Cultures and languages across the curriculum in global health: New curricular pathways toward internationalization

Abstract

Institutions of higher education have placed increasing importance on internationalising their curricula over the past 10 years. At Duke University, a private university in the southern United States, these efforts have led to a unique partnership between the Romance Studies Department and the Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI) that focuses on a curriculum design based on the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) model. Our partnership began in 2012 when Deborah Reisinger, Lecturer in French, and Joan Clifford, Lecturer in Spanish, teamed up with Kathryn Whetten, Director of the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research, to create a series of courses that explore global health issues in multiple target languages. At the end of the pilot’s first semester, we reached out to our colleague Darla Deardorff, a research scholar in Duke’s Program in Education, who consulted with our team to help integrate intercultural competency into the curriculum.