Introducing LINC

As LINC supports the Valpo community through:

• Facilitating impactful opportunities supporting the intercultural development of Valpo students, faculty, and staff (see below),
• Providing engaging resources and spaces for individual reflection about intercultural development,
• Promoting campus conversations and healthy dialogue about intercultural topics, and
• Maintaining our traditional support for language students including tutoring, student-led language groups, and language-focused programming

Specific intercultural learning opportunities include:

• An intercultural inventory called the IDI, an online assessment that measures intercultural competence. Now available to campus through the center, the Intercultural Development Inventory serves as a new vehicle for individual development and as a springboard to advance campus conversations surrounding intercultural practices.
• Short term discussion and learning groups specific to faculty and staff. For example, the center hosted a summer group for faculty and staff who read and discussed the book Caste, the Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. This fall, LINC launched the Podcast Parlor group which continues this spring.  Also coming this spring is a group for faculty and staff who have completed the IDI assessment and want to further their intercultural competence within a community of practice.
• Programming with an intercultural focus, such as the Matters of Language Conversation Series, and other ways of engaging students with intercultural topics. New engagement displays are integrated into the LINC’s space, prompting small moments of individual reflection that will hopefully lead to informal conversation and healthy dialogue.
• Campus collaborations on special programs such as the screening of the film Origin as part of MLK Day week.

Intercultural competence is a person’s capacity to effectively and appropriately interact with people across cultural differences – differences in language, nationality, faith tradition, ethnicity, gender, identities, cultural heritage, and so on. Intercultural engagement involves navigating across differences with greater levels of complexity, and can be developed over time and with focused effort.

Intercultural learning refers to the actions an individual explicitly takes in order to build their own intercultural competence. This includes developing one’s ability to adjust perspective and adapt speech and behavior when interacting with other people across differences, while remaining authentic to one’s own values and beliefs.

Intercultural learning is purposeful, developmental, and challenging. This learning process is unique to each individual who intentionally commits to furthering their intercultural competence. Developing intercultural competence requires time, commitment, practice, and engagement with others who are different from you in multiple ways. Over time, you can increase your capacity to navigate interactions and experience cultures and individuals with greater levels of complexity.