When Universities Train Their Teachers, Engineering Students Learn to Bridge Cultures

Engineering has long been imagined as a universal language of equations, circuits, and load calculations, but the workplaces that graduates enter are anything but culturally uniform. From multinational construction consortia to distributed software teams, the modern engineer negotiates meaning across borders as often as across disciplines. A new study from Indonesia, one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse nations on Earth, now offers a detailed statistical map of how universities can build that cross-cultural capability into technical education, and the findings suggest that the pathway runs directly through how faculty members are trained and supported.

The research, published in Discover Education, surveyed 814 undergraduate engineering students at a public Indonesian university spanning six departments, including electronic, electrical, mechanical, automotive, civil, and mining engineering. Led by Muhammad Husin of Universitas Negeri Padang, with collaborators from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Somalia, and Uganda, the team constructed and tested a process-oriented model using structural equation modeling, a statistical technique capable of tracing direct and indirect relationships among many variables simultaneously. The goal was to connect, in a single framework, seven constructs that researchers had previously studied largely in isolation: perceived faculty development support, cultural intelligence, intercultural competence, interculturally informed teaching practices, intercultural student engagement, perceived institutional support, and student learning outcomes.

The logic of the model follows a chain that begins long before a student enters a classroom. When students perceive that their lecturers receive meaningful professional development, including workshops, training programs, mentorship, and intercultural resources, they report higher levels of cultural intelligence, the capacity to function effectively across culturally diverse settings. That cultural intelligence, in turn, was associated with stronger intercultural competence, the ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from different cultural backgrounds. Students with stronger intercultural competence then perceived more interculturally informed teaching practices in their courses, such as the integration of diverse cultural perspectives, inclusive learning materials, and activities designed for multicultural contexts. Those perceived practices were linked to greater intercultural student engagement, and engagement was ultimately associated with higher self-reported learning outcomes.

The statistical evidence for this chain was striking. Faculty development support showed a very large effect size on cultural intelligence, with an f-squared value of 1.239, far above the conventional threshold of 0.35 for a large effect. Intercultural competence showed an even larger effect on perceived teaching practices, at 1.764, while interculturally informed teaching practices exerted a strong effect of 0.640 on intercultural engagement. All thirteen hypothesized direct and mediated pathways reached statistical significance, with bootstrapped t-values exceeding the critical threshold and p-values well below 0.05. The model also demonstrated adequate predictive relevance across all outcome constructs, with student learning outcomes and teaching practices showing the strongest explanatory and predictive performance.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns sequential mediation. The analysis indicated that students’ perceptions of faculty development support were indirectly associated with learning outcomes through a cascade of four mediators: cultural intelligence, intercultural competence, perceived teaching practices, and intercultural engagement. In other words, investment in lecturers appeared to matter to students not as an abstract administrative expense but as a visible foundation for the intercultural capabilities and classroom experiences that students themselves reported. Institutional support, encompassing policies, resources, infrastructure, and administrative commitment, showed both direct and indirect associations with intercultural competence and learning outcomes, reinforcing the idea that educational innovation depends on organizational structures rather than on heroic individual effort alone.

The authors are careful about what their data can and cannot show. Every variable was measured through students’ self-reports, so faculty development support and institutional support represent student perceptions of their lecturers and university rather than direct assessments of faculty competence or institutional performance. The cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, and the convenience sampling approach, which distributed an online questionnaire to the entire engineering faculty population, may exclude students with limited internet access and limits generalization beyond the studied institution. The relationships should be read as associations among perceptions and self-reported experiences, not as proven causal mechanisms operating at the faculty or institutional level.

Even with those caveats, the methodological groundwork was thorough. Because no established instrument covered all seven constructs together, the team developed a new questionnaire grounded in the intercultural education literature and piloted it with 51 undergraduate engineering students. Exploratory factor analysis using principal component extraction produced factor loadings between 0.638 and 0.949, all comfortably above the 0.50 threshold for construct validity. Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, a measure of internal consistency, ranged from 0.761 for faculty development support to 0.847 for intercultural competence, indicating satisfactory reliability across all seven constructs. All items used a five-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, and the main survey data were analyzed with SmartPLS software following standard procedures for assessing measurement and structural models.

Why does this matter beyond one Indonesian campus? Engineering education has historically lagged other fields in attending to intercultural learning, even as professional practice becomes relentlessly global. Graduates increasingly collaborate across national and cultural boundaries, and the ability to do so effectively is now considered an essential professional competency rather than a soft skill. Prior studies had established that faculty workshops can raise intercultural awareness, and that culturally responsive teaching can boost engagement, but the mechanisms linking institutional investment to student outcomes remained poorly charted. By modeling the full sequence, the new study provides a systems-level view: intercultural capability is not simply an individual attribute that students either possess or lack, but something cultivated through an alignment of institutional policy, faculty development, pedagogical design, and classroom participation.

The practical implications are concrete. Universities seeking globally responsive engineering programs, the authors argue, should prioritize faculty development that explicitly incorporates intercultural training, reflective learning activities, and cross-cultural pedagogical strategies. They should support interculturally informed teaching through curriculum development, teaching resources, and institutional incentives, and they should make institutional commitment visible through dedicated funding, mentorship networks, and strategic frameworks that embed intercultural learning objectives. Finally, institutions should treat intercultural student engagement, participation in culturally diverse discussions, collaborative projects, and internationalized curricula, as a core component of the learning experience rather than an optional enrichment, because engagement appears to be the final bridge between inclusive pedagogy and measurable learning gains.

The study also opens a research agenda. The authors call for multi-institutional, longitudinal, and multi-source investigations that could test whether the observed associations hold across different disciplines, countries, and educational levels, and that could incorporate faculty assessments, classroom observations, and institutional records alongside student self-reports. Longitudinal designs would be especially valuable because intercultural competence is a dynamic capability that develops over the course of an academic journey, not a fixed trait captured in a single survey. For now, the message from 814 Indonesian engineering students is clear and quietly radical: when a university visibly invests in its teachers, students notice, and what they notice shows up in how confidently they navigate a culturally complex world. In an era when engineering problems, from climate infrastructure to global supply chains, refuse to respect cultural boundaries, that may be one of the most important lessons a technical degree can teach.

Subject of Research: Intercultural competence development in Indonesian undergraduate engineering education

Article Title: Building intercultural competence in Indonesian engineering education through faculty development, institutional support, and teaching innovation

Article References: Husin, M., Almaaytah, S. A., Ibrahim, A. A., Hashi, A. I., & Laban, O. (2026). Building intercultural competence in Indonesian engineering education through faculty development, institutional support, and teaching innovation. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1067. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02233-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02233-y

Keywords: intercultural competence, cultural intelligence, engineering education, faculty development, institutional support, student engagement, structural equation modeling, Indonesia, higher education, culturally responsive teaching, learning outcomes, PLS-SEM