Iowa State’s Languages and Cultures for the Professions (LCP) program allows students to pursue a professional track degree—in the College of Business, the College of Agriculture, or the College of Engineering—while at the same time pursuing a second major in their chosen language in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (within the Department of World Languages and Cultures). It’s not just a language that students enrolled in this program are learning, though. LCP students are gaining the skills to be successful cultural entrepreneurs; they are not only able to communicate in a second language, but they become culturally competent and develop the skills to succeed in multicultural and multilingual professional settings.
To date, past LCP graduates do not have a place in the LCP curriculum and it’s difficult for our current students to see tangible examples of successful, worldly, multilingual professionals working in the vast fields of agriculture, business, and engineering. Relatedly, there is little—if any—contact between our successful LCP graduates working in international firms and enterprises, serving as medical professionals in bilingual clinics, working abroad, etc., which is why the primary goal of this proposed OER resource is to allow for our Iowa State LCP graduates—and their testimonies of global agility and cultural entrepreneurship—to enter, albeit digitally, into the undergraduate classroom.
In addition to these “video shorts,” I also created assessments that related to each video at the end of each respective module (in Spanish), and incorporated engagement on the Discussion Board in Canvas centered around themes presented in the videos. Students enjoyed the videos and in an anonymous survey, most shared that they did not previously think about what it really means to be a “global professional” in today’s workplace.