Galvanizing Intercultural Competence

Abstract

With increased attention in higher education on students’ ability to engage with and prepare professionally for work within a pluralistic global community, institutions, faculty, and student services have turned to identifying intentional interventions to galvanize student intercultural competence. This mixed-methods study adds to prior research, particularly limited qualitative knowledge, investigating the effect of high-impact practices on first-year students’ intercultural competence development. Furthermore, within intercultural competence scholarship there is an emphasis on lifelong learning and the idea that intercultural competence is not developed in a moment in time but rather through increasing and continuous curiosity about the world and its people. This provoked further inquiry on the timing of intentional interventions in buoying students’ positive attitudes toward intercultural competence learning for the duration of their undergraduate tenure. International and domestic student-participant narratives augmented quantitative data gathered through pre-semester Intercultural Development Inventory assessments. These components form a framework to analyze which interventions are most effective at priming first-year students for lifelong intercultural learning. Additionally, as research isolating the first-year experience as a basis of analysis is limited, the study sought to illuminate student understanding and engagement with intercultural competence within this specific timeframe to infer if the timing of high-impact practices matters. Themes emerged from student reflections following activities and high-impact practices experienced in the first year of study at a four-year private business college in Massachusetts, indicating a steady increase of student understanding and engagement with intercultural learning. The findings support previous research and help to further insights into the future implementation and assessment of intercultural competence development.>