QEP Thoughts and GC

I was going through the QEP briefly tonight and I noticed a chapter that stood out to me the most out of the (seemingly exhaustive) QEP.  Specifically, it was Chapter 3 in the QEP concerning student outcomes and a plan for implementation of the new QEP throughout the university. It is specifically concerned with upping some of the requirements for undergraduates to become globally and locally competent as it seems the incoming freshman are not necessarily up to par when it comes to diversity, culture, and multicultural interactions.

The concept or proposal that struck me the most is exactly what the QEP plans to do to achieve competency throughout the undergrad population. The big step is to require that students of all disciplines take 3 credit hours of multicultural coursework and 6 hours of writing intensive coursework. The writing intensive part of this proposal seems like a great idea as many engineers and STEM disciplines seem to want to downplay the amount of work and thought that goes in to a competently written document. Additionally, it would seem that the line of thought is that in order to be able to write across cultures and on the global level then a student should have a strong core in writing on the basic level of their own native language. However, the multicultural requirement troubles me for one reason: it doesn't really seem all that multicultural.

For instance, the specific language regarding this course says, "TTU students must complete a three-hour designated Multicultural Course that focuses on U.S. subcultures or the cultures of other societies. Students can fulfill the Multicultural Course requirement by selecting a course from 53 options that span the undergraduate curriculum from 'Introduction to Agricultural Education' to 'World Dance Forms' to 'Cultural Aspects of Food' to 'World of Egypt and the Near East.' They can also fulfill the requirement by completing an approved Study Abroad Program, with assessments by the TTU Study Abroad Office." (QEP, 2015). The focus on U.S. subcultures seems a bit out of place. What does that mean exactly? Not to pull down the QEP or those who designed it, but what makes U.S. subcultures part of being multicultural exactly? If we think about how Appadurai talks about villages and neighborhoods being constructed I could see some link there. There are many smaller pockets of tradition and culture from around the world in the U.S., but the "melting pot" concept is more like a "bowl of salad" where we are all kind of tossed together, but don't necessarily meld completely.

Also, we've talked briefly in class about how other cultures fund their students and faculty to go to other countries to work and study to truly develop competence in their workers and scholars. Here it says a student can fulfill that requirement by studying abroad, but there isn't any funding to give students so that they can actually afford the ridiculous cost to do that. I admire the development of the Global Communication center and appointing fellows every year who get to be involved in courses, but again, things like Intro to Sociology and Art Appreciation are valued higher over classes based in English it seems. I wonder if teaching in the FYC program (which every student has to take or get credit for) would qualify us to become fellows in a global communication context. I would say so, especially if it affords the opportunity to make connections and gather training to help mediate the fact that many of our FYC classes are heavily saturated with students from different cultures.

Overall, the state of Global Communication, to me, is that we are trying. It's not an easy task by any means. The fact that TTU has the foresight in the next 5 years or so to see that being able to produce workers with intercultural competence is important is a great stride. I haven't read the QEP 100%, so I can only comment on that one chapter, but overall I would like to study it further to see how it was constructed from a rhetorical standpoint.

As a side note: At the end of Chapter 3 is just a singular picture of a black student with no title or caption or anything. Kind of just....there. Is that what "multicultural" is to TTU? Is it representative?