The Intercultural Experience Project: A practical tool leveraging multiple intercultural experiences at home to foster student intercultural competence

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on an Intercultural Experience Project that higher education institutions could implement to foster student intercultural competence (ICC) without the need for cross-border mobility. The project requires students to engage in multiple, direct and indirect, interpersonal and non-personal experiences with a foreign culture while keeping a journal of their interactions. It guides students in writing a cultural essay, analysing both their own and the foreign culture as well as the distance between them, then a reflective essay on their ICC learning. Analysis of student journals and essays corroborates that the project fostered student ICC attitudes, skills, knowledge, and awareness, even leading some students to advanced intercultural maturity levels. The multiplicity of intercultural interactions enhanced the meaningfulness and depth of students’ experience, emboldened them to engage in various types of interactions, and helped them develop advanced ICC skills related to comparative, critical, and systemic thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural competence (ICC)
• experiential learning
• internationalisation at home

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nabil Ghantous

Nabil Ghantous is Professor of Marketing and Intercultural Management at EM Normandie Business School, Paris, France. His most recent research on higher education covers mainly the acquisition of intercultural competences, the sustainability of students’ international mobility programmes, and faculty’s appropriation of generative artificial intelligence.

Emna Belkhiria

Emna Belkhiria is the manager of Institutional Data and Policy Management Unit in Qatar University. Her multidisciplinary research includes sustainable development and policies in higher education. She holds a Doctorate in Higher Education Management from the University of Bath, UK.