Interculturalism in Classrooms – Insights into Teachers’ Intercultural Sensitivity

In March 2024, a survey of intercultural sensitivity (IS) was conducted among 300 teachers from the Republic of Croatia. The adapted and translated (Jurković, 2023) Intercultural Sensitivity Scale - ISS (Chen and Starosta, 2000) was used in the research. The aim of the research was to determine the level of IS of teachers and to establish whether there is a correlation between some socio-demographic factors and the level of IS. In addition, an attempt was made to establish whether there is a difference in the level of such sensitivity with respect to the aforementioned socio-demographic factors. The results of the study indicate that the examined teachers mostly show agreement with statements reflecting a positive intercultural orientation (M=3.83; SD=.438), whereby the enjoyment of interacting with members of different cultures (M=4.22; SD=.707) was highlighted as the dimension in which respondents expressed the highest degree of agreement, and confidence in interaction with members of different cultures (M=3.58; SD=.596) as dimension with the lowest level of agreement. In addition, the correlation between teachers’ sociodemographic characteristics and IS was examined, and it was shown that attending communication courses is statistically significantly negatively correlated to the level of IS (ρ=- .139; p<.05), while the average success of students is statistically significantly positively correlated (ρ=.131; p<.05). Finally, it was checked whether there are statistically significant differences in the level of IS with regard to related sociodemographic variables. It has been shown that there is a statistically significant difference in the level of IS of teachers concerning the reported academic success of their students (F(2,282) =4.942; p<.01) in such a way that better students’ academic success also means a higher level of IS of teachers.