Intercultural competencies of Dutch secondary school students without, before and after a short-term abroad immersion experience in a developing country

Abstract

Due to increasing modernization and globalization processes it is becoming increasingly important to educate youth as global citizens and to stimulate the development of their Intercultural Competencies (ICC). Cross Your Borders (CYB) is a foundation that acts on this by providing citizenship education programs at secondary schools about global inequalities and injustices and by providing nine-day-long immersion travels to developing countries, named Fairaway travels. To this point it was unknown if these travels stimulate the development of ICC. A questionnaire was set up based on two preexisting questionnaires to test the ICC of CYB partakers without travel intention (n = 11), with travel intention (n = 6) and with travel experience (n = 8). ANCOVA tests were run with travel experience as independent variable, different measurements of ICC as dependent variable and age as a covariate. This research showed that secondary school students who partook in a global citizenship education program with (the intention of going on) a short-term abroad immersion experience ascribe themselves more ICC than those who partook in such a project without having the intention to travel. Moreover, former and future short-term travelers judged their ICC to be equally developed, giving the impression that ICC form a predisposition of motivation to go on such a travel.