Strategy and action: Assessing student-led culture workshops within the professions

In order to prepare students to successfully engage with native speakers and members of heritage language communities both at home and abroad, educators must develop course curricula that emphasize cultural practices, products, perspectives, and comparisons as well as provide students with opportunities to directly apply the skills that they have acquired in the classroom across a range of other settings. This article describes a Culture for the Professions course whose curriculum was based on the four steps of the cultural intelligence model (Earley & Ang, 2003): drive, knowledge, strategy, and action. The study focuses in particular on how students implemented the last two components of the model (strategy and action) by collaborating with local organizations to design and present culture workshops that were specifically tailored to each organization's needs and mission. In addition to benefiting the organizations themselves, data obtained from evaluation rubrics and postworkshop reflections suggest that community culture workshops allow students to become more aware of how culture influences the work of an organization and to develop strategies to bridge cultural differences in the workplace.