Material things like clothes, tools, cars, books and various other things are seen as culture. But also practices like learning, theatre, cinema, storytelling, working, farming and many other practices are seen as culture. Furthermore, the concept of culture includes much more. Also faiths, believes, traditions, identities, histories, concepts of place and space are reflected when it comes to the concept of culture. And culture is always something collective because it is a concept that reflects on human beings, things and ideas it its relation to each other.

I am sure that this list, what culture could be, is very incomplete but that doesn't matter because it is impossible to give a complete “image” what culture is at all. But there are always some basics, that culture has. For instance, culture is always “communication” because culture as a “collective” of different actors, ideas, practices and places needs communication to link all the different entities together. The way we talk to each other, how we exchange ideas, how we express our feelings and how we connect to other people is all about communication. Culture is also “practice” because it matters what, why and how we do it. It is about how we use tools, how we play theatre, how and why we educate others, why we have faiths and how we bring them into practice, what we do in our daily lives, how we earn money, how we bring our children up and many practices more. Furthermore culture is always a “dynamic process” because human beings do things, change their ideas, develop new approaches how to do things, convert to other faiths, migrate to other places and countries, learn other cultural practices and languages, etc.. For that reason in my view it is very important to reflect on culture never as something static but as something very dynamic. This, in my view, makes it impossible, to see culture as a closed entity like “culture A”,, culture B” or “culture C” - or like “English culture”, “Italian Culture” or “Inka Culture”. Because of the continuously movement and migration of human beings and their ideas, thoughts and cultural practices culture is much more a process that makes it impossible to separate one “culture” from “the other”.

So what? And how we can deal with that somehow “wide and open” approach to the concept of culture, one may ask now. In my few it is important to take into account the perspective or the field from which one is approaching culture. If we are reflecting on culture in the context of intercultural learning it is important to take very much into account “communication”, “practice” and “intercultural dynamics”. When people with different cultural background come together to learn in whatever place, they first of all communicate with each other. They try to find a language that everybody understands and they try to find out about the perspectives of each other. Here it is important to get to know peoples different concepts of learning. It is also important to know about the cultural techniques one uses to communicate. These cultural techniques include talking, writing reading and the ability to use new media and technologies like the Internet.