural school community with intercultural competence;

  • Advancing teacher and staff effectiveness of educating students who come from complex and diverse backgrounds; and

  • Creating inclusive school environment, which invites and collaborates with all families and community members to support student learning.

Our aim is to support educational and community leadership by facilitating professional development processes towards intercultural capacity.

For our intercultural training, coaching, and consultation, we begin by listening to your needs and concerns as well as conduct necessary assessments. 

We utilize all data, including statistical data that is objective and reliable, to tailor-make learning processes that best fit your school’s needs.