Click here to view the working paper (PDF)
This “Working Paper: Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Communication Project,” was written by Lance Hill and used for the basis for a panel discussion among an outstanding interdisciplinary consulting team for the project, which met in New Orleans in June, 2003.
The Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation have partnered on the Interdisciplinary Cultural Competency Project (ICCP) to develop training and evaluation standards on cultural competency for nonprofits, with a longterm goal of improving collaboration skills for people and organizations working for an inclusive and equitable society. The paper is intended to stimulate discussion and debate on defining cultural competency and developing national standards for evaluating cultural competency programs. The project arose from the efforts of the Southern Institute for Education and Research to develop effective assessment instruments for the Institute’s cross-cultural communication training programs. The project is also an opportunity to help a broader range of government agencies, nonprofits, community organizations, and businesses that use cultural competency training.
The paper was the product of a “working group” of consultants (see complete vitas and bios on blog site) who included two of the most esteemed scholars in intercultural communication: Dr. Derald Wing Sue of Columbia University and Dr. Stella Ting-Toomey of the University of California at Fullerton. Between the two of them, they have published twenty-six books and are regarded as the leading experts in their respective fields. They were joined by Lance Hill, Ph.D. and three experience practitioners, (1) Haywood Hall, M.D., Executive Director of the PanAmerican Collaborative Emergency Medicine Development Program and MedSpanish, a crosscultural training institute for health professionals; (2) Ted Quant, Executive Director of the Twomey Center at Loyola University who has twenty years of diversity training experience; (3) and Dr. Michael Kane, an international facilitator and training consultant who has extensive experience in cross-cultural training in Latin America and the Middle East. All working group members reviewed earlier draft of the paper and made numerous suggestions, some of which were incorporated in the final draft. Some of their comments can be found on the paper’s blog site. Citations are not uniformly formatted since some came from different authors, but they should be readily accessible to researcher.
After two years of preparing the working paper and the panel discussion transcript, the Institute was prepared to disseminate the materials when, unfortunately, our office in New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina. Digging out of the muck of Katrina, both physically and organizationally, delayed final editing and the creation of a web site for interactive discussion.