About
Focusing on the pedagogical decisions made, the implementation hurdles which needed to be overcome and the students’ learning outcomes, this white paper describes the instructor’s efforts to add a one-credit “culture-general” certificate program to a popular six-week summer study abroad program in Florence, Italy. Designed by a team of noted intercultural scholars, the AFS Global Competency Certificate (GCC) is an 18-module video-based digital learning aid to developing intercultural competence. Effectiveness was measured via pre and post-program administration of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a widely used instrument of intercultural competency measurement. With the help of the GCC, the 2018 cohort of this 6-week program in Florence attained an astonishing mean increase of 13.54 IDI points, moving from Polarization (judging difference) well into Minimization (finding common ground). This is put into perspective via the use of comparison data from other Purdue 2018 short-term programs, some of which also used the GCC.
