Intercultural Competence: an Evaluation of Diaries from a Comenius 2.1 Project

Today¿s flow of information and people, across country-borders, has made the world face new challenges. Societies are in need of new expertise and competence to handle these challenges. Focusing on the education sector, teachers need new competence to tackle the multicultural class. This paper is an evaluation of diaries written by teacher students from Poland, the Czech Republic, France and Germany, who attended a course in September 2005 within a Comenius 2.1 project aiming to develop modules to help increase the intercultural competence among teacher students. These modules were tested out at this course. The course consisted of combining theory with practical activities. The objective of the evaluation is to find out if the course reached its desired effect: Did the teacher students develop intercultural competence? To find this out, the participants¿ diaries have been interpreted and linked up to relevant literature. The literature review circles around the terms intercultural competence, difference, identity, strangeness and gender, which are important terms for the course and the project.