Cultural Competence in South African Teachers

Abstract

The current study investigated cultural competence in South African teachers by first examining the dimensions and sub-dimensions associated with cultural intelligence in teachers, and secondly, assessing the factors that impact cultural competence. The study also assessed the feasibility of using the adapted version of the E-CQS (Da Silva, 2015) as an accurate measure of cultural intelligence in the South African population. Given the limited amount of research in this area, the insights provided by this study help to bridge this gap in knowledge and further the goal of cultural inclusivity and transformation in education. The study hypothesized that i) working within a culturally diverse classroom setting would increase overall cultural intelligence, more specifically both cognitive and metacognitive cultural intelligence, ii) interaction with diverse students, teaching experience, international travel, language ability and training in cultural sensitivity would each contribute towards increased cultural competence, iii) increased teaching experience would be correlated with higher cultural competence, whilst controlling for international travel, and lastly iv) similar findings would be found between both the CQS (Ang et al., 2007) and the adapted version of the E-CQS developed for use in the South African population (Da Silva, 2015). Participants included teachers recruited from various schools within South Africa. Data was collected using self-report questionnaires, administered directly to each teacher using a Google Form format. Teachers were found to have an above average score of cultural intelligence, with the highest dimensions being that of motivational and metacognitive cultural intelligence and the lowest being cognitive cultural intelligence. Training in cultural sensitivity, cultural competence and/or culturally relevant teaching strategies were identified as having a significant effect on overall cultural intelligence, more specifically cognitive and behavioural cultural intelligence. Further, teachers who had more teaching experience were also more likely to have higher CQ. Lastly, results of the study validated the use of the adapted version of the E-CQS for the South African population.