Intercultural competencies in higher education: a perspective of the brazilian continent

One of the challenges of higher education in Brazil is to understand the complexity of the "emerging" context This includes a rethinking of latent concepts, including intercultural competencies. This text seeks to bring a reflection on the development of intercultural competencies in Brazilian higher education from the student perspective. The way forward was based on qualitative-quantitative research, with questionnaire support, at a public university in the Amazon. The results point to the predominance of the concept of competence as input (PARRY, 1996) and functional interculturality (WALSH, 2009), even if it is not with systematized actions or models. It is necessary to institutionalize actions that aim at the development of intercultural competencies in higher education, involving the actors of this context and the importance of diffusion of the concept.