Describe your experience in the situation, with an emphasis on how you were acting in an appropriate way according to your own culture.

DIRECTIONS:
OPTION 1: INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE: A CRITICAL INCIDENT
Recall a situation where there was a cultural misunderstanding (e.g., disagreement or argument) between you and a person from another culture. (Notice! If need be, you could view culture in the broader sense– another gender, profession, region etc.). Briefly describe the general context (e.g., is
the person your friend, your spouse, a stranger, etc., and the general topic of the misunderstanding).

A) Describe your experience in the situation, with an emphasis on how you were acting in an appropriate way according to your own culture. Provide as much detail as needed to clearly present the event.

B) Describe the same disagreement from the other person’s perspective (using “I” to represent that person’s thoughts), with an emphasis on how that person would have been acting appropriately according to his/her culture. That is, pretend you are the other person completing part A).

C) Discuss critically, then, some of the ways in which the two of you were perceiving things differently, thus giving you a different experience of the event? At what position of intercultural sensitivity were you operating? (Use Milton Bennett’s model “Development of Intercultural Sensitivity” as a guideline for your analysis.) How did cultural differences contribute to the misunderstanding?

D) Next, discuss what could have been done differently to have avoided or decreased the level of misunderstanding. What new meaning perspectives or lessons can be drawn from that one experience and your reflection on the events that you can use in future interactions?

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