Learning to Build Bridges: Promoting Skills for Complex Collaboration Across Professional and Cultural Boundaries

Abstract

Collaborating effectively with people with diverse professional/cultural backgrounds is a core skill in a globalized world. To prepare students, we need to understand how skills for interprofessional, and multicultural collaboration can best be (1) defined, (2) measured, (3) de- veloped (4), and fostered. Thus, this symposium seeks to identify shared challenges and poten- tial synergies in research on interprofessional and multicultural collaboration. So far, research- ers in these two areas have been working in parallel instead of pooling expertise. We argue that bringing together expertise from these two fields can advance educational theory and inform practice on collaborative learning and problem-solving. In this symposium we bring together experts from both fields who present selected theoretical frameworks and share empirical evi- dence. The symposium ends with an interactive discussion, lead by a leading scholar in the field, asking the question how we can prepare students for collaboration in authentic and complex settings.