Dr. William Holliday, Associate Professor of History recently published an article with Dr. Lily Anne Goetz (EML) titled “Designing Programs to Foster Intercultural Competence through Interdisciplinary Study Abroad” in NECTFL Review 80 (September 2017): 11-46.

The article presents a model for a short-term interdisciplinary study abroad program designed specifically to foster intercultural competence. It also presents data demonstrating that participants showed improvement in their Spanish language-speaking abilities and exhibited high levels of cognitive and affective engagement. The data also suggests that participants generally performed favorably in comparison to student cohorts on-campus, especially in terms of engagement levels of students with grade point averages less than a 3.0 on a 4-point scale. The article also emphasizes that one cannot assume that cultural immersion will, on its own, lead to intercultural competence.

Besides collecting data for several years from the students they led overseas, Drs. Holiday and Goetz’s collaborative effort overcame numerous obstacles (often not so visible) that come with cross-disciplinary research, and their perseverance deserves extra notice.