Intercultural Learning

Learning opportunities for faculty and staff

Purdue University's Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment and Research (CILMAR) offers many opportunities for faculty and staff development in intercultural learning (ICL). These professional development opportunities are designed to equip ICL practitioners to embed ICL into the academic classroom, education abroad, co-curricular programming, and their own daily lives.

CILMAR provides needs analysis for faculty and staff for creating appropriate ICL interventions in various contexts.  The Center operates on a train-the-trainer model, first demonstrating the ICL tools used before a live audience, then inviting ICL practitioners to present the tools to others with a CILMAR specialist assisting, and then giving faculty and staff members ownership of the content.

CILMAR also provides support in the assessment of ICL and has a number of publications to share which demonstrate ICL growth in various contexts.  

Learning opportunitities for students

CILMAR's ultimate goal is that Purdue would graduate Boilermakers ready to meet the global challenges of the 21st century. In order to meet this objective, CILMAR works alongside the Purdue Study Abroad office, the Global Engineering Alliance for Research and Education (GEARE) program and the Learning Beyond the Classroom (LBC) program to embed ICL into the education abroad experience through COM 30301, SCI 39500, and ENGR 39700. 

Intercultural learning in the virtual context

CILMAR strives to be a leader in virtual intercultural learning (ICL), as well as face to face (F2F) ICL. As Boilermakers we are involved with the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap. We see limited mobility as an opportunity for Boilermakers to take the next giant leap in ICL through virtual learning. Possibilities are as wide as our imaginations can take us. We offer a few small steps to get started.