The Intercultural Development Inventory: An Approach for Assessing and Building Intercultural Competence

Abstract

Consider the following situation. 1 It was 9 months ago that Acme Pharmaceutical Company formally agreed to a limited partnership arrangement with Jaca Marketing of Japan. The purpose of this partnership is to permit Acme to introduce a line of pharmaceutical products in Japan. Jaca is a well-respected and established marketing firm in Japan that knows the "ins and outs" of obtaining government approvals so that the medicines developed by Acme can be formally approved for sale to Japanese consumers. At the time of the signing of the agreements, both the president of Acme and the president of Jaca expressed their enthusiastic support for and confidence in the newly formed partnership. For Acme, Jaca represents an essential method of introducing pharmacological products into the Japanese arena. For Jaca, the opportunity to represent a large, U.S.-owned multinational corporation that wants to do

International vs. Domestic Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU): A Three-Year Assessment of the Preparation of Students for Global Workforces

“…This finding suggests that international experiences that combine intensive language and culture instruction, hands-on, cutting-edge research experience, and intentional activities that require reflection upon the way in which they experience the culture in research, may improve students' global understanding in context; thereby better preparing them for engineering global workforces. This finding is consistent with literature from study abroad that suggests that students demonstrate the greatest gains in intercultural learning when they also engage in intentional reflection on cultural differences [26] [27]. Given that engineering schools and the National Academies desire to improve the global preparedness of undergraduate engineering students, this study provides insight into the need for comprehensive programs that include not only international experience for students but also link pedagogical practices that enable students to fully process the experiences in which they are engaging with before, during, and after they return to their home university.…”

“…The index is grounded in global citizenry theory. [25,26] It utilizes four subscales, as provided in Table 2, each of which have been validated using item response theory and extensively tested for reliability (alpha coefficient=.92).…”

In Quest Of The Third Learning Space

“…The alienation from the cultural mix of their classrooms, exposed by nine persons, evidences the urgent necessity of developing constructs to use to distinguish the aspects of the 'third space' and themselves. From this new perspective, the demands laid on developing an "intercultural mindset" (Hammer, 2009) can be met by introducing a new conceptual framework for EMI teacher training at URFU, including language repertoire growth and formation of cultural intelligence and metacognition as its critical aspect (Earley & Peterson, 2004). Thus, the EMI teachers armed with the adaptive strategies can take a proactive approach to potential cultural dilemmas and gain confidence in self-efficacy.…”

Transforming Higher Education through Organizational Meditation: A Story of the Executive Learning Series on Equity & Empowerment

“…Being accustomed to combatting flat-out racist or uninformed thinking, we can attack an idea before deeply engaging it because it is presented in a way that triggers those past experiences. We can also choose to go along to get along and mask our own unique perspective and lived experiences because we don't believe they will be valued by the institution, a process called minimization (Hammer, 2008;Okun, n.d.).…”