The immersion imperative: Students' lived experiences of developing multicultural competence in interprofessional, multiethnic teams during the university third trimester field practical programme

Abstract

Multicultural competence is widely claimed as a graduate attribute in higher education, yet the evidence base describing how it develops is drawn predominantly from international mobility, classroom encounters, and short-term project teams in the Global North. Intra-national cultural diversity, the form of difference most African students navigate daily, remains largely unexamined. This article analyses the processes through which undergraduate students develop multicultural competence within the interprofessional, multiethnic teams of the Third Trimester Field Practical Programme (TTFPP) at the University for Development Studies, Ghana. The TTFPP is a mandatory, credit-bearing, two-year community immersion in which student teams live and work in rural Ghanaian communities for seven to eight weeks annually without resident supervision. The analysis is oriented by an integrated framework in which four bodies of theory, The Cultural Dynamic Framework, Experiential Learning Theory, Social Learning Theory and the Cultural Mosaic Theory. Adopting a social-constructivist paradigm and hermeneutic phenomenological design, the study draws on thirty-five individual in-depth interviews, eight focus group discussions involving fifty-four students, and four coordinator and supervisor interviews (ninety-three participants total), analysed through interpretative phenomenological analysis structured by reflexive thematic analysis. Findings reveal that multicultural competence developed through two processes: (1) learning driven by necessity, comprising communicative adaptation under task demand and the disruption of inter-ethnic stereotypes through counter-stereotypical relational encounters; and (2) structural enablers, comprising the reflective field notebook, the Year 2 development proposal as an interdisciplinary synthesis task, and peer-governed learning in the absence of supervisory authority. Year 1 generated adaptation and stereotype disruption; Year 2 converted these gains into disciplinary synthesis and pre-normed collaboration. The study argues that competence in this setting is produced by the institutional structuring of necessity rather than by exhortation or goodwill, and that assessment design functions as a pedagogical instrument of intercultural development rather than merely its measure.