The majority of students who took this general education undergraduate course in developing cross-cultural understanding at a state college in the northeastern United States reported that their level of cross-cultural competence and global awareness increased by the end of the course. The primary course objective was to help students better understand their own cultural roots and become more globally aware of other cultural groups. This limited study revealed that this one undergraduate college course was successful in increasing cultural self-awareness, cross-cultural competence, and global awareness among the students who took the course. In addition, it points to the need for more courses to be added to college curricula and for more statistically significant studies to be conducted.
In an urgent effort to internationalize curricula, institutions of higher education are rethinking the role of language study. Many administrators, faculty, and staff are realizing that language study is more than merely a means of communication. More importantly, it is the key to understanding how people from diverse cultural backgrounds, especially those who are engaged in our academic institutions, interpret their cultural experiences. Three important questions will be discussed in this paper: (1) If we accept the idea that curriculum reforms should mirror the changing world, then what curricular changes are needed to promote internationalization?, (2) What role does language study play in this reformed curriculum?, and (3) If we accept a new definition of knowledge as having a language and cultural component, then how can we better prepare our students to gain multilingual and multicultural competence?
The benefits of the presence of international faculty on university campuses are widely acknowledged.Their integration into campus life creates a global atmosphere and provides rich resources to encourage globalization efforts on campus. We set out to explore the perceptions of the challenges faced by our international faculty, with the further goal of meeting these challenges and increasing their retention. To probe these perceptions and address the challenges they identified, we created and disseminated a survey and interviewed our international faculty. The results of the study will be used to increase the retention of international faculty at our institution. The actions we propose will be to create more opportunities to socialize, provide more legal support, recruit more international students, offer mentorship based on cultural affinity, and make English language support and speech modification services available to international faculty and encourage them to take advantage of these services. Keywords faculty development, international faculty, international faculty retention, internationalization of higher education, internationalizing the campus, campus globalization initiativesStockton to retain the international faculty". 55Published by SCHOLINK INC. "As someone who lived under this uncertainty until just a few months ago, I certainly appreciate calling attention to this important issue and offering resources. But I also think in addition to such individual efforts, Stockton as an institution needs to make a more consistent effort to support all employees through the visa/green card and other immigration paper work/processes. These have always been complex and involve a great deal of financial and other stress; navigating it requires a supportive employer. I can only imagine that the process has become even more fraught now. But in my experience, there is no uniform or consistent support for this at Stockton, it is often left to the individual going through the process to negotiate with the Deans or supervisors adding yet another layer of stress". Theme 3: Too few international Students."What the university can do is to recruit more international students, which would truly make the campus global. The presence of more international students would in turn facilitate the integration of the international faculty into the larger community". Theme 4: Need for mentors. "Assigning a [additional] mentor from the same [similar] culture who can help the person be familiar with local communities". Theme 5: Language barrier."Cultural differences make me feel sometimes it is difficult to join conversations. Maybe a little language barrier as well". DiscussionOur survey and interview data indicated that international faculty had experienced various communication difficulties on campus. Their biggest challenges were with students and administrators.The two main problems that were identified were the need to repeat themselves and being misunderstood, which both result in poor satisfaction ratings with the language serv...
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