The South African higher education landscape has become progressively diverse since the onset of democracy, with students emanating from different racial, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. As such, the country’s multicultural context highlights the need to focus on pedagogical approaches that promote inclusivity when designing learning experiences for diverse student needs and backgrounds. Cross-cultural interactions exist between educators, students, and instructional designers. Given that both implicit and explicit awareness is said to impact learning, it can be assumed that developing cultural competence affects the way learning is designed and experienced. Furthermore, developing a deepened understanding of the human experience is integral to the design thinking process. As such, researching, defining, and developing an empathetic understanding of a student audience is core to strategising the design of learning solutions that effectively meet user needs.

However, little consideration has been given to positioning culture as a core construct in this process, specifically within the domain of instructional design. There appears to be an underrepresentation of models and frameworks that guide cultural inclusion and diversity in instructional design. The hegemonic adoption of universal models does not offer a feasible approach to guiding cultural integration, or fostering cultural competence amongst designers, educators, and students. In contrast, culturally sensitive and inclusive frameworks and models prevail within the healthcare sector; a sector that is deeply concerned with the notion of holistic care for patients which can be attributed to a standard measure for cultural competence in healthcare being formalised in 2001.

Given that instructional design as an emerging field in both design and education as well as the fact that it draws from a plethora of models and frameworks which guide the design of effective learning experiences, benefit could be gained by framing both fields – healthcare and instructional design in higher education – as care professions. Within this framing, it becomes evident that developing cross-cultural competencies is paramount to delivering inclusive and holistic education. This paper employs Giger and Davidhizar’s Transcultural Model (2002), which emphasises cultural diversity and postulates that individuals can be assessed according to six cultural domains: communication, space, social organisation, time, environmental control, and biological variations. The model guides the effective design of healthcare solutions to meet the needs of a multicultural population, and this paper attempts to reframe this benefit within the context of instructional design. This exploratory paper will unpack each of the six domains, considering their relevance, application, and potential adaptation to Instructional Design within South African design education.
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