After cultural literacy: new models of intercultural competency for life and work in a VUCA world

ABSTRACT

Globalisation has brought about change not only in the economic, social and technological order, but also in people’s mentality and the ways they interact with the world around them. There has been a consensus that in our increasingly interconnected world, one of the essential tasks of educators and institutions at all levels is to develop, promote and enhance cultural literacy. In the wake of counter-globalisation forces and the rise of the national populist movement, the relevance of being culturally literate might be questioned. This paper reviews the literature on cultural literacy and clarifies some of the conceptual ideas surrounding the construct. It updates the elements of cultural literacy relevant to the 2020s and critically assesses the development of the concept of cultural literacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. An analysis and summary are made of common trends for a new set of skills and competencies necessary for success in the twenty-first century, studied by policy-making institutions like UNESCO, by education institutions like the British Council, by multinational corporations like IBM and Google, and by influencer organisations like LinkedIn and the World Economic Forum. The conclusion drawn is that there is a pressing need for an updated model of cultural literacy that can serve as a powerful instrument for living in a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural literacy
• leadership
• twenty-first-century skills
• intercultural skills
• communication

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the thoughtful comments provided by the reviewers of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. http://cleurope.eu/about/.

2. For more see Kirmayer (2015).

3. The graph is extracted from www.culturomics.org, a tool that investigates cultural trends quantitatively using digitised texts containing about 4 per cent of all books ever printed. The most accurate data is shown between 1800 and 2000. The terms included in the search show the trends till 2008. Terms that appeared after 2008 are not displayed.

4. The term has gained particular acceptance by the business community.

Additional information

Funding

The author declares that she received no financial support for her research and/or authorship of this article.