Fostering Intercultural Competence in Teacher Education: A Tri-National Co construction Dialogue Experience

This article analyzes, through an interpretive case study, the usefulness of an experiential learning strategy intercultural co-construction dialogues—to help student teachers from three countries improve their IC competencies. The study was framed into an interpretative case study. The fifteen participants engaged in dialogical activities over a four-month period using digital telecollaboration technologies and generated written and oral data that were coded in a collaborative manner. The analysis was based on Byram’s (2021) intercultural communicative competence (ICC) model. The study measured the participating students’ engagement primarily in two components of the ICC: intercultural attitudes and critical cultural awareness. The discussion highlights students’ growth in key elements of critical cultural awareness such as suspension of judgment, ethnorelative perspectives, and glocal sensibilities. It is concluded that the intercultural co-construction dialogue strategy fostered the appreciation of global and local cultural knowledge and promoted critical awareness of social settings, highlighting the need for intercultural models in teacher education to support culturally sustainable pedagogies.