Guidelines for Internationalizing your Curriculum

Enhancing your curriculum:

This requires preparation and rethinking of the course goals to include intercultural issues and approaches. It involves enhancing your curriculum by adding Global Learning Outcomes (specifically awareness, perspective, and engagement); selecting active learning opportunities that reflect diverse points of view on events, topics, or issues as well as incorporating your students' personal experiences to enrich learning.

Transforming your curriculum:

This requires the most extensive form of IoC. It is a complete revision of course content to include various cultural perspectives and world views and allows students the opportunity to move between two or more world views. Study abroad programs that require students to become immersed in another culture are good examples of transformative experiences. (Note: this approach may not be appropriate for all courses or disciplines).

Any process of curriculum design involves decisions about program and learning outcomes, assessment tasks, and teaching and learning arrangements. It is common to hear faculty talk with both passion and concern about the "crowded curriculum;" and how there is never enough time to "fit everything in." Often such comments result from a focus on the delivery of content rather than on engaging students in active learning. An internationalized curriculum must focus on more than content. To make sense of and thrive in the world, students need to develop their ability to think critically, intercultural competencies, and problem-solving skills.

The diagram provides the process of internationalizing your curriculum. While each stage of the process appears to be separate and bounded, in practice, these boundaries are soft and permeable. The process of reviewing and reflecting often leads to imagining new possibilities, which then stimulated further review and reflection. Below is the process explained.