About CLAC

DEFINITION

The Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) Movement intends to make global competence a reality for students and to create alliances among educators to share practices and find ways to incorporate an international dimension in curricula, and, more generally, to achieve internationalization goals. General principles of CLAC include:
1. A focus on communication and content

2. An emphasis on developing meaningful content-focused language use outside traditional language classes

3. An approach to language use and cross-cultural skills as means for the achievement of global intellectual synthesis, in which students learn to combine and interpret knowledge produced in other languages and in other cultures

Within this large framework, CLAC can take many forms, depending on specific content and curricular goals within a discipline. Among areas of interest to CLAC educators are:

1. Alternative models of education that foster the acquisition of cross-cultural competences

2. Frameworks that serve to build connections between comparative literature, cultural studies and area studies

3. K-16 articulation models

4. Content-based language instruction and the development of new content-based foreign language textbooks and discipline-specific learning materials and technology

5. Study abroad including programs focused on professional studies

6. Heritage learner programs

7. Service learning models in cross-cultural contexts

MISSION STATEMENT

These recommendations are part of a report from AAC&U's National Leadership Council which is conducting a ten-year campaign to reaffirm the importanceof the liberal arts for America's future. The desired outcomes include knowledge of human cultures and the (which include communication),personal and social responsibility (including intercultural competence), and integrative learning across disciplines.physical world,intellectual and practical skills These outcomes are enhanced when students have opportunties to explore intercultural issues in the context of their broader studies and in their major fields.Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum promotes the kind of integrative study recommended by AAC&U and its National Leadership Council because CLAC helps students makes connections between what they are learning indifferent classesand gives them the necessary skills to understand alternative perspectives which are illuminated by the study of other cultures and languages.By utilizing foreign language in other disciplines CLAC also promotes more broadly based discipline-related vocabulary and an applied understanding of related issues in a real world context .

CRITICAL NEED

Educators in higher learning recognize the critical need to prepare graduates to meet the challenges of living in an increasingly globalized society.In order to respond to this need, graduates must acquire a deeper understanding of the many facets of our world interconnectedness,and be able to venture into other ways of perceiving and applying knowledge. While foreign language instruction helps students progress towards this goal, the task of producing globally competent graduates goes far beyond the scope of traditional foreign language instruction and is a university-wide issue that involves a wide range of disciplines and entities. There is a growing recognition that other disciplines, even those apparently "universal" disciplines such as the sciences, are framed by culture and developed within cultural contexts.

CHALLENGES

The challenge to U.S.universities and colleges is to find ways to link language and culture to other disciplines so that students have adequate opportunity to acquire cross-cultural competence, and learn to think of foreign languages and cultural knowledge as tools that can be applied in a wide variety of circumstances, not just when they are reading literature in the original or studying abroad.Meeting this challenge is both a structural and funding issue for universities and colleges.However, these kinds of opportunities are a critical part of the education of globally competent graduates, graduates who can access information presented in non-English language sources, and synthesize information from multiple cultural perspectives