University Teachers: Coping with Sociocultural Diversity. A Study about Critical Incidents between Hegemonic and Subaltern Cultures

摘要

This article aims to identify and characterise the critical incidents (CI) that occur most frequently at university level in highly diverse sociocultural contexts. Intercultural relations will be analysed within the framework of hegemony and resistance between Western culture, which is inherent to university settings, and the non-Western mixed traits present in the student body. The relationship between different CIs will be examined, as will be the various issues associated with them according to teachers’ perceptions. For this qualitative study, 23 teachers from two Bolivian universities were interviewed. The teachers reported 9 types of CIs linked to sociocultural diversity. The results indicate that CIs are usually the outcome of cultural clashes between the institutional and teachers’ culture and the students’ culture, with the three most frequent CIs related to the use of the vehicular language, expression and communication; different thinking processes and the relationship between students. As a result, we propose a typology and a scheme for classification and interpretation of CIs linked to cultural diversity with the objective of advancing university teacher training.