Enterprise Academy Fellow, Lecturer School of Tourism and Hospitality Management

Email: Deirdre.Ryan@TUDublin.ie

Deirdre is a lecturer and researcher in the fields of intercultural studies & Cultural Intelligence (CQ) in the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at TU Dublin. Her research interests include Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC), CQ, Transversal Skills and Continuous Professional Development in Higher Education. She is passionate about best practice teaching methodologies and in particular, re-imagining international education. Deirdre's PhD study employed an action research informed Community of Practice model to engage lecturers with the concept and practice of IoC. She has published nationally and internationally in the field of IoC.

 

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) for Enterprise & Academia

Cultural Intelligence is the ability to work and relate effectively in culturally diverse situations, an essential skill in an increasingly multicultural and diverse world. Furthermore, it is one of the core transversal skills required in the workplace, and enterprise generally is seeking innovative ways to improve their overall competence in this field. During her fellowship, Deirdre set out to address the need to mainstream Cultural Intelligence across enterprise and academia to meet the demands of the contemporary global workplace. This project developed a Cultural Immersion Framework which provides a mechanism to further connect TU Dublin with the world and become a truly globally connected university.

 

The need for cultural intelligence is reflected in reports such as Future of Jobs (World Economic Forum, 2016, 2020), UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015) and Deloitte Insights (2016) which all call for a system of higher education that prepares students to work in globally networked work environments. This fellowship aimed to realise such benefits through the mainstreaming of CQ. Deirdre aimed to help organisations become more culturally intelligent, as CQ is relevant to all contexts within an organisation (e.g. EDI programmes, recruitment, hiring and promotion, leadership development programmes and team development). To that end, she repurposed an already validated module from the Professional Diploma in Transversal skills into a 5 credit micro-credential which has direct relevance of to all programmes. This module (Global Citizenship in the Workplace) could also be adopted by schools across the university to help mainstream CQ into all curricula. She engaged with enterprise partners to develop cross-cultural challenges for students, a light-touch way of inserting the enterprise perspective which facilitates enterprises’ active engagement in the development of business critical CQ related challenges for students. Additionally, Deirdre piloted the Virtual Exchange (VE) best practice framework and typology for TU Dublin with Hainan University in China. She developed and piloted a CQ taster workshop for staff, international partners & enterprise partners, as well as briefing documents for international partners, and collaborated with two HNU lecturers to co-design and develop lessons. She undertook preliminary research with Virtual Reality (including a trial of Oculus headsets), to explore the use of VR in conjunction with CQ initiatives to further immerse students in cross-cultural experiences.

 

Following completion of her fellowship, Deirdre received additional funding to facilitate a pan-university "Internationalisation at Home" Community of Practice. She used this as a platform to engage staff, students and enterprise partners with the global work and learning initiatives. She facilitates the Global Citizenship in the Workplace (level 8) module for Sustainable Innovators in Enterprise (SIE), a pan-University programme, and supports the development of students CQ across the University. In this way She continues to highlight the value of CQ for enterprise and build enterprise partners in the context of CQ.