Reaping the Benefits of Cultural Diversity in Schools: Classroom Cultural Diversity Climate and Students’ Intercultural Competence

Students growing up in culturally diverse societies need to develop intercultural competence. Previous research suggests that culturally diverse schools may constitute a natural arena for training these skills if there is a high degree of positive interaction between students of different cultural affiliations and if cultural variations are acknowledged and valued (Gurin et al., 2002; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008). In this study, we assessed how classroom cultural diversity climate (contact and cooperation, colorblindness, and heritage/intercultural learning) is related students’ motivational, cognitive, metacognitive, and behavioral intercultural competence.

The sample included 1335 minority and majority adolescents in Germany (M_age= 14.69 years; 52% immigrant background (i.e., foreign-born or at least one parent born abroad). Self-report questionnaires tapped into the classroom cultural diversity climate (Schachner et al., 2017). Intercultural competence was measured using a self-report questionnaire (based on Van Dyne et al., 2012) and open-ended questions capturing adolescents’ interpretation of, and reaction to intercultural situations.

Multilevel SEM indicated that contact and cooperation, heritage/intercultural learning, and surprisingly also colorblindness, were positively related to students’ intercultural competence across minority and majority groups. Relations were stronger for individually perceived climate as opposed to classroom-aggregated climate, and barely differed between students of immigrant and non-immigrant background.

We conclude that the specific form of colorblindness assessed in this study (i.e., focusing on similarities) may not be as detrimental to students’ intercultural competence as expected. Thus, contact and cooperation, colorblindness, and heritage/intercultural learning each make positive, but unique contributions to students’ intercultural competence and a combined approach seems most effective.