Developing cultural competency in higher education: an agenda for practice

Competence of Faculty, Staff, and Administrators in Hispanic Culture: Evidence from Three Surveys of Personnel and Students at Hispanic-Serving Institutions

“…As Haupt and Connolly Knox (2018) stated, -By increasing cultural competency knowledge, skills, and abilities…our graduates… [become] more credible, empathetic, relatable, and trustworthy, and less inclined to negatively apply biases, stereotypes, and preconceived notions‖ (p.538). These are worthy goals and they are being pursued around the globe, in Europe (Kedzior et al, 2015;Koskinen et al, 2012) and the United Kingdom (Kruse, Rakha & Calderone, 2018), in Australia (Pillay & James, 2015), in Hong Kong (Bodycott, Mak & Ramburuth, 2014), and in the United States (Haupt & Connolly Knox, 2018). These efforts are occurring in a variety of academic fields including -emergency management and homeland security‖ (Haupt & Connolly Knox, 2018, p. 538), education (Sandell & Tupy, 2015), medicine (Swanberg et al, 2015), and nursing (Jeffreys & Dogan, 2012).…”

Discursive Leadership: Exploring the "Black Box" Challenge in Transcultural Leadership Studies

“…England, Australia, Ireland, and South Africa). As U.S. society further globalizes, growing more linguistically and culturally diverse, its college and university students appear to be on a path to diminished knowledge and understanding of the rest of world's languages and cultures (Kruse, Rakha, & Calderone, 2018;Shalala et al, 2015).…”

“…As I have stated previously, there has recently been a strong consensus among academic leaders and scholars that the curricular and infrastructural capacities for teaching culture and transcultural competence in the higher education setting are in need of both bolstering and elucidation (Kruse, Rakha, & Calderone, 2018;Shalala et al, 2015;Bezrukova, Jehn, & Spell, 2012;Sue, 1991). It is evident, at least on the campus of the large state university where I work, that university faculty and administrators are in active agreement that a marked increase in curricular focus on culture and transcultural competence is necessary.…”

“…Leaders and scholars within academe are already signaling both the challenge and the urgent need for more, and better, education about culture(s), with particular focus on improving students' capacity to function effectively both within and across different cultural paradigms. The central thesis is that transcultural education efforts within U.S. institutions of higher education are currently both underdeveloped and unduly diffuse (Kruse, Rakha, & Calderone, 2018;Shalala et al, 2015). It is this question of underdevelopment and diffusion in the teaching of culture within higher education to which I will now turn.…”

“…The College of Extended Studies offers a program in cross-cultural competence for educators, which is open to both matriculated and non-matriculated student populations, and plans are underway for additional certificate programs in both the College of Arts and Letters and the Business College. Such a broad and sweeping response to the recognized need for more tightly focused (trans)cultural curricula in higher education is clearly one part of the solution proposed by Kruse, Rakha, and Calderone (2018), in that it does increase disciplinary approaches to transcultural competence development, and thereby learner access to them. It does not, however, appear to adequately respond to the challenge of diffuseness in the field of (trans)cultural studies.…”