Working paper · In progress
Evidence from the UNESCO Chair Peace and Diplomacy Programmes
Osman Gültekin, Yaren Sude Fadir, M. A. Saadan Qasmani and Pragya Upreti · UNESCO
Abstract
Short-term mobility programmes have become a principal mechanism through which universities extend international experience to students for whom semester-length mobility is financially or academically inaccessible. Their contribution to intercultural competence development, however, remains unevenly evidenced, and the programmes delivered under the UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Programme have been almost entirely absent from this literature despite training and capacity-building forming an explicit component of the Chair mandate. This study evaluates intercultural competence outcomes across [N] participants from [N] countries who took part in the UNESCO Peace and Diplomacy Programmes delivered by the UNESCO Chair on Cultural Diplomacy, Governance and Education at Istanbul Aydın University between [year] and [year]. Employing a pre-programme and post-programme design supplemented by qualitative participant accounts, the study measures change across knowledge, attitude and application dimensions of intercultural competence as specified in Deardorff's process model, and examines the contribution of the programme's Model United Nations component as an applied pedagogical element. Findings indicate [results summary]. The study establishes that short-term programmes delivered under an institutional peace and diplomacy mandate produce measurable intercultural competence gains, that the Chair structure provides a replicable and portable delivery model of demonstrated international reach, and that the integration of simulation-based practice addresses a structural limitation in how compressed programmes pursue behavioural outcomes. We argue for the expansion of this model across the UNITWIN network and for the adoption of participant-level outcome measurement as standard practice within it.
Keywords
- intercultural competence development
- UNESCO Chairs
- UNITWIN
- short-term mobility
- Model United Nations
- peace education
- internationalisation of higher education
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