While participating in international engineering experiences students became increasingly aware of cultural differences and how to integrate this understanding into their work. For engineering students to be prepared for today’s global society, intercultural awareness is a necessary area of learning for all students. As defined through our research, intercultural awareness includes: the ability to work within cultural differences, an enhanced awareness of cultural differences, the realization of social, economic, and political climates, and the acquisition of community trust. While on-site, students are immersed within the local culture and thus have the opportunity to pursue a more appropriate project design by understanding the social, economic, and political elements of the community. Students expressed that developing a sense of cultural differences led to an enhanced awareness of how to move forward with the project as they more fully understood community needs in the appropriate cultural context. Finally, students realized the importance of acquiring a community’s trust to create an atmosphere of project sustainability. Students have the opportunity to increase their intercultural competence while abroad, but it is also possible to address this topic within the general engineering curricula.
Components of Intercultural Awareness
- Realize the importance of acquiring community’s trust
- Recognize social, economic, and political climate of a particular context
- Analyze cultural differences
- Adapt to cultural differences
- Develop a tolerance of ambiguity and a non-judgmental stance
Intercultural Awareness Learning Objectives
Students will be able to:
- Recognize that differences between cultures exist.
- Explain the complexity of, and specific features of, a given culture.
- Differentiate between own and other worldviews without judgment.
- Identify aspects of the culture that are affecting the engineering design and design process.
- Develop project solutions that begin to take into account the cultural differences of each stakeholder.
- Compile specific cultural differences and can propose alternative solutions that reflect various cultural perspectives.
- Behave and communicate in a culturally appropriate manner.
- Evaluate a specific project’s success in regards to its cultural appropriateness while restraining personal cultural judgments.