[Workshop Contribution] Developing intercultural courses in a UK university context: Some curricular, strategic and research considerations

In this presentation, we will present and reflect upon our experiences in recent years of designing, developing, implementing and finetuning/revising a range of (what we broadly refer to as) intercultural courses. We will also briefly outline our upcoming development plans. This portfolio of intercultural course development involves: both undergraduate and postgraduate provision; face-to-face, elearning and blended learning modalities; and experiential sites in Manchester, overseas and online. The courses cater for both a specialised student body of experienced language teachers and a range of undergraduates (drawn from different faculties). These curriculum developments have taken place in a context in which the ‘intercultural’ was, for many years, noticeably absent from the institutional discourse. However, over recent years, the university’s vision for the undergraduate experience has increasingly seen cultural awareness, global citizenship, digital literacy and sustainability education foregrounded. Thus, our experiences regarding these courses can be characterised initially as ‘development largely in an institutional vacuum’. Nowadays, it might be more accurately characterised as ‘development in the vicinity of an intercultural agenda and emergent intercultural practice’. Although we will refer at some points to our ongoing research activity into the intercultural learning of our students, our presentation is primarily a reflection on our course development experiences.