We live in a world marked by environmental challenges, social inequities and political uncertainty. These issues are not peripheral to universities; they are central to the work of teaching, learning, and knowledge production aimed at addressing global issues and improving the world we live in. In this context, cultural competence is not a peripheral skill but a transformative capability that enables students and educators to engage ethically and effectively across differences as they navigate learning and collaboration. As a vehicle for driving social change, cultural competence is more than just a ‘tick a box’ exercise; it is an essential skill for responding to the challenges of our interconnected world.
At the same time, gen AI is here to challenge and provoke us. At the National Centre for Cultural Competence we are working with this technology in many ways while also critiquing its risks including bias, misinformation, privacy, and over-reliance. What’s often missing from the debate, however, are discussions that centre on our uniquely human intelligences. The very idea of ‘intelligence’ in gen AI needs rethinking: AI is a powerful task performer and it is unlikely to replace the very qualities that make us human. To that end, we explore how gen AI can be critically and pedagogically integrated to support the development of cultural competence as a uniquely human intelligence.
The role of critical self-reflection in cultural competence
Cultural competence is an iterative process of actively engaging in critical self-reflection (CSR), which involves examining our values, beliefs, and assumptions to better understand who we are as cultural beings. Importantly, CSR extends beyond individual introspection; it also requires connecting our personal experiences and interactions to broader socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts. Without this step, reflection risks remaining an individual exercise, detached from the systemic forces that shape our lives and interactions. By situating the self within these wider contexts, individuals are better able to recognise the role of power, privilege, and history in shaping worldviews and relationships. This deeper awareness helps prevent cultural competence from being reduced to a set of personal skills or attitudes and instead grounds it as a practice of relational accountability and structural understanding. To enhance students’ development of cultural competence in our OLET1103: Cultural Competence Fundamentals course, we designed a Cogniti agent.
Scaffolding critical self-reflection with Cogniti
Here are three core areas we used in the system message for encouraging iterative reflection:
| Core Area | Explanation | Agent response |
| 1. Critical Reflection Prompts | Socratic-style questioning to guide critical thinking beyond surface-level; encouraging deeper, more meaningful reflection that can be transformed into actionable insights. | 1. Describe the event. 2. Why have you chosen this event? 3. What kinds of emotions does this event involve? 4. What actions did you take: at the time, then subsequently?Can you connect the event to broader contexts, e.g. socio-cultural, historical, political? How might this new learning influence your future actions? |
| 2. Levels of Reflection | Feedback to increase depth of reflection. | Descriptive: Focus on telling the ‘story’. Analytical: Distancing self from the ‘story’. New interpretations and perspectives appear. Critical: Appreciation of multiple contexts, (historical, socio-political perspectives) and willingness to change actions. |
| 3. Language Strategies | Supporting students in reflective writing with precision, clarity and depth. | 1. Evaluative vocabulary 2. Modality 3. Evidence (attribution, and/or endorsement) 4. Logic (comparison and contrast, concession resources, and conjunction and logical connectors) |
As to how a student might use the agent and how the agent guides the student, see here an example of a reflective task assignment based on the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT). Here, the “event” is the act of taking a chosen IAT and receiving the results, while the “story” refers to the student’s initial, descriptive account of that experience. The student is initially encouraged to reflect on why the test was selected, what the results indicated, and their immediate reactions. The agent then guides students to deepen this reflection by examining how their responses may be shaped by their social positioning, upbringing, and experiences, and by connecting these insights to broader socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts. This progression helps move reflection beyond personal reaction toward critical self-reflection and consideration of future actions in cultural competence.
Can gen AI foster deep and relational reflection?
We have noticed that generative AI has pedagogical potential in supporting students as they prepare for more embodied and intercultural engagement. For example, lecturer feedback on the afore-mentioned student assignment highlighted how AI-assisted reflection can help students articulate meaningful connections between their positionality and broader systemic factors:
“This is a thoughtful and honest reflection that shows a developing awareness of how socialisation and positionality influence implicit bias. You’ve done well to link your IAT [Implicit Association Test] result to broader systemic factors and acknowledge your role within them. Your recognition that no one is fully neutral or culturally competent is a key insight.”
AI-supported reflection helps students move beyond surface-level responses to recognise how positionality and systemic factors shape perspectives. In this way, generative AI served as a scaffold for CSR, fostering the reflexive habits that support relational and transformative cultural competence.
Call to action
Cultural competence is a lifelong skill and a uniquely human intelligence. Through gen AI, we can create spaces that both harness this technology while preserving the essential human work of critical self-reflection. AI can effectively create the cognitive lift needed for reflection, but the uniquely human intelligences of ethical reasoning, critical interrogation, and relational accountability remain essential for deeper cultural competence development. AI can support the reflective process, but it cannot replace the relational and contextual work at the heart of cultural competence. We invite educators to see Cogniti not only as a teaching tool for students, but also as a catalyst for their own ongoing critical self-reflection. We encourage educators to use our CSR agent to enrich their critical self-reflection and, when relevant, to bring elements of this learning into their classroom(s) to support students’ understanding of culturally competent practice.
This article was contributed by Elif Batkan Şahin and Amy B McHugh, the National Centre for Cultural Competence
