Abstract
Enrollment in U.S. universities and colleges is reflecting a more diverse student body. This diversity requires that academic departments revisit their curricula for adequately addressing the needs of students from different cultures within their programs. One such academic department is Workforce Education and Development (WED), which prepares students for highly technological and knowledge-based occupations of the diverse 21st Century workforce. A main mechanism for partly meeting such diversification is to modify an existing curriculum to accommodate the multicultural backgrounds of students. In this theoretical article, the authors reviewed research and literature on instructional systems design as well as cross-cultural issues for international students in higher education. The article presents the authors’ conclusion that there is scope for integrating cross-cultural elements into general workforce education curriculum design and proposes a theoretical framework based on social cognitive theory and the instructional design model for effecting this integration.