The importance of teacher training in intercultural skills

Abstract

The contexts in which we are living are multicultural, but are we responsible citizens in this society? What do we need to know to live in multicultural contexts? We need Intercultural Skills, which means to have training that leads to the acquisition of skills and intercultural attitudes. Given this, we must ask if teachers are capable of training students in intercultural skills. We have conducted a research aimed at knowing if the teachers consider themselves crossculturally competent. The research is qualitative and uses a questionnaire and an in-depth interview to collect data. We have collected information from 124 teachers. The conclusions indicate that teachers believe themselves to be interculturally competent and think they use techniques to implement intercultural education, but they do not show neither sufficient attitudes nor techniques to develop students’ intercultural skills.