"Intercultural sophistication"

I have read both Fernando Reimers's chapter on "Educating for Global Competency" as well as the excerpts from "Partnership for Global Learning" with interest.  Being a product of three very different cultures as well as a French teacher I have been more than aware of the utmost importance of being able to recognize "the others' and one's own perspectives."  What began over the past 23 years as a timid effort to begin incorporating  authors from the francophone world into our curriculum, has evolved into a year long course covering a large portion of the francophone world--including countries as diverse as Switzerland, Senegal, Martinique, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria as well as French Polynesia and Haiti!  We are so very fortunate at BB&N to be made up of a very diverse student body where we can live a multicultural experience on a daily basis.  However, offering our students the opportunity of learning one or two world languages is, in my opinion, one of the most important gifts we can provide to ensure their future global competency.   Understanding cultural differences has been a project my friend, Gilberte Furstenberg, worked on for 15 years at MIT  with her "Projet Cultura" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJR-j7ZCkiU.  Thanks to her students--and their French counterparts at Universities in France-- she was able to  delve deeply into and to give the students a better understanding of what makes the French and Americans different from each other.  It is an eye opening and extremely important educational challenge!

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Brigitte Tournier
French department
Buckingham Browne & Nichols