ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an interdisciplinary lens through their discussion of cultural humility from a healthcare perspective since cultural humility is emerging as a key element when researching intercultural competence. US medicine is learned and practised across a number of racial, cultural, economic, and linguistic borders. Highlighting the distinction between cultural competence and cultural humility exposes important nuances of the cultural frameworks and socio-historical worldviews with which service providers and clinicians approach their patients and administer institutions. Educator's inability or lack of discipline to do the lifelong, ongoing work of self-reflection and self-critique will limit and undermine their effectiveness in transmitting knowledge and their ability to participate in the transformational promise of international education for a global community. The task of teaching students how to mitigate power imbalances inherent in intercultural encounters begins with explicitly identifying and carefully documenting these imbalances for and with students.
