Applied Cultural Competencies Certificate

The applied cultural competencies certificate prepares students to live and work in multi-cultural social and professional environments, domestically and internationally. Students will learn to identify the cultural dynamics of the different settings within which they operate. They will develop insight into their own cultural assumptions and behaviors, and gain perspective in relation to the spectrum of differences that exist among others. They will also consider their own social position in relation to others, as defined by, for example, race, ethnicity, gender, class, nationality, religion and sexual orientation. The certificate prepares citizens of the contemporary world to better understand processes of culture and to navigate complex inter-cultural settings. It equips students with critical understanding combined with practical tools, as they gain the foundational knowledge, applied skills, and dispositions to more effectively navigate and collaborate amidst cultural variation in increasingly diverse local and global environments. 

Program Learner Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this program, students will be able to:

• define and operationalize the concept of culture in relation to different professions;
• express awareness of their own world view and positionality in relation to those of others;
• explain the value of cultural differences in society and professional settings;
• demonstrate knowledge of different cultural practices and world views in relation to specific professional settings;
• demonstrate skills for communication and interaction across cultures in different professional settings;
• demonstrate core competency in ethnographic methods as applied to different professional settings;
• identify how different world views and value systems might manifest in different professional settings, and describe opportunities for how to work across them;
• identify misapplications of “cultural” explanations;
• analyze different professional settings as socio-cultural systems (e.g. medical, educational, police/justice, organizational); and
• identify the issues that medical, educational, legal/law enforcement, business, social work anthropologists work on in relation to these systems.