Naropa University (Buddhist-inspired) has a vastly different culture and approach to education than the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA). For their senior capstone project, cadets co-created shared experiences with Naropa University to develop respect for each other’s culture using the scientist-educator model and intergroup contact theory. This mutual exchange of ideas/practices has the potential to make each culture more effective in meeting its mission. This cross-cultural collaboration is an application project based on a decade of our earlier research which involved pushing boundaries of comfort to develop and assess respect for those we often see as different from ourselves.
