Abstract:

The students that sit in front of us each August are largely of European heritage, economically comfortable, and safe in their communities. One of the challenges that the authors face working from May through July in their yearly revision and planning cycle is how do you develop Intercultural Competency amongst the students few of whom have left the country and some of whom had never left the Midwest.

The basic approach built around the Stanford D Schools’s Design Thinking model flows through out a full academic year and four courses. Many are familiar with Design Sprints. In the DTSPI four course sequence it is a Marathon lasting from August until the end of April in the following year.

An important part of the sequence is the first four months which are spent entirely on the often-neglected piece of the Design Thinking Model. In order to develop empathy students in the class dramatically increase their intercultural competency. In 2025 there were 27 students on the first day and each would pick a country in the bottom half of the economic pyramid. Following that they each would commit to one of the UNESCO SDGs.

The students spend one six-hour block with the authors every week. This also helps as it can get quite intense. Lectures are difficult with this generation and so the six hours are usually packed with experiential learning activities.

Students learn about other countries in many ways in this sequence a few of which are:
1. Country presentations.
2. Food Sampling from countries around the globe.
3. In class exercises are used in many different countries.
4. Researching in detail or rapidly a country .
5. Developing their research panel and helping others with finding research panel members.
6. Watching and listening to presentations on other countries.
7. Commenting and posting on the countries that students are working on.
8. Using today’s technology to learn more rapidly and efficiently.
9. Developing the skills sets with which to think through foreseeable problems in countries they had not heard of before the class began.

Early in the more than a decade that this class has been run the students learned about countries and used panels in a consultative fashion with surveys about ideas, concepts, or prototypes. Now the goal is to get students in the sequence to use the panels as partners. To learn to treat panel members as equals in the co-creation process.

This is really a big challenge for our local students. They are shocked to find that people in their country do not have running water in the home, no bathrooms, and possibly have to source water from a stream, lakebed, or borehole at great distances. They quickly learn that poverty is endemic in these countries, and that even the most basic medical care is not available.

Their competence develops as they become more fully aware that they cannot solve these problems for the world, for the country they have selected or potentially for a region. They have to get deep into a specific community or group of communities, or section of a city to begin to bring together a team to think about ways of making life better in some ways.

Many of them focus on the prototype they must build by the end of class; others begin to realize it is the global knowledge of many countries and vary diverse ways of life that are lived by many is one of the great benefits of the class. This is the developing intercultural competence.

Keywords:

Intercultural Competence, Design Thinking, UNESCO SDG’s, Empathy, Research Panel, Partnership.