Intercultural Competence
Intercultural Competence Outcome:
Engage with people and ideas from their own and other cultures (e.g. by seeking to understand with curiosity, grace, humility, respect, and compassion)
Using this outcome to design a course
Because APU believes that diversity is an expression of God’s image, love, and boundless creativity, intercultural competence is essential to fulfill our role in the world. Courses in this category will equip students to engage with others from diverse cultures with compassion and respect. Based on this framing, these courses will help students achieve higher levels of personal and social responsibility, seeking transformation of the head, the heart, and the hands. The following are the goals in this category:
1. Students will understand the world’s diversity and complexity
● Through balanced study and analysis of diverse individuals, groups and/or systems, historic and/or contemporary, global and/or local
2. Students will affectively engage with diversity
● Through learning processes that encourage students to reflect critically and personally on their own identities in the context of complex human relationships with other human cultures or systems
3. Students will act to fulfill God’s design for reconciliation
● Through experiential learning that encourages students to utilize personal and collective learning to transform real-world situations
Courses in this category may involve study away, service-learning, or community-based research.
Here are some questions you should ask yourself to determine if your course is a good fit for the Intercultural Competence category:
- Do your students become more aware of differences between cultures?
- Do your students grapple with societal factors affected by cultural differences?
- Do your students reflect on their own cultural identity?
- Do you use pedagogy that prompts students to take the perspective of people from other cultures?
- Does your course include experiential learning in diverse cultural settings?
- Do you equip students with strategies for demonstrating curiosity, grace, humility, respect, and compassion?
If you answered yes to most of these questions, your course is probably a good fit.