Between colleagues and communities: Students' lived experiences in the university for development studies third trimester field practical programme, Ghana

Abstract

Multicultural competence is increasingly positioned as a core graduate attribute in development-oriented higher education, yet the scholarship underpinning this claim has been constructed largely from Global North settings, international mobility schemes, and short classroom encounters. This study describes students' lived experiences of cultural diversity and team interaction during community immersion in the Third Trimester Field Practical Programme (TTFPP) of the University for Development Studies, Ghana, a mandatory, credit-bearing, two-year programme in which interprofessional and multiethnic student teams live and work in rural communities for seven to eight weeks annually without resident supervision. The study described how students experienced cultural diversity, how they navigated team interactions, and how these experiences evolved across Year 1 and Year 2 of participation. The analysis is oriented by four theoretical resources, Van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenology, Experiential learning theory, Group development theory and Cultural Mosaic Theory. A hermeneutic phenomenological design was employed, generating data through thirty-five individual interviews, eight focus group discussions with fifty-four students, and four coordinator interviews. Findings revealed three experiential structures: cultural encounter as disorienting arrival; identity under productive pressure; and team interaction as movement from fragmentation to cohesion. Students initially encountered difference as protocol breach, fear, and linguistic exclusion; subsequently as embodied participation, empathy, and inventive strategies such as ethnicity-matched household interviewing; and finally, as an enriched rather than diluted cultural selfhood. Cohesion consolidated around the fourth week of each immersion and again, at a higher level, in Year 2. The study concludes that multicultural learning in TTFPP is a temporally nested, community co-produced, and necessity-driven process in which discomfort functions as the productive entry point of learning. It recommends that UDS institutionalise pre-departure cultural orientation focused on interpretive preparation rather than discomfort prevention, incorporate multicultural competence as a named and assessed programme outcome, treat team composition as a deliberate design variable with minimum linguistic capacity requirements, and formalise community elder roles as recognised support structures.