CROSS-CULTURAL AND IMMERSION PROGRAMMING IN GRADUATE EDUCATION FOR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Many graduate programs recognize the importance of training graduate students to be culturally competent budding professionals. Culturally competent graduates have the foundation to be socially just in their civic responsibilities. Socially responsible graduates work towards improving their communities through understanding the privileges and oppressions their communities may face (Nelson, 2004).
Many graduate programs include cross-cultural training in their curriculum by offering courses with standard diversity textbooks and experiential exercises held within the classroom setting. While these aforementioned approaches are fitting and viable, it should not be the only method available for teaching students to be culturally competent. Textbooks that discuss various aspects of diversity as it pertains to specific groups can be seen as oversimplifying cultures; which if this method is used alone, can in return, lead to more generalization of a particular group of diversity.
This poster presentation aims to demonstrate the benefit of incorporating a cross-cultural immersion program into the curriculum to produce socially responsible graduates with a heightened global awareness, appreciation, tolerance and sensitivity to diversity issues (Danzig & Jing, 2007).
In order to effectively train graduate psychology students to be culturally competent professionals, The Adler School of Professional Psychology offers a course called Cross Cultural and International Immersion. The course is designed to provide Adler students with a cultural immersion experience while volunteering in another country for two weeks. This program serves to combine service-learning techniques with a cross-cultural component. This format stresses simultaneously the importance of civic engagement and cross cultural sensitivity. In addition, the course is aimed toward teaching students to examine and to critically think about the impact of systemic and structural barriers on health abroad and in the Unites States.
The Cross Cultural and International Immersion Course is taught from an ecological and anthropological approach. Students are taught to challenge themselves to understand various cultures from an emic (from the view of the culture being studied) and etic (from the view of the observer) approach and to understand the difference between the two approaches in their own learning and understanding. Students are also taught to understand how macrosystems , exosystems, and microsystems impact other/and their own culture(s) and nation(s). Teaching from an ecological approach helps students to understand globalization and how global issues may impact cultures different or the same from their own.
The students who have traveled abroad have begun to understand the complexities of culture and have begun to understand that it is difficult to compare nations if you are comparing cultures as there are many cultures often residing in one nation. The students began to understand how to think outside-the-box when looking at more macro-level issues and are constructing ways in how different nations solve common problems. The students have also demonstrated more awareness of their own biases as well as developed more sensitivity and tolerance to areas of difference.