Twenty students participated in Braeburn's 6 month International Peer to Peer Mentor program from October, 2015 - April, 2016. This program matched 10 US students with 10 Indonesian, first generation college students with a goal of increasing cross cultural knowledge, intercultural sensitivity and building international relationships.
The US students were all studying global leadership, social entrepreneurship, international affairs and related topics in the classroom. This hands-on experience provided a learning space to practice global skills in addition to reading about them. Using a virtual Community of Practice as a theoretical framework, the progam was designed to target 5 foundational global skills that most employees will need, regardless of their job or technical role in a company. A US controller implementing a global financial system must navigate these areas just as an engineer co-designing a product on a global team.
The 5 Global Skills are:
Managing differences in:
1. Time zones
2. Language
3. Culture
4. Available technology
5. Socio economic backgrounds
This program was designed to compliment classroom learning by immersing students in a real global problem solving environment. Student pairs were tasked with completing one video chat per week & responding to an academic prompt, (e.g. What did you learn about your partner's government?) and a cultural prompt (e.g. What is your partner's favorite food?) each week.
This learning space allowed students to continually solve problems related to scheduling video chats (13 hour time difference), navigating English as a Second Language challenges, building trust and a relationship with a student from another culture, finding creative work-arounds for poor wifi connections and limited access to technology by the Indonesian students, and developing intercultural awareness and sensitivity (US college students expected they would attend college, Indonesian students were unexpectedly given the opportunity via sponsorhsip).
An abstract of the results of the program is available upon request and the student training manual is below.
The US students were all studying global leadership, social entrepreneurship, international affairs and related topics in the classroom. This hands-on experience provided a learning space to practice global skills in addition to reading about them. Using a virtual Community of Practice as a theoretical framework, the progam was designed to target 5 foundational global skills that most employees will need, regardless of their job or technical role in a company. A US controller implementing a global financial system must navigate these areas just as an engineer co-designing a product on a global team.
The 5 Global Skills are:
Managing differences in:
1. Time zones
2. Language
3. Culture
4. Available technology
5. Socio economic backgrounds
This program was designed to compliment classroom learning by immersing students in a real global problem solving environment. Student pairs were tasked with completing one video chat per week & responding to an academic prompt, (e.g. What did you learn about your partner's government?) and a cultural prompt (e.g. What is your partner's favorite food?) each week.
This learning space allowed students to continually solve problems related to scheduling video chats (13 hour time difference), navigating English as a Second Language challenges, building trust and a relationship with a student from another culture, finding creative work-arounds for poor wifi connections and limited access to technology by the Indonesian students, and developing intercultural awareness and sensitivity (US college students expected they would attend college, Indonesian students were unexpectedly given the opportunity via sponsorhsip).
An abstract of the results of the program is available upon request and the student training manual is below.