CIICPD 2023

service providers and their customers, Maurizio Pompella, Antonio Fasano and Mario De Martino from the University of Siena (see Chapter 4) examine the current situation of CI management in academic context and the financial sector. Drawing upon Bott and Tourish’s (2016) framework for interpreting observations in organisational practice, the scholars conducted a survey between their students of banking and financial intermediaries’ workers, emphasising the importance of creating a conflict preventive environment in wider contexts with the aim of helping set standards for a more inclusive education. Arguing that diversity is more dominant in companies than in schools, the authors placed an emphasis on creating stable conditions for the occurrence of CIs encompassing wider social issues and governance. Their study shows that to reduce the incidence of undesired events, a reactive approach to CIs as post-crisis management must go hand in hand with proactive steps starting with adjusting the educational systems to the multicultural reality. Intercultural training in language education has a long history and a stable position in Finland. The Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture defines effective, international and globally competitive HEIs with culturally sensitive content of language education as their priority and, correspondingly, defines the standards for language teaching. Didactic approaches for multicultural language teaching practice are defined in the Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches (FREPA), providing potential teaching materials to promote intercultural competences in their students. Since the upper secondary level, students compile their language profile accentuating competence development in working with diversity, cultural differences or misunderstandings. Research on CIs, however, seems absent in intercultural studies in Finland, and the notion of CIs unknown to the teachers. Based on these observations, Riikka Ala Sankila, Anne Vuokila from Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences (see Chapter 5) conducted a survey among teachers from a variety of schools in the western part of Finland with the aim of finding out how language teachers approach situations that qualify as CIs in their language teaching practice, i.e. how they pedagogically deal with events of varied degree of emotional intensity caused by cultures in contact. Finding out a general insufficiency of didactic tools and materials available to the teachers to implement pluralistic approaches to their classrooms, and with reference to the works of Reinman (2013) and Tran et al. (2019), the authors sought to introduce the concept of CIs as an efficient approach to incorporate intercultural communication themes into language education on the way to help the young develop a strong set of skills for the highly competitive globally interconnected job market. All five of the above mentioned CIICPD project partner teams exerted mutual effort to expand the cross-border cooperation on diversity management and intercultural communication research. Using selected samples of CIs, the participating scholarly teams examined the wide range of possible interpretations across the socio-cultural reality of each prospective country in two subsequent joint studies, one using reflections from interviews with experts from varied business settings (Gaisch et al., 2021) and one with HE students from each partners’ institutions (Sieglová et al., 2022). Thematic analyses used to analyse the collected data showed not only the introspection of the participants’ train of thought, i.e. of both experts’ and students’, but also their ability to find common

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