Culture Matters
INTERCULTURAL CAPABILITIES FOR STUDY ABROAD AND VOLUNTEERING
Whether you are managing a student exchange or organising volunteers overseas, participants need to develop the capability to function effectively in a cross-cultural environment, even those deceivingly similar to their home country.
Research shows that experiential learning is the most effective when it includes support for active reflection and sense-making. Without the capacity or motivation to make sense of a cross-cultural experience, the risks range from no learning outcomes, to increased ethnocentrism and reinforced stereo-types.
And for volunteers there is both the challenge of adapting to life in a new cultural environment and the need to achieve programme outcomes by utilising their technical skills effectively with people from different cultures.
Our approach helps to equip students and volunteers with the skills and capability to learn and make the most of their time abroad.
For travel designed to improve inter-cultural effectiveness, assessing each participant's strengths and weaknesses prior to departure, can assist in targeting the learning programme and in-country experiences, while a second assessment post-travel, can help measure learning outcomes.
The predictive power of our assessments means that volunteer programmes can save a lot of heartache, time and resources by knowing early on whether a person is likely to adapt and thrive, or may need to develop some additional skills prior to their service.
We can assist you to:
- Improve learning outcomes of student exchange programmes
- Improve in-country effectiveness and wellbeing of volunteers
- Conduct capability assessments pre and post-departure with individual and group feedback reports
- Identify strengths and weaknesses with an organisational cultural audit
- Embed cultural perspectives in organisational capability programmes