Intercultural Competence Development: Exploring International Graduate Student Leaders' Journeys through Contemplation and Mindfulness-Based Inquiry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given the globalization of education, intercultural competence (IC) is a pivotal learning outcome in student mobility and internationalization. While scholars conceptualize IC as the ability to communicate effectively and appropriately in cross-cultural contexts, few studies have explored international graduate student leaders’ IC development and how they perceive IC in their transitional journeys, and most research demonstrates IC development mainly through Western-centric frameworks. This study thus explored, through a non-dominant cultural lens, the IC development of international graduate student leaders to deepen the understanding of their lived experiences. Inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s philosophy of Engaged Buddhism, the study scaffolded an innovative contemplation and mindfulness-based inquiry and developed the Lotus theoretical framework combining Mezirow’s (1978) transformative learning theory and Drake’s (2010) story model to explore participants’ lived experiences. Eight international graduate student leaders from two Ontario institutions attended the semi-structured interview and two focus groups in the form of a Story Circle (Deardorff, 2020c). Findings depicted new narratives that challenged a deficit view about international students and revealed (a) participants’ perceptions about IC, (b) their journeys of perspective transformation, (c) their engagement in the meaning-making processes, and (d) the role of IC in leadership development. The study’s results offer insight into life in transition and how these students make meaning of their lives through leadership engagement and IC development. Such insights could raise awareness among different stakeholders about the meaning and importance of IC and may enable institutional leaders and practitioners to develop more effective programs and a more inclusive environment for all.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".