Transcultural Education: A framework for supporting students to develop commonalities in cultural complexity

In 2021, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proposed a new social contract for education and pedagogy to be organized around building the capacities of students to work together to transform the world. Against this background, the concept of transcultural education in higher education is promising and aims to help students to learn by cooperating. This chapter introduces transcultural education and focuses on the role of education and educators in developing students’ transcultural competence for successfully navigating and cooperating in a world that is shaped by cultural complexity. Building on the results of an international and interdisciplinary Delphi study, transcultural competence can be described as a general competence to deal with cultural complexity. Transcultural competence refers to the ability and willingness to engage in context-specific processes of developing new shared meaning and action beyond existing practices through shared experience(s) and mutual learning as a means and result of being in relation. We conclude by offering a framework on how to design and structure transcultural learning in higher education. The crucial role of content organization, shared experiences, debriefing, and cultivating communities of practice are shared.