Exploring Collaborative Work for the Creation of Interdisciplinary Units Centered on Intercultural Citizenship

Oct 15, 2026

Report on a collaborative project at a Northeastern university exploring how to design interdisciplinary teaching units that integrate intercultural citizenship into world languages, mathematics, and sixth-grade social studies. Presents a framework enabling educators to develop intercultural citizenship while strengthening skills across diverse content areas. Describes co-design work with graduate students, teachers, and administrators, provides an example unit, and derives recommendations from qualitative analyses of notes, memos, and observations across four emergent collaboration themes.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Global citizenship and intercultural citizenship

Calls for education in a globalized world

Challenges in K-16 education

Proposed framework and project approach

3 Exploring Collaborative Work for the Creation of Interdisciplinary Units Centered on Intercultural Citizenship Manuela Wagner University of Connecticut Fabiana Cardetti University of Connecticut Michael Byram Durham University, England Abstract In this work we report on a collaborative project at a large Northeastern University, in which we explored how to best collaborate to develop interdisciplinary teaching units, which integrate intercultural citizenship (Byram, 2008) into world languages, mathematics and social studies sixth grade curricula. We argue for the importance of addressing current critical areas in education. After introducing a framework that allows teachers to focus on the development of intercultural citizenship while at the same time fostering skills in the diverse content areas, we report on how we worked with a group of graduate students, teachers and administrators in order to co-design interdisciplinary units focused on intercultural citizenship. An example of such an interdisciplinary unit is provided along with lessons learned about how we can facilitate this type of interdisciplinary collaboration. Our recommendations are based on qualitative analyses of the notes, memos and observations documented by the authors. Specifically, we share four emergent themes that illustrate how this group of educators successfully collaborated in this project: (1) Respecting disciplinary identities and boundaries,(2) Extending the understanding beyond the disciplines, (3) Ensuring a collaborative learning environment, and (4) Offering opportunities to continue the work beyond the course. Key words: Interdisciplinary collaboration, intercultural citizenship, STEM, teacher education Introduction The work presented in this chapter was motivated by two trends that occurred concurrently. Firstly, it is now more important than ever to prepare our students for an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Secondly, it is a much-lamented fact that U.S. students are behind many other countries in their performance on STEM 36 Dimension 2016 (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) assessments. Here, we hope to offer an approach that can tackle both challenges by helping students understand the interconnectedness of the content they learn in schools. Our proposal is to find ways of linking subjects, such as world languages and mathematics, and education and life beyond the walls of the school, through the concept of “intercultural citizenship.” We will first discuss recent calls for educational programs that prepare students to meet the challenges they will face in a globalized world by building competence in intercultural citizenship and then discuss the challenges in K-16 education that are obstacles in meeting those challenges. Then, we introduce a theoretical and practical framework that can potentially address the challenges via collaborative and interdisciplinary efforts. After this we introduce one project that exemplifies one way to achieve these specific goals. Lastly we describe the processes experienced by the team to achieve the respective goals in the project. It is important to note that we are not advocating a duplication of the project described in this paper because every collaboration may be different depending on the setting in which it will take place. However, we hope to provide the reader with a rationale for planning collaborative interdisciplinary projects focused on intercultural citizenship and some insight into the benefits as well as the complexities of a collaborative project of this kind. We start with the concept of intercultural citizenship which as we will show later, is related to the more widespread and a much-invoked term “global citizenship.” Because there are so many different definitions of global citizenship, the term remains vague. And yet many mission statements for schools and universities in the U.S. and abroad emphasize global citizenshi

FAQs

What is the main focus of the collaborative project described in the document?

The project explores how to collaborate to develop interdisciplinary teaching units that integrate intercultural citizenship into world languages, mathematics, and sixth-grade social studies.

How is intercultural citizenship connected to global citizenship in the text?

The document explains that intercultural citizenship is related to global citizenship, while noting that global citizenship has many definitions and can remain vague.

What sources are used to generate the recommendations in this work?

Recommendations are based on qualitative analyses of authors’ documented notes, memos, and observations from the collaboration process.

Oct 15, 2026

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