1.4 Interview with Professor Byram

An intercultural encounter can be any situation where someone finds themself noticing that they are interacting with someone from a different social group. In other words, where the group identity, the ‘group self’, as some people call it, is salient and is dominating the situation. So my example of when I’m in the United States, I’m seen as British is a situation where my ‘Britishness’ is salient. But it might be the same if I’m in the south of England or the south-east of England coming from the north of England, and having lived for 30 years or more in the north-east of England, so my identity as someone from the north interacting with someone from the south, in some circumstances, will be the dominant, salient identity. And in that sense it’s an intercultural encounter within the same … within one society.

But we might have a similar situation with an intercultural encounter being between two people of different professions, who, in the situation in question, are talking about and interacting through their professional identities. And there again they have different values, beliefs and behaviours which they need to understand and which … where they need their intercultural competence to help them understand each other. The same thing happens with religious groups. I mean, one of the things which has happened to me over many years as a teacher trainer, as it were, I … being someone with a Protestant upbringing, I often went to see my students in Catholic schools who were, who were doing their teaching practice in Catholic schools. And I found myself in what seemed like a different environment, and I noticed differences in the environment, in the behaviours and the fact that, for example, prayers were said at the end of lessons in some schools, which I … which was not familiar to me, er, so it was a different religious culture. And I think I wanted to use that example within a society rather than taking the more obvious examples of, er, of the contrasts of going to another country where another religion is dominant, a completely different religion is dominant.

OK. So it’s an encounter where basically you notice different values, beliefs and behaviours, and perhaps feel a little, what, uncomfortable about that?

That’s exactly so, yeah, yeah.