Cultural Foundations and Q Methodology
摘要
Globalisation has brought individuals into contact with one another in a rapidly changing landscape and at an unprecedented scale. This has produced a general challenge for people to learn more about the diversity of cultures and develop cultural competence. Culture is an everchanging existence. and there is not a universal ideal of “culture” or of cultural competence. Cultures evolve and this influences our understandings of and attitudes towards cultures different from our own. Following the establishment of researcher standpoint and a summary of a first encounter with Q methodology, this chapter highlights through two case studies how Q methodology can be employed to explore understandings of culture and cultural competence in education. The first study investigates students’ cultural competence development during a short-term international experience. The second study examines preservice teachers’ understandings of cultural competence in early childhood settings. These examples illustrate how Q methodology effectively captures the complexity of points of view about cultural competence in educational settings.