CILMAR Seed Grant Program

Purdue University’s Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment and Research  is pleased to invite applications for funding to support intercultural assessment and research during the 2025-2026 academic year. This Seed Grant program supports faculty, staff and graduate students who wish to engage in the assessment of intercultural learning outcomes, conduct studies of intercultural competency development, and/or generate new intercultural theoretical development, but lack the resources to do so.  

Grant Amount: Upto $5000 (matching funds are encouraged from deans, heads and supervisors)
Call for 2025-2026 is OPEN: The call is here.

Review process

In the review process, we will prioritize applications that will:

  • Conduct research or assessment
  • Present a clear plan for intercultural assessment or research
  • Connect work explicitly to the CILMAR vision
  • Contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion work
  • Demonstrate significant impact at Purdue

Please note that travel is an allowable but low priority budget item for CILMAR seed grants; travel necessary for data collection will be more persuasive than travel to disseminate findings. The number and amount of awards will vary dependent upon requests for support and available funding.

Expectations

CILMAR Seed Grant recipients will be expected to:

  • Utilize intentional, reflective experiential/active learning pedagogies of engagement with cultural differences
  • Implement one or more of the following with Purdue students, faculty or staff:
    • Formative assessment of the attitudes, knowledge, skills or behavior of intercultural competence or related constructs (e.g., multicultural/diversity awareness, global citizenship, cultural intelligence, intercultural communication/interaction, etc.)
    • Program evaluation of an intercultural learning intervention in a course, study abroad or virtual exchange program, co-curricular program, diverse research team, etc.
    • Experiments, ethnography, or other common quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods studies that develop cultural/intercultural understandings or theories
    • Validation of new intercultural scales or inventories
    • Exploration at the intersection of global/international and diversity/equity/inclusion and social justice scholarship
  • Serve as a mentor to faculty and staff in the Purdue community interested in intercultural teaching and learning scholarship by participating in CILMAR writing groups, training seminars, and communities of practice
  • Pursue appropriate dissemination outlets for their projects in peer-reviewed academic conferences and journals

Application

Applicants should be employed and/or pursuing a course of study at Purdue University’s West Lafayette campus during the 2025-2026 academic year.

*Statewide Polytechnic and Purdue Indianapolis faculty are eligible. 

Please use the proposal template to complete the application. Submit the completed proposal, CV and endorsement email here by Friday, March 3rd, 2025. 

For more information, please contact cilmar@purdue.edu.

Next Steps 

  • CILMAR will make a public announcement on social media in April 2025.
  • At the end of the project you will be required to submit a white paper and a recorded video.

Note: Submit a white paper and video-recorded presentation of findings from the funded project to be published on the Intercultural Learning Hub by April 2026. The template for white papers can be found here. The video needs to to uploaded using Kaltura only; please watch this video for instructions.

SEED GRANT RECIPIENTS

2024

Alejandra Magana. $4000 for her project Transformative Pedagogy as an Approach to Promote Students’ Self-Awareness of Their Identities in the Context of Teamwork.

Zhixu (Rick) Yang and Franki Y.H. Kung, $2000 for their project The Experience of Mechanistic Dehumanization of Asian Workers in the U.S.: A Mixed-Methods Scale Development Study. 

2023

Siddhant Joshi, $2000, to assess the intercultural competence of the students engaged in a cross-culturally team-based experiential learning setting.

Adrie Koehler and Hannah Kim, $1480, to investigate the personal and teaching intercultural competencies of the students enrolled in the Teacher Education Program.

2022

Jianfen Chen, Yao Yang, $1450, to map out the cross-cultural challenges, needs, and supports that international students have encountered within the pandemic context.

Wanju Huang, $2000, to examine the effectiveness of intercultural learning
modules in enhancing students’ ICC, and explore to what extent a service-learning group project that involved the learners to recreate the ICC modules impact students’ practice of their ICC.

Huai-Rhin Kim, $1000, to investigate how BTS influences their fans to develop their intercultural communicative competence.

Sharon Li, Franki Kung, $2000, to explore how the internalization of “positive” Asian American stereotypes lead to negative workplace implications through dehumanization.

Kelsey Patton, Siqing Wei, Seungyoon Lee, $2000, to explore the career networks of international students searching for work in the U.S. post-graduation.

Diane Wang, Gary Burniske, Wilella Burgess, $1000, to conduct intercultural assessment of an undergraduate overseas STEM research experience for U.S. students.

Siqing Wei, Li Tan, Matthew Ohland, $2000, to examine the extent to which international students boost team-based learning effectiveness in undergraduate engineering education.

Alice Wilcoxson, Scott Lawrance, $396, to initiate programmatic development and assessment of intercultural competence as a healthcare provider in the Purdue Master of Science in athletic training program.

2021

Temitope Adeoye, Virginia Cabrera, Michael Lolkus, Daniella Castellanos Reyes, and Marquetta Strait, $2000, to evaluate the use of digital intercultural learning badges for College of Education Teaching Assistants

Casey Haney and Jennifer DeBoer, $300, to reconceptualize intercultural competency through a study of international students' development of cross-cultural skills and attitudes

Elizabeth Karcher and Paul Ebner, $2000, to create intercultural learning opportunities in an animal science curriculum

Huai-Rhin Kim, $2000, to study the impact of learning styles on intercultural learning outcomes

Christi Masters and Lata Krishnan, $2000, to compare the results of group versus individual debriefs of the Intercultural Development Inventory® 

Jill Newton, JoAnn Phillion, Rose Mbewe, Bima Sapkota, and Lili Zhou, $2000, to investigate intercultural competence development through a virtual global social justice in education course

Jacob Stensberg, $2000, to assess intercultural competence development through a music-centered intercultural curriculum

Marquetta Strait, $1010, to assess Supplemental Instruction (SI) leaders' culturally responsive practices in non-traditional learning environments

Joe Tort, Siddhant Sanjay Joshi, Kirsten Davis, Francisco Montalvo, Niall Peach, Bruno Staszkiewicz, and Akash Patil, $400, to explore engineering students' experiences and learning outcomes from participating in virtual team projects with international partners

Siqing Wei, Cristian Vargas, and Olivia (Tiantian) Li, $630, to study how international graduate students socially construct their academic paths in Engineering Education

Jonathan Ying, $720, to compare intercultural learning and competence in a face-to-face course using an evolutionary, evidence-based approach versus a virtual experiential intercultural learning course  

2020

Jaime Bauer Malandraki and Chenell Loudermill, $700, to assess the effectiveness of a grads training program to improve intercultural competence of graduate students

Elizabeth Karcher, $2160, to create intercultural assignments that embed intercultural learning pedagogies within an animal science context

Huai-Rhin Kim and Jungsun Kim, $1750, for a Systematic and Phenomenological Investigation of Intercultural Competency among Undergraduate Students at Purdue University

Sharon Li, $850, to develop and validate a scale for perceived immigrant contribution

Megan Sapp Nelson, $1180, to introduce Full Professors to mentoring and intersectional, cross-cultural communication education 

Pamela Sari, $2000, for Intercultural Learning between Asian international and Asian American students within Asian-interest student organizations

Jieyu Shi, $1000, to enhance intercultural learning in hospitality and tourism students through internationalizing the curriculum

Nathan Swanson, $1400, to address the persistent under-representation of minoritized and first-generation students in study away programs

Phuong Tran, $500, to design a Multicultural Reader to foster intercultural competence in first year writing students

Jonathan Ying, $460, for Program evaluation of an intercultural learning intervention in a management course

2019

Sweta Baniya, $2000, for a comparative analysis and assessment of intercultural communication of the disaster-affected digitally networked societies of Nepal and Puerto Rico

Bradley Dilger, Hadi Banat, Parva Panahi, Rebekah Sims and Phuong Tran, $4000, to link mainstream and international/L2 writing classes in order to support development of intercultural competence among all students, offering a socially just, effective model for fostering inclusion and community

Rebecca Johnson, $400, to assess the foundation of cultural competence within the School of Nursing faculty

Elizabeth Karcher, $1600, to identify best practices for promoting intercultural learning in short-term agricultural study abroad programs, specifically in the development of empathy

Colleen Kelly, $2000, to complete a three-article dissertation comprised of attempts to shed insight on the BEVI institutional signature phenomenon

Kristen Kirby, $1000, to demonstrate competencies within 80% of graduating senior students and faculty that impact patient care within the six constructs articulated by the AAC&U Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE Rubric by May 2022(student) and 2021 (faculty)

2018

Tatjana Babic Williams, $1300, to integrate a more intercultural approach into the curriculum of the Italian language program in the School of Languages and Cultures

Bradley Dilger, Hadi Banat, Parva Panahi, Rebekah Sims and Phuong Tran, $2000, for pairing native and non-native English-speaker first-year writing classes to determine how writing curricula and pedagogy influence the development of undergraduate students' intercultural competence

Louis Hickman, $2000, for the investigation of the relationship between beliefs about cultural controllability and intercultural competence development through a lab-based experiment with pre- and post-testing using the Cultural Controllability Scale

Yeling Jiang, $500, to understand Asian students' behaviors in US culture based on a virtual reality simulation

Nastasha Johnson, $2000, for a three-part intercultural intervention plan for Purdue Libraries faculty and staff that combines formative assessments and development workshops with reflective assignments to increase the intercultural competence of participants

Vasundhara Kaul, $1400, to understand the ways in which transgender people (called 'third gender') in Southern India cope with violence in their lives

Lata Krishnan, $1000, to develop a new Speech, Language and Hearing study abroad opportunity with a service-learning component

Kyongson Park, $500, to examine the relationship between academic, social, and linguistic integration of international students on campus from a process-oriented perspective

Heidi Parker and Margaret Hegwood, $2000, for the intentional development of global and intercultural competence in students enrolled in GEP 200: Research and Design for the Global Engineering Grand Challenges

Ronald Smith, Myron McClure and Robert Stwalley, $1500, to provide an effective way for students to become aware of the importance of intercultural competence and stakeholder diversity and inclusion throughout the design process of the Agricultural & Biological Engineering capstone project

2017

Hadi Banat, Parva Panahi, Rebekah Sims, & Phuong Tran, $2000, for a research study of intercultural competency development in First Year Writing courses

Xueting Dou, $500, for a conceptual framework for the development of intercultural sensitivity through community-based cultural tourism

Louis Hickman, $500, for a new theoretically based approach to intercultural learning and assessment

Horane Diatta-Holgate, $2000, for the cultivation of classroom environments that facilitate academic achievement, motivation and development of intercultural attitudes, skills and knowledge using data from instructors and their students

Elizabeth Karcher, $500, for creating collaborative video blogs with students studying abroad

Vicki Kennell, $2000, for the evaluation of the intercultural training of writing tutors in comparison to a control group who received no intercultural intervention

Anne Lucietto, $500, for the comparison of IDI data, pre-study abroad, between Purdue STEM students and others found in referenced studies, in which STEM students fell into more ethnocentric levels of intercultural competence.

Monica Miller, $2000, for a project integrating and assessing self-awareness interventions in the pharmacy curriculum

Heidi Parker, $2000, for a study abroad research project which incorporates the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) and the Global Competence Certificate (GCC) into the curriculum. 

Darryl Reano, $500, for GeoConnections and Place-Based Education at Heritage University: Preliminary analysis and results from an introductory environmental science course

Goals: Learning Outcomes and Evidence

Per the recommendations of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) Transparency Framework and the NILOA Excellence in Assessment Standards, we provide the goals for each program offered through CILMAR.

75% of Seed Grant recipients will demonstrate generation of creative and innovative new knowledge relevant to intercultural competence. Each Seed Grant recipient will complete one white paper, one video presentation, and one conference presentation or journal article. These will be assessed, as categorized by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Creative Thinking VALUE Rubric, for innovative thinking and for connecting/synthesizing/transforming. In this baseline year of data-analysis for creative quality, the goal will be 75% at level three (high milestone) or above on both items.

Updated 12/19/2024