In the age of globalization and super-diversity, our daily lives depend more and more on multiple interconnections across borders. Almost every country is involved in migration, which refers to multiple, circular, transnational movements across geographical spaces (Guo, 2015). As a result, many countries are becoming increasingly ethnoculturally diverse. Recognizing these global processes of migration and transnational flow opens space for reconstructing the concept of intercultural competence. The evolution in intercultural competence research corresponds to the importance of developing skills and knowledge in order to behave and interact competently in a diverse society and workforce. For the past decade intercultural competence has revolved around different communication models (Bennett, 2008; Chen & An, 2009; Deardorff, 2006; Gudykunst, 2005; Martin & Nakayama, 2015), recipes for successful communication, and inventories (Hammer, Bennet, & Wiseman, 2003) for assessing intercultural competence. Unfortunately, there is very little research exploring the experiences of transcultural learning and its impact on communication, interaction for organizational and community inclusion.

I propose using transcultural competence as transformative learning that will focus on examining and promoting paths for successful communication, interaction, and active participation in the global transnational environment. Transcultural competence as a learning activity can facilitate an individual’s economic, sociocultural, and political adaptation to his/her host society for a vital and purposeful life for the society. Furthermore, its goal is to promote voluntary pluralism, global citizenship, and belonging by integrating different identities that relate to more than one ethnicity and culture.

It is therefore the purpose of this study to investigate how adults acquire transcultural competence through participation in different learning activities and how transcultural learning empowers personal growth and transforms an individual’s perspectives. The discussion that follows is organized into four parts. First, it reviews a body of literature that informs this study. Next, it discusses the research design and data collection. Then, it presents the research findings, to be followed by more substantial discussions. Finally, I propose a model for developing competent and effective interaction among members of our very diverse society.

2 Review of Literature

This study is critically informed by a collage of literature relating to holistic concept of culture, transculturalism, and transformative learning. Conceptualizing culture, transcultural competence, and transformative learning provides information about their dialectic and dynamics, as well as their multidimensionality in analyzing the process of becoming transculturally competent.

Culture is a lens through which we communicate, interact, learn individually, and position ourselves in sociocultural context; therefore, first, I will outline the perspectives of Bennett (2009), Geertz (1973), and Trice & Beyer (1993), which interpret culture as a context and a system of meaning and are fundamental in developing cultural competence. Understanding culture as a context in which perception and behavior occur, Bennett (2009) distinguishes between objective or “big-C” Culture and “little-c” subjective culture. Learning about Culture includes institutional, political, and historical circumstances that emerge from and are maintained by a group of interacting people. Subjective culture is the worldview of people who interact in a specific context: According to Bennett, a cultural worldview does not prescribe or determine the behavior of individuals who share the culture; rather, it constitutes the context in which perception and behavior occur.

In his eminent work, Geertz (1973) seeks the symbolic mediation of meaning embodied in ideas, attitudes, judgments, or beliefs. Geertz’s interpretive holistic approach defines culture as “a pattern of meanings, a system of conceptions” (Geertz, 1973, p. 144), a “web of significance” (p. 5), a set, a vast geometry, a cosmos, a stratified hierarchy, a structure, and a frame. Similarly, a pluralistic view of culture and of an individual as a product of multiple cultural realities is further developed by Trice & Beyer (1993). They describe cultures as collective, emotional, historical, symbolic, dynamic, and fuzzy. People’s allegiance to their beliefs, values, and cultural practices develops primarily from their emotional needs (Trice & Beyer, 1993). Accordingly, members of a culture rarely question their core beliefs and values, but if they do, their reaction is emotional. Cultures are historically based because they cannot be divorced from their histories and they do not arise overnight. The dynamics of culture incorporate contradictions, ambiguities, paradoxes that result from interaction and multiple subcultures.

The commonality between these scholars is their symbolic interpretation of culture. They see culture as a set of socially established symbols—a source of information through shared meaning, produced, perceived, and interpreted by members of a culture. This fabric of meaning guides individuals’ actions and behaviors, and creates social structure (Geertz, 1973), systems of shared meaning and symbols (Trice & Beyer, 1993), and the context in which behavior occurs (Bennett, 2009).

Secondly, the perspective of transculturalism provides the theoretical framework for this study. As a mode of being and learning where humans interact with each other in a culturally diverse environment, transculturalism offers new experience and intellectual generosity, a new way of seeing the world and understanding ourselves where ethics is at the crossroad of possibilities in human relations (Bakhtin, 1981; Epstein, 1999, 2009, 2012). The process of transculturation sees cultures as fluid, and places them in constant interaction with other cultures (Zhang & Guo, 2015). Transculturation implies diffusion of multiple cultural identities as individuals cross the borders of various cultures and adopt them (Epstein, 2009). As such, transculture is the freedom of every person to live on the border of one’s inborn culture or beyond it, adding another culture, moving to the transcendental realm that relates to all existing cultures, as they relate to nature (Epstein, 2009). Thus, transculturalism builds new configurations in the zone of interference that challenges the established and solidified identities; it is the next stage of ongoing human quest for freedom from determination, not abolishing cultural roots, but radically enriches cultural bodies.

Even the meaning of the prefix trans- brings the notion of dynamics, moving through space across the border (Kraidy, 2005) and expanding the limits beyond a single identity, switching between cultures and languages as a mode of being, having a sense of continuum, discourse, and transformation (Berry & Epstein, 1999; Epstein, 2012). In this sense, transculturalism includes stabilizing or destabilizing effects, social conjunctions, historical conditions, and integration or disintegration of groups, cultures, and power. As an ideological perspective, transculturalism calls for cooperation, interaction, and exchange between communities and thus flexibility and an open mind on the part of individuals (Wilson, 2012). Transculturalism also expands the interdisciplinary field of study as new cultural and ethnic boundaries have emerged in our era of globalization, fostering multiple cultural interactions, attitudes, meaning making, and power formations (Brooks, 2007; Cuccioletta, 2001/2002; Kraidy, 2005; Lewis, 2002).

Slimbach (2005) proposes a map for transcultural development, including six broad categories: perspective consciousness, ethnographic skills, global awareness, world learning, foreign language proficiency, and affective development. The first proposition in Slimbach’s map is recognizing universal human nature and potential as a prime identity for transcultural development. From this fundamental egalitarian acknowledgment, individuals start to discover and expand the range of alternative values, visions, and ways that others make sense of the world. Then the learners can see themselves and be able to move in and out of daily contexts where nationalities, gender, classes, languages, races, religions, and ideologies coexist in our era of intense economic, political, and cultural change. Knowledge and awareness of one’s own cultural reactions, behavior, language, and that of the host society are needed competencies to succeed in a transcultural journey. This transcultural journey is a journey across multiple cultural spaces that are immersed, immediate and emotional (Slimbach, 2005) where learners bring knowledge from their own cultures to the process of learning and develop relationships and interactions across cultures.

The third body of literature that informs this study is research on transformative learning. Built on the foundational concepts of constructivist assumptions, humanism, and critical social theory, (Mezirow, 2000, p. 75) defined transformative learning as a process “by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference … to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action”. In Mezirow’s view, the elements of critical reflection and dialog lead to a transformed frame of reference resulting in individual and social change. Frames of reference are structures of assumptions and expectations that frame an individual’s tacit points of view and influence their thinking, beliefs, and actions. It is the revision of frame of reference in concerns with reflection on experience that is addressed by the theory of perspective transformation. A perspective transformation leads to a more fully developed frame of reference that often occurs either through series of cumulative transformed meaning schemes or as a result of an acute personal or social crisis (Mezirow, 1996). Learning occurs in one of four ways by elaborating existing meaning schemes, learning new meaning schemes, transforming meaning schemes, and transforming meaning perspectives (Mezirow, 2009).

Transformative process is indeed a complex discourse in which individuals reconstruct basic assumptions and expectations that frame their thinking, feeling, and acting. They develop concepts of the world and their selves based on perceptions that are contingent on various perspectives and interpretation. Meaning is seen not only as a cognitive event, but also as a social construct that is produced and changed in social interactions (Mezirow et al., 2009). The common ground between transculturalism and transformative learning is the idea of continuum: an on-going process of thinking, reflecting, and acting. This is the interconnection of knowledge, attitudes, and skills with responsible and liberatory action to make a difference in the world – to create a more socially just, equitable, inclusive, and peaceful world. A world, where each person takes multiple and varied actions individually and collectively. An action informed by inquiry, framing, positionality, dialog, and reflection that can be the catalyst for social justice, transformation, and inclusion. Transcultural learning as perspective transformation allows individuals located at the crossroads of cultures to switch between cultures as a mode of being in the world, as a quest for inclusion while considering common values, oppositions, tensions, and power in interactions (Jurkova & Guo, 2018).

3 Research Design and Data Collection

To reiterate, this study examines the process of acquiring transcultural competence by adult learners and how transcultural skills and knowledge empower personal growth and transform their perspectives. Following Merriam (2014), the study employed qualitative research design, interpretive and constructive, comprised of semi-structured in-depth interviews as a primary method, focus groups, unstructured observation, and document analysis as secondary methods. The data collected through 21 face-to-face interviews with 11 Canadian-born and 10 immigrants – all adults, subsequently formed the foundational basis for the overall findings. Although the study includes both Canadian-born and immigrant participants, it was not designed to compare those two groups. Rather, the inclusion of participants from these two groups was necessary to broadly understand how different demographic characteristics (e.g., ethnic background, age, education) impact and distinguish the process of transcultural learning. Defining transcultural learning as a continuing learning process was the reason for selecting individuals who participated in one or more learning activities. This was an opportunity for participants to describe how different learning activities have impacted their transcultural competence.

Qualitative interviews were the primary method for data collection in this research because they offered the potential to capture a person’s perspective of an event or experience (Marshall & Rossman, 2011). They allowed us to investigate in critical ways respondents’ comprehensions of their cultural experience and beliefs, the process of developing transcultural competence from their point of view. Particularly, in transformative learning, interviews can focus on the learner’s story and experience to gain insight into the processes or outcomes of the learning, as well as to track learners’ perspective changes or developmental progression over time (Cranton & Hoggan, 2012). Thus, interviews served as a venue for understanding individual experience, transcultural skills, and perspective change. The interview questions were divided into several categories in relation to the research questions. The knowledge questions elicited participants’ understanding about transcultural knowledge and skills that they have developed, the most beneficial ways of learning, and the resources that they have used to build their understanding. The second set of questions encouraged participants to share their experiences in acquiring transcultural learning: What motivated them to engage in these learning activities, and how had their perspectives changed and their lives been impacted?

Additionally, data collected from two focus groups informed about direct learners’ opinions of participating and interacting in an event related to the issue of investigation: How transcultural learning enhanced personal transcultural development? The focus groups were productive for generating knowledge through dialog and contributed to achieving synergy in data collection. The observation provided information about how participants interacted during their learning activities and the document analysis shed light on the purpose, value, and the outcome of the diversity training program in which they participated.

The concept of crystallization is more relevant to this qualitative inquiry and to the research phenomenon. With multidimensionality of approaches, correlations, methods of data collection, and analysis, crystallization provides deeper understanding of the topic (Ellingson, 2009; Richardson, 2000). Complexity and continuum, as principles of crystallization, are consistent with the distinctive characteristics of transculturality in this discourse. The continuum is achieved through blended approaches for meaning-making and representation. The complexity of the research embodied description and interpretation of participants’ understanding, knowledge, and learning process construction.

4 Report of Findings

The research findings reveal a holistic process that involves the cognitive, affective, and social dimensions through which individuals develop transcultural competence. Examining and reflecting on their individual experiences, participants outlined intrinsic and extrinsic factors that motivated them for developing transcultural qualities in relation to the need of personal growth, family relationship, and adaptation to an increasingly ethno-culturally diverse society. Participants also constructed transcultural competence as a multidimensional transformative process that challenges their taken-for-granted frames of references and expanding the horizons of their world views.

4.1 Cognitive Dimension

Connecting transculturalism with participants’ experience of learning offers a lifelong path for humanity’s progress and community inclusion. Overall, in this discussion the participants’ perspectives about the phenomenon of the study support the literature. Transculturality is constructed as a sum of qualities relating to being a transcultural individual, including an ability to see the world in a way that relates to others with limited prejudicial thinking, to transcend one’s own culture to understand and see the merits of another culture, and to bring people of different backgrounds together. Participants’ open-mindedness and receptiveness to the other are due to their capacity to share an experience of life that brings individuals together, being emotionally supportive, curious to learn and explore, to listen and interact. Transculturation, then, is designated as a holistic process of learning and exchange, from which a new reality emerges, transformed, and complex. Taking a transcultural journey, individuals transform themselves and become agents of change in their own environment. Participants emphasized variables, including self-awareness, authenticity, communication, building rapport, trust and empathy, collaboration, and empowerment. Enriched with transcultural knowledge, participants moved beyond their own cultural socialization, expanded their cultural horizons, and, furthermore, contributed their knowledge for greater effectiveness and community inclusion.

The research findings demonstrate that developing transcultural competence is a holistic, multidimensional process that requires the development of cognitive knowledge together with an ability for emotional attachment and support, interaction and engagement in real cultural interactions. The multiple transcultural dimensions are outlined in Table 1 according to three categories—cognitive, affective, and social. For example, the cognitive dimension comprises of open-mindedness, knowledge about the world, proficiency in more than just the language of host society, awareness, and reflectivity. This dimension also encompasses the importance of analytical skills and the ability to apply different cultural perspectives in a transcultural context. The affective dimension relates to humility, empathy, sensitivity, and freedom in constructing and choosing multiple identities without opposing each other. The social dimension refers to real cultural exposure, communicating and interacting flexibly and comfortably in different cultural settings, maintaining positive relationships and act as agents of change.

In the holistic process of transcultural learning, learners invite their previous and current knowledge, individual observations, experiences, feelings and interaction to the process of cultivating relationships across cultures, developing skills and awareness, social sensitivity, and humility. Participants immigrants and native-born, discovered different paths and opportunities for transcultural learning that transformed them. In this sense, differences between the two groups do not contradict them, neither impact negatively the learning process, societal engagement and belonging. Rather, this study acknowledges transcultural competence as vital for all members of our society, without differentiating between them based on ethnicity, race, religion, and social privilege or disadvantage.

Connecting these findings with transcultural theories led to the construction of a holistic learning model (Figure 1) that involves inquiry, framing, positionality and progressing to dialog, reflection, and competent action. Moreover, I argue that the common ground between transcultural learning and lifelong learning is the idea of continuum, an ongoing holistic process of thinking, reflecting and acting, that includes cognitive, emotional, and social aspects of learning.

   

Figure 1:

Transcultural model for personal development and social impact.

   

Through interconnection of knowledge, attitudes, and skills, with responsible and liberatory action the transcultural learning model can create a more socially just, equitable, and inclusive world. In this path, inquiry is a desire and willingness to know, to ask, to find out, and to learn. The practice of inquiry leads us to engagement with others. In transculturalism, inquiry is exploring universal and unique human nature, experiences, and potential, discovering the ways that others make sense of the world (Slimbach, 2005). Likewise, this is the notion of experience in transformative learning—prior learners’ experiences and what they learn about themselves and the world when they participate in learning activities. Whereas participants engage in such activities and interact, sharing their experiences also make them aware of the frame of reference from which they see the world. Framing is a knowledge construction across cultural dimensions, time, and space, which fosters transformation in learning. Consequently, in transculturalism, framing is distancing from one culture in order to understand it and transcend its boundaries.

Positionality constitutes the next standpoint in transcultural learning – a place from which to view and make sense of the world around us. It assumes that socially constructed hierarchies based on race, class, gender, nationality, religion, age, and physical abilities, among others, position us socially, geographically, politically, symbolically, and materially in relation to each other, to structures and configurations of power. Differences in power and positionality are evident when one engages in a dialog.

The process of dialog invites participants to imagine, experience, and engage creatively with points of view, ways of thinking, being, doing, and beliefs. For Bakhtin (1981) and Epstein (2012), dialog is a path for cognition of human being, a self-awareness, and discovery of others. Dialog becomes the medium for critical reflection to be put into action where experience is reflected on, assumptions and beliefs are questioned, and habits of mind are ultimately transformed. Then, an action informed by inquiry, framing, positionality, dialog, and reflection can be the catalyst for social justice, transformation, and inclusion.

The transcultural path is multidimensional, complex, and dynamic. The stages are non-linear, they may overlap, may create contradictions, and repeat during this transcultural transformative journey of teaching and learning. Additionally, each of those critical ingredients corresponds to the cognitive, affective, and social dimensions of learning. There is a common ground between transformative learning and transcultural theories in terms of how to view the process of developing transcultural competence: a positive and constructive deconstruction, involving ongoing change and action in sociocultural surroundings, reaching new horizons of knowledge and implementation. As such, transcultural learning model reflects the cultural dynamics of the society, transnational movements, local and global changes.

6 Conclusions and Implications

The transformative model of developing transcultural competence aligns with the new realities and demands of a rapidly diversifying and transnational world characterized by new mobility patterns, interconnectedness, and post-ethnicity (Fleras, 2019). Furthermore, the transcultural notion of understanding cultures as self-differentiated but mutually involved, without isolating them from each other corresponds to the humanistic interferential model in the study of cultures proposed by Bakhtin (1981), Berry & Epstein (1999), and Epstein (2012). Integrating different identities and connecting the global with the local, transculturalism is a learning commitment that facilitates communication, interaction, and socio-cultural adaptation in a dynamic society recognizing different worldviews. This study offers a theoretical perspective and a vision that aim at dissolving cultural and ethnic binaries and the duality of opposing local to global, national to international, particular to universal, and mainstream to newcomers, us to them. As such, it could apply to communications studies and education where competent educators and learners will be able to engage in dialog and implement diverse forms of learning, communicating, and interacting, while building trust and creating safe space for participants.

This study also sheds new light on individual development and organizational growth. Implementing the model for transcultural competence in the workplace will stimulate better usage of talents and will facilitate sociocultural adaptation and foster an inclusive society. A transcultural worldview will help international businesses to bridge gaps between local norms, standards, perceptions, and working habits. Furthermore, human resource departments can establish competent hiring practices for recruiting, training, and retaining international talents. Transculturally competent workers and leaders with cognitive, affective, and social knowledge will be more adaptable and flexible on local and global stage, better prepared to face technological progress in all spheres.