This fall at Assessment Day, NYIT faculty members discussed techniques for building global competency by taking advantage of the diverse students we have in our classrooms. The Discovery Core includes the following description of global competency:

Students can identify interdependencies among cultures and are able to collaborate effectively, participating in social and business settings globally.

Upon graduation, students will be able to:

• Recognize the impact of the global interconnectedness of issues, processes, trends, and systems on their academic specializations and worldviews.
• Practice well-researched oral, written, visual, and digital communication in its diverse cross-cultural forms.
• Describe a complex global issue from multiple cultural perspectives and explain how those perspectives affect the treatment of the issue.
• Employ effective and appropriate interaction and teamwork with people of different nationalities and cultures, demonstrating respect for social, cultural, and linguistic diversity.

NYIT faculty members described three challenges they frequently encounter and discussed strategies they have developed in response:

1. Language issues: comprehension, communication (oral and written), cultural misunderstandings and values differences.
2. Differences in learning styles and unfamiliarity with Western learning methods and norms.
3. Students do not have a uniform set of prior learning experiences.

It can be challenging to learn everyone's name, and some faculty members have developed strategies to do this. One faculty member asks students to write their names and seat locations on the white board in the classroom. Students then sit in the same seats for two or three weeks until everyone in class learns each others' names.

In addition to learning each others' names, students at NYIT learn about each others' cultures. In some English classes, students are assigned stories or poems to read, for example, a story about Dublin in 1900. The students are then asked to rewrite the literature to reflect current times, issues and their culture in their respective countries. In media classes in Communication Arts, students bring in samples of media from their respective countries, such as newspaper articles, magazine stories, video, or social media. They introduce themselves and talk about their cultures and how the media operates in their country.

Our students have different levels of proficiency in English. A number of faculty make use of Zoom, VoiceThread, and the asynchronous discussion boards on Blackboard, so students have time to think and prepare what they want to say in advance - always helpful when communicating in a second language.

In the Senior Design course in the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences, students work in teams that are comprised of local and international students. The teams must stay together for one year; students do not have the option of picking team members. Students must speak English as a team although they may speak their first language when necessary to clarify concepts. Required weekly presentations aid students in practicing their oral presentation skills, and significant improvement is evident over the course of the year.

The ability to work as part of a team is essential in today's world. Our faculty members build heterogeneous teams, so that students with different strengths can learn to work together effectively.

There's an art to forming teams so that they work effectively. First, learn about the backgrounds of the individual students and assess their interest levels in different topics. Try to keep students with similar research interests together. At the same time, try to mix students with different skills so that they complement each other. Alternatively, if you want truly randomized groups, pick the teams by numbers.

Encourage groups to self-manage by establishing group rules. For example, allow students to determine what happens if someone doesn't contribute, and to agree on an appropriate penalty if needed.

One way to add a global dimension is to assign projects that are set in context abroad. This strategy is especially effective when the setting is a region or culture in which no students belong, because all the students will then have to do research. You can also change the audience for presentations to one that is outside the students' peer group. This encourages the students to think about what they know and how to present the material in a different market setting. At the end of a group project, some faculty require each student to make a self-assessments of his or her contributions.

Future Weekly Teaching Notes will share specific strategies for teamwork. If you have a strategy you'd like to share, or if you want to follow up on any of these ideas, please contact me at fglazer@nyit.edu.