Higher education administrators love to tout the idea of the pivot. The pivot is often presented by deans, chairs, AVP’s and other senior level administrators as an essential device, necessary for breathing life back into faltering departments in the university. The pivot, from the outside, is a nice active verb with a seemingly neutral and innocuous demeanor. It also has pleasant associations with dancing and being intentional and in-control. We should all strive to have a little more “pivot” in our lives, right?

But what is the value in the pivot? To pivot is to make an intentional and deliberate change. Making a change means concluding that the current direction is no longer the best course. It may also be an acknowledgement that the end goal has ceased to be the desired objective. Pivoting is not just changing direction, but it is also reevaluating the destination.

The upside for Global Educators, currently in a never-ending holding pattern, is the opportunity to evaluate whether the direction we have traditionally been moving in is still the best course given all the circumstances of 2020. One area deserving of renewed consideration is the application of intercultural communication skills. Global Educators are generally seen as the experts in this curricular and co-curricular domain. Most of us are experienced facilitators of courses, workshops, and briefings on intercultural competency, cross-cultural knowledge and inter-cultural communication. The current understanding and application of intercultural competence on our campuses needs a pivot to reestablish relevance in our post pandemic and diversity, equity, and inclusion landscape.

In global education, intercultural competence is the most common program learning outcome for study abroad students. This learning outcome focuses on increasing intercultural knowledge, understanding global interconnectivity and developing comfort with difference. It is commonly accepted that mastery of these topics can only be learned and/or are only useful when outside of our borders. Given the culturally diverse composition of most of the US, it’s very surprising that we only emphasize inter-cultural communication for students leaving the country. Why is developing comfort with difference and recognizing our relative cultural lense only seen as useful skills outside the United States?

While student mobility is curtailed, Global Educators have the perfect opportunity to pivot intercultural communication as a skill valuable for bringing the campus community closer together and improving engagement at the local level. In our own country’s current situation of social upheaval and racial unrest, teaching skills for respectful communication and developing strategies to be more comfortable with those different from us are more important now than ever.  Intercultural competence isn’t just for oversea travel anymore it is an essential component to building back our local communities split apart by a lack of ability of engage and accept cultures different from our own.