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.

This is a descriptive study that is one of the case study patterns used in the qualitative research method. The problem situation was determined as the perception of intercultural education. The situation to be examined in this study is to reveal how prospective teachers perceive and plan to apply intercultural education. Study group The sample consisted of 5 prospective English teachers from English Language Department with no experience. These students were selected on a voluntary basis from those who took the “Culture and Language” course for a semester, 14 weeks. In this online course, every student was asked to read one article with their four other peers. They read the article, study together, and they presented this article in the online course. They were asked to write a report on their article and do reflections on it. In total, during the term, 17 articles were presented. Data Collection In this study, a focus group was used as a data collection method. The researcher asked questions structured by taking expert opinions and through the literature review to the group. There were four questions. 1. What is intercultural education? 2. What are the components of intercultural education? 3. What are the qualities of an intercultural education teacher? 4. How will you implement intercultural education in your class? It is aimed to get views of the prospective teachers on knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behavioural (future plans) dimensions of intercultural education. The focus group was conducted with prospective teachers voluntarily on zoom. Data Analysis The descriptive analysis method was used to analyse the focus group data. The data was tabulated according to the pre-determined themes and categories, and concepts that emerged during the analysis process. The tabulated data were interpreted and reported. Qualitative study data analysis steps of Creswell (2009) were used in the study. The data analysis process started with data collection. The raw data was organized and made available for analysis. The prepared data was read from beginning to end. The data coding process was started. Themes and categories were identified in data coding, and related themes and categories were interpreted. For comments and citations, the teachers were coded with the initial P (Prospective teacher), and each teacher was randomly numbered as P1, P2, and so on. These directives were used in the encodings.

Prospective teachers in the study group know every dimension of intercultural education. They are aware that they need to provide students with cultural aspects. One of the students said, “We can teach other cultures through English (P1)”. Also, one believes that intercultural education means “Developing a sensitivity towards other cultures (P2)”. One of the interviewers used a comfort zone analogy: “We show them that they are outside of their comfort zones (P4)”. According to Byram’s model, a person should have “knowledge of self and other”. One of the students explained this dimension as “to become aware of their own culture first and then become aware of other cultures (P3)”. Another student underlined the importance of the communicative aspect of language learning: “While learning a different language, learning that language together with its culture. Because the culture of that language is very important in terms of communication (P5)”. Components of intercultural listed by the prospective teachers are defence, refusal, egocentrism, prejudice, comparison, awareness of other cultures, becoming conscious, tolerance, sensitivity, empathy, acceptance, adapting behaviour, transferring knowledge to behaviour, integration, acting accordingly. These are all the components of the process of intercultural learning. Also, all prospective teachers in the study group stated that they think intercultural education is necessary. They also stated that intercultural education teachers should be objective, aware of the other cultures, open-minded, understanding, smiling, without prejudice, capable of using a hidden curriculum and various materials. They explained their plans for implementing intercultural education in their classes. In conclusion, according to the data provided, the prospective English teachers have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of intercultural education. The limitation of the study was that behavioural dimension could not be observed with class observations. Future studies can be done with class observations.

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