DIVR Courses

Global Cultural Diversity courses introduce students to differences, similarities, and connections among cultures by exploring the multiplicity of individual and group experiences within and across historical periods, societies, and cultures in global comparative context. Courses help students engage and understand social and cultural contexts and interactions across the globe using critical thinking, information literacy, communication, self-awareness, and flexibility in perspective. Using multiple cultural or intellectual perspectives, courses prepare students to address questions about how factors such as history; politics; communication styles; economics; institutions; and/or cultural values, beliefs, and practices influence cultural variation. Courses are intended to help prepare students for lifelong constructive engagement with others in plural societies, promoting the abilities to suspend value judgment in interactions with culturally different others and/or the core beliefs of others; and to negotiate a shared understanding of what produces cultural variation and/or how culture changes across time and/or different geographic and environmental contexts.

Student Learning Outcomes

Students, regardless of major, who successfully complete a DIVR course should be able to:

• Understand fundamental knowledge and concepts related to cultural diversity as appropriate to the discipline (WSU LG: breadth of learning).
• Recognize the complexity of elements important to members of a culture in relation to history, values, politics, communication styles, economy, or beliefs and practices (WSU LG: diversity).
• Recognize the sources and limits of one’s own perspective and cultural rules and limitations in relation to the perspectives of others (WSU LG: critical thinking).
• Identify relevant sources of information that demonstrate ways that history, institutions, and/or ideologies shape cultural variation and/or different experiences (WSU LG: informational literacy).
• Evaluate, at an appropriate level, claims or information about cultural diversity based on the sources and the methods used to generate it (WSU LG: information literacy).
• Communicate about cultural diversity in written forms appropriate to the discipline (WSU LG: written communication).

Revised outcomes approved Fall 2022.

Available DIVR Courses