This essay highlights a critical assessment approach for intercultural communication courses that engages in a "doing--undoing" practice for instructors, with the aim of "doing" culture as learned through society and traditional intercultural communication instruction with the limited, romanticized, and settler colonial…

This Teaching Note examines the implementation of a full-semester course model for digital exchanges between students across countries. The model, Global Understanding, created and administered by East Carolina University, is a platform for humanistic pedagogy that dovetails seamlessly with sociological content, methods, and principles. Through an…

This essay shows how one professor teaching "Introduction to Buddhism" sought to counteract his students' view that Chinese and Tibetan forms of Buddhism represented a deviation from a "pure" Indian Buddhism rather than worthwhile forms of creativity and religiosity in themselves. A simple comparative assignment that asked a…

This study examines the effectiveness of an undergraduate intercultural learning assignment immediately and over time. Students were asked to consider what they know or believe about refugees and the sources of their information. They then engaged in two one-hour online interviews with a refugee. After the interviews, they wrote reflective…

The importance of diversity and diversity education is becoming increasingly clear among businesses and in society. Colleges and universities are recognizing the necessity of expanding student outcomes to include intercultural competence to meet this requirement. Because of this increased importance, this study sought to examine the impact of a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of using structured reflection via the critical incident analysis method to develop multicultural awareness and intercultural empathy in undergraduate-level pre-service teachers. This research is important, given the striking demographic mismatch between students and teachers in US…

Here the author shares his attempt to add, without financial cost, substantive and dynamic international experiences to the secondary social studies teacher education program he facilitates. He provides thick descriptions of (1) the overarching goals of a collaborative, online, international learning project, (2) the curriculum materials he helped…

This study explores how students produce their own mini videos using the target language to share experiences and communicate with native speakers. Multimodality is used as a theoretical approach. Class observations and in-depth interviews were used for data collection, which was analysed by theme. The research results indicate that students deem…

Educators are aware of the benefits of service learning such as retention or application of course concepts. Students enrolled in courses with a service learning assignment may not be aware of the benefits or may not view the assignment as beneficiary. This study examined student perceptions of service learning to determine if students'…

This article is the first in a two-part series. It features 13 teaching innovations selected from the 60 "My Favorite Assignments" presented at the 2019 Association for Business Communication's annual international conference in Detroit, Michigan. Pedagogy presented includes experiential learning methods to teach how to deliver peer…

Barriers to cross-cultural instruction challenge even experienced educators and their students. To increase cross-cultural competence and bridge learning gaps, professors in two countries adapted the Photovoice methodology to develop shared visual vocabularies with students and unearth hidden assumptions. Results from an anonymous evaluation…

Educators have long sought how to prepare students to develop a global mind set and to work under conditions of complexity and uncertainty common in many world markets. The purpose of this study was to support educators in this cause by providing them with a "hands-on" exercise readily adaptable across the business curriculum to identify…

Increasingly, today's information systems (IS) programs are focused on making sure students are graduating with well-developed soft skills. One of these necessary soft skills is intercultural communication, which is the ability to communicate with people from different cultures. This teaching tip presents an assignment designed to increase the…

In this paper, I describe an innovative assignment for teaching undergraduate students cross-cultural understanding. The Outsider/Insider assignment simultaneously teaches facts about cultural difference and skills for managing cross-cultural encounters. Briefly, the assignment is to write two short papers, one in which the student describes a…

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…