ABSTRACT
The Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Global Bridge included two concurrent programmes at VCU, one focused on the attitudes, knowledge, and skills of international and domestic students, the other on those of classroom faculty, operating in tandem to bridge academic and cultural gaps faced by international students in their first undergraduate year. Like many such programmes, the Global Bridge takes as its foundation Deardorff's Intercultural Competence Model, with its focus on developing attitudes, knowledge and comprehension, and skills. The Global Bridge builds on this model through an intentional focus on academic content and a highly deliberate metamodernist discursive approach to pedagogy and assessment. Departmental programmes focused on inclusive pedagogical practices have been introduced, as have university-wide initiatives for faculty building on the results of the Global Bridge, most notably VCU's Global Zone training programme for faculty, advisers, and staff.
