Global Studies
Level: Bronze
My global experience was taking MLL 305 (Intercultural Communication). This linguistics course is a global studies gateway requirement and provided a nice introduction to intercultural communication from a global perspective. While this was not very directly related to my grand challenge, I believe that because health informatics is a global issue, this experience has provided relevant and important skills in intercultural communication. If we are going to solve this challenge,
then the whole world needs to be able to work together and communicate. This course was 3 credit hours and took place during Spring 2020.
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Global perspectives are important to keep in mind while thinking about Health Informatics. Cultural communication can have a tremendous impact on every field and health informatics is no different. This is because great communication in the health industry can help prevent serious injuries, misdiagnosis, or even death. As we strive towards a more connected healthcare system, communication will only become more frequent and more important. One branch of health informatics where this is apparent is telehealth. The worlds best doctors could be made available to those all over the world through telecommunication. As the physical borders between countries and their healthcare systems fade away, it will be crucial for those in the healthcare industry to hone and maintain intercultural communicative skills.
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In relating this experience back to the GCSP, it can be seen that this experience contributes to two of the program wide learning objectives, those being integrity and perspectivism. For integrity, this experience allowed me to reevaluate my core beliefs on many different platforms. It also allowed me to justify my own beliefs and encourages me to follow my beliefs in many different cultural contexts. For perspectivism, this experience exposed me to many different ethical perspectives through debates and discussions during the course.
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Before I took this class, I was skeptical about how much value I would be able to get out of it. After all, I believed that I had a very sound global perspective going into it. However, slowly after each discussion I realized how much there was still out there for me to learn. This course taught me that for every perspective you learn about there are at least two more important global perspectives that come out of nowhere. This class has made me more aware of my surroundings on a global level, and it has also helped provide me with skills on how to attack cultural conflict when it happens. The skills that I picked up will help me in my future endeavors by allowing me to avoid conflict pitfalls and gain more understanding into potential perspectives of those that I will be working with in the future.
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Core Learning Objectives:
Working with Diverse Teams.
This experience will allow me to learn about cultural diversity. This is valuable because the world is made up of so many kinds of people, it is important to learn how to work with all of them.
Global Citizenship.
This course will give me a broad overview of all of the challenges we are facing as a planet. It will give me a new appreciation for challenges such as sustainability, poverty, and security and how to talk about them
Cultural Awareness.
MLL 305 will teach me to identify different attitudes, beliefs, values, and assumptions. It is all included in the course curriculum.
Openness to Difference.
This global studies gateway course will help open me to many personal and cultural differences. It will allow me to learn about how to act non-judgmentally in situations when differences might be present
Additional Learning Objectives:
Throughout the course we had many discussions on what makes the various cultures of the world unique. We discussed the knowledge, history, government and economic systems related to various different cultures.
This class also contributed to exhibiting consciousness of the connectedness of the world. We analyzed many different cultures and what each one contributed in many different social, and socioeconomic situations. It was very interesting to learn about the various different cultural characteristics that affect communication, and the economy.