After the pandemic, everybody realized the inequalities, especially in education. These inequalities can be socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, and gender-based. On the part of education, teachers, especially the English teachers, are the mediators of raising awareness on inequalities and diversities through intercultural education. Intercultural knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours of teachers’ can be the determiners of the intercultural skills of students.
Intercultural education aims to foster global citizenship and to build bridges between diversities. Some of the Sustainable Development Goals of UNESCO aimed to be realized by 2030 includes inequality issues. Goal 4 "quality education" is about eliminating all kinds of disparities to reach inclusive education. In addition to that, Goal 5 "gender equality", Goal 10 "reduced inequalities", and Goal 16 "peace, justice, and strong institutions" are also related to equity and inclusion in education. These goals need to be achieved by embracing cultural diversities to create global citizens (UN, 2020) which is possible with intercultural education. Moreover, intercultural education can be a great tool to empower 21st-century skills that include collaboration and teamwork, creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication by bringing different perspectives. Numerous Council of Europe documents aim to increase the plurality of societies with multilingual and intercultural education. Language competencies, knowledge, trends, and attitudes enable an individual to have collective cultural identities. Moreover, multilingual and intercultural education increases participation and social cohesion to become democratic citizens and they help to build an information society (Beacco et al., 2016). Intercultural education builds empathy and comprehension, self-awareness, and skills. It is also a process of raising cultural awareness because learners understand that cultures are not superior to each other and that there is no such thing as good or bad culture (Larzén-Östermark, 2008). Being an active member of a multilingual and multicultural society is essential to an individual's own democratic practice.
Byram (1997) has an intercultural competence model which is widely accepted as a guiding concept for the general purpose of foreign language education. According to Byram, there are five components of intercultural competence in foreign language education. They are Knowledge "culture specific and cultural general knowledge", "knowledge of self and other", "knowledge of interaction: individual and societal", "insight regarding the ways which cultures affect language and communication"; Skill "ability to interpret and relate", Behaviour "ability to discover and/or interact", "ability to acquire new knowledge and to operate knowledge, attitudes, and skills under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction’", ‘Metacognitive strategies to direct own learning"; Attitudes "attitude to relativize self; value other", "positive disposition towards learning (intercultural competence)"; Critical cultural awareness "ability to evaluate critically perspectives, practices, and products in own and foreign cultures" (Byram, 1997; Sercu, 2004: 75). This model was taken as a framework to analyse the perspectives of prospective English teachers in this study.
Intercultural education is an interdisciplinary concept aiming to raise active citizens and individuals with cultural sensitivity. A foreign language classroom can support students to be more open and give a positive view of other cultures if prospective foreign language teachers have a training to develop awareness on intercultural education. However, teachers are inadequately trained on intercultural education. Therefore, it is aimed to determine the prospective teachers' perspectives on intercultural education and their ideas about what can be done in practice. For this purpose, the research question "How do prospective teachers perceive intercultural education?" was answered.