Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum
Bringing languages and cross-cultural learning to life
By Diana K. Davies
How can we prepare the next generation of highly skilled engineers or scientists to communicate effectively with their colleagues from other countries? How do we train our future business leaders to market their products around the world, including in emerging economies, where cultural norms may be remarkably diverse?
Unfortunately, there is a gap in higher education today, with foreign language and area studies majors on one side of the divide and other majors — especially majors in the sciences and professions — on the other. On one side, we find students with linguistic and cross-cultural expertise who may not know how to apply that expertise in a non-academic setting. On the other side, we find students who have content knowledge, without having the skills and attitudes necessary to operate effectively in an increasingly globalized and inter-connected world. One innovative solution that could bridge this gap is Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum.
Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) is an extension of the movement known as Languages Across the Curriculum (LAC). LAC is a concept that has taken root at many institutions of higher education across the country. This is an approach to language learning that has attracted the attention of many academics, administrators and government officials.
The basic philosophy of LAC is simple: give students opportunities to use foreign languages in courses across the curriculum. In other words, teach students to think of foreign languages as tools that can be applied in all circumstances, not just when they are reading literature in the original or conjugating verbs in a traditional foreign language class. CLAC expands this line of thinking to include an emphasis on cultures and cross-cultural competency. It prepares students, in any discipline or major, to process information from an ethno-relative perspective or from a perspective that takes into account cultural filters and frames of reference.
The primary goal of this movement is to support the development of global competence in all college and university graduates, in any discipline. Global competence in this case can be defined as an ability to navigate multiple cultural terrains, to access information from a variety of authentic, international sources, and to apply that information to "real-world" problems and experiences.
One of the greatest challenges we face in the field of international education today is making international learning, including foreign languages and intercultural knowledge and skills, relevant to all parts of a student’s life. For too long, many in the field have approached internationalization from “seat time” or “cafeteria” perspectives. Some universities and colleges have attempted to ensure that their graduates will have a basic global competency by establishing or increasing foreign language credit hour requirements, developing new internationally focused general education requirements, or even requiring all students to study abroad.
While all of these efforts are laudable, they can fall short of the mark if these experiences are not woven into the rest of a student's academic and pre-professional career. In the same way, some institutions have developed international majors or internationally focused general educaiton requirements that require students to select from a series of "international" courses and experiences. Students might be required to take two foreign language courses, one regionally based course, and one international thematic course, or to select from a similar menu of requirements. This cafeteria approach to internationalization can fail to create truly globally competent graduates if the disparate experiences are not integrated into the rest of the student's curriculum.
A 2006 report by the Committee for Economic Development (CED) recommended that in order to meet the nation's critical need for globally competent graduates, international content should be taught "across the curriculum and at all levels of learning" (CED, Education for Global Leadership, 2006). By infusing all U.S. education, from kindergarten through college, and all disciplines, from anthropology to astronomy, with international content and cross-cultural perspectives, we can reach our goal of creating a globally competent citizenry. This is precisely the approach taken by proponents of Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum.
At a November 2005 conference on The University of Iowa campus, sponsored by International Programs and made possible by an IP Major Projects Grant, UI Second Language Acquisition students, foreign language faculty from across the country, area business leaders, government agency officials and others gathered to discuss the challenges facing foreign language study in the U.S. today and to formulate possible responses to these challenges. Participants of the conference, “Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (C/LAC): Responding to a National Need” shared information about how LAC programs are implemented at different colleges and universities. In some cases, LAC takes the form of team-taught courses, with one historian plus one Spanish language professor, for example. In other cases, LAC programs include content-based courses such as Latin American history taught in Spanish or paired courses such as Latin American history paired with accelerated Spanish for history majors.
One institution, Binghamton University in New York, utilizes native speakers who are also content experts (for example, an MBA student from India) to lead modules or discussion sections of large, undergraduate courses. In some of these sections, the discussion may be conducted entirely in a foreign language. In other sections, students may read newspaper articles and other authentic texts written in the foreign language, but may discuss them in English. In any case, the emphasis is on communication, content-based vocabulary building (vocabulary that is immediately relevant to the student's academic or career goals) and cultural understanding. The goal is to get students to really use the language skills they have, not to see the foreign language as an abstract thing that gets left at the classroom door as they move on to deal with “real life.”
Building on conversations from previous conferences, the Iowa conference examined opportunities to expand the role of culture in LAC initiatives and considered alternative models that foster the acquisition of cross-cultural competencies. Can we imagine, for example, a program in which international PhD students lead discussion sections in which students read articles from foreign newspapers written for an English-speaking audience and discuss topics and ideas integral to the course from a non-U.S. perspective?
Thanks to a Business and International Education grant from the Department of Education, with Terry Boles, associate professor of management and organizations and director of the Institute for International Business in the Tippie College of Business as principal investigator, a “Cultures Across the Curriculum” pilot program is being offered this fall in a special section of introduction to marketing. In this course, honors students are approaching their marketing projects from an international perspective, receiving feedback from international students, and learning to incorporate cross-cultural points of view into all aspects of their curricular work.
In October 2006, a follow-up conference was held in Portland, Ore., which focused on Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum and K-16 foreign language articulation. At this conference, funded by a grant from the American Council on Education and with the support of UI International Programs, Portland State University, Binghamton University-SUNY and Baldwin Wallace College, participants established a new national consortium for Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum. UI and the other members of this new consortium will share resources and develop a new CLAC online clearinghouse, which will include CLAC materials, sample syllabi and best practices.
Conference participants were also able to tour Portland's highly successful K-12 language immersion classes and to attend workshops on the intersections of CLAC and international service learning, offered in conjunction with the International Conference on Service Learning. Plans are already underway to organize the next meeting of the CLAC Consortium, to be held in fall 2007.
While Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum is only one piece in a very large and complicated puzzle, the program could make “global competence” a reality for many U.S. students. CLAC holds the promise of bringing together expertise in a field (be it history or engineering) with cross-cultural skills and “real life” use of foreign languages.
Diana K. Davies
Diana K. Davies is the director of International Programs (IP) at The University of Iowa and holds an adjunct assistant professor position in International Studies, with an emphasis in Russian and East European Studies. She received her doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Rochester. As the director of IP, she has supervisory oversight of the offices of international students and scholars, and study abroad, as well as external relations and community outreach. Prior to coming to Iowa, she served as the director of the LxC program at Binghamton University.
Davies organized the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum: Responding to a National Need Conference in November 2005. The conference was funded by a UI International Programs Major Projects Grant and was held in collaboration with Binghamton University and ACE: American Council on Education. Davies is also a co-founder of the new national consortium on Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum and an organizer of the ACE-supported CLAC conference at Portland State University.