Cultural Humility in Education and Work: A Valuable Approach for Teachers, Learners and Professionals

Abstract

The continuing internationalisation of universities in the twenty-first century, in terms of both their curricula and virtual and physical expansion, coupled with increasingly globalised economies, places the intercultural nature of learning, teaching and professional practice in sharp focus. While there is a significant body of literature attributed to an understanding of intercultural skills and their use in educational contexts, another area of cultural knowledge has not been discussed or examined in any significant degree in the field of education. This area is ‘cultural humility’– a topic and a practice most frequently and best discussed in the academic literature of the health-related and medical disciplines (Tervalon and Murray-Garcia, 1998; Schuessler et al., 2012; Alms, 2014; Gallardo, 2014). Professor James Arvanitakis introduced the concept of cultural humility to us in the context of higher education teaching and learning (Arvanitakis, 2014).