Introduction to the IBCP

The IBCP program strives to provide opportunities for students to enhance their personal and interpersonal development with an emphasis on experiential learning. The goals of the IBCP include:

• Empowering students to be responsible for their own learning and development
• Challenging students to establish and achieve meaningful goals
• Providing students with flexible strategies to deal with familiar and unfamiliar situations
• Involving students in authentic activities that allow the students to develop the capacity, and the will, to make a difference
• Giving students the opportunity to learn, plan, act and reflect
• Developing the students' practical and intellectual skills at the heart of the IBCP program are the four core components:

Personal and Professional Skills: Students must participate in a course that emphasizes critical thinking, personal and interpersonal development, problem-solving and the acquisition of practical skills.

Service Learning: Students must liaise with members of the community and undertake unpaid and voluntary activities that help the community and that have a learning benefit to the student. The rights, dignity and autonomy of all those involved are respected.

Language development: Students must improve their language proficiency in a target language other than their best/mother tongue language.

Reflective project: Students must plan and create a project that draws together key aspects of their studies, including the career-related study, personal and professional skills and service learning.

Students must show evidence of having achieved the following learning outcomes as part of completing the core:

• Social Awareness, community involvement and social action: The student has developed a sense of social awareness, community involvement and social action. The student is able to recognize a need in the community and most importantly is prepared to act to make a difference.
• Equity, justice and responsibility: The student has recognized issues of equity, justice and responsibility. It is important that the student is able to look beyond him or herself and recognize issues of inequity and injustice both locally and internationally.
• Intercultural communicative competence: The student has developed greater intercultural communicative competence. The student's behaviors and attitudes towards people from different cultures have changed in a positive way.
• Awareness of strengths and areas of growth: The student has increased awareness of his or her own strengths and areas for growth. The student is able to see himself or herself as an individual with various skills and abilities, some more developed than others. The student has grown in self-esteem and confidence and understands that he or she can make choices about how to move forward.
• Undertaking new challenges: The student has undertaken new challenges. A new challenge may be an unfamiliar activity, or an extension to an existing one.
• Plan and initiate activities: The student has planned and initiated activities. This can be shown in activities that are part of larger projects, for example, .service learning activities in the local community, as well as small student-led activities. Also, the student has received feedback and acted upon it.
• Work collaboratively with others: The student has worked collaboratively with others. Collaboration can be shown in many different activities, such as working in teams to help the local community resolve a problem and then thinking about preventing the problem from happening again.
• Show perseverance and commitment: The student has shown perseverance and commitment. At the very least, this implies attending regularly, completing assigned tasks and accepting a share of the responsibility for dealing with problems that arise.
• Engage in issues of global importance: The student has engaged with issues of global importance. The student may be involved in international projects but, at the very least, the student has developed a sense of international-mindedness and global citizenship.
• Ethical implications: The student has considered the ethical implications of his or her actions. Ethical issues arise throughout the core activities, and the student must show that ethical principles have played a role in decision-making.