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An Alternative Pedagogical Approach for Bridge Programs for Internationally Trained Healthcare Practitioners

Mon, April 15, 3:15 to 4:45pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview A/B Foyers

Proposal

Over the last several decades, the increased worldwide demand for healthcare have opened borders of the U.S. for foreign labor, resulting in rapid rise in the number of internationally trained healthcare providers. As a result, policy makers have sparked discussions surrounding the creation of ‘bridge programs’ in which the international professionals are credentialed regarding the core elements of practicing medicine (Wynia & Osborn, 2010). Recently, the bridge programs have started offering cross-cultural communication courses to help international professionals improve their healthcare communication skills. A close analysis, however, shows that most of the cross-cultural courses adopt a nation-state assimilation perspective in which monolingual cultural pedagogies are preferred, thereby restricting students in today’s contexts of linguistic and cultural pluralism (Canagarajah, 2013). Given the changing dynamics, migration is now theorized as transnational and the dominant notions of migrant acculturation and assimilation is called into question. As migrants no longer feel obligated to remain tied to a ‘given’ unitary culture (Gou & Maitra, 2017), traditional methods of teaching surrounding the language differences will be inadequate to support the body of international healthcare practitioners and their transcultural/lingual identities.

In this presentation, we propose that using a framework of intercultural rhetoric and translingualism in the development of a cross-cultural communication course can be a crucial component to enhance rigorous bridge programs (McIntosh, Connor, Gokpinar-Shelton, 2018). During the poster session, we describe the development process of a 13-week healthcare communication course prepared for internationally trained dentists at a Midwest university. Classroom activities are featured to help practitioners understand the ways the curriculum is designed to encourage students to embrace their own language and cultural diversity while they negotiate the norms within various discourse communities. The goal of the presentation is to offer an alternative pedagogy to support the needs of internationally trained healthcare practitioners in today’s transnational world.

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