Telecom Bretagne- an intercultural global village?
Résumé
Inspite of the increased internationalisation of our campuses, there is overwhelming evidence that home and international students rarely engage naturally in meaningful intercultural interaction. Many contributing factors have been identified, such as social isolation, financial and academic difficulties and problems of cross-cultural adaptation for international students and language difficulties, fear of difference and peer pressure for home students. To remedy this situation, there is clearly a need for more student voices to be heard. This paper presents a study of a student-run, annual, intercultural event called the Global Village, which takes place on the campus of Telecom Bretagne, a French CDIO collaborator. Since 2005, this one day event has transformed the campus into a vibrant, colourful, bustling marketplace, where students from all over the world set up decorated stands, serve traditional food and perform songs and dances. We discuss the learning outcomes for both students and staff, using the CDIO syllabus and our Intercultural competence framework, supported by the results of questionnaires and interviews. We then suggest possible improvements to further include intercultural, integrated learning experiences into engineering education.