| This interactional ethnographic study addresses an emerging problem in higher education: the lack of research tracing the developing processes and principles for instructional design in global education programs. Curriculum design in higher education is often situated within a particular course within a discipline within an ongoing program. Therefore, to explore what constitutes designing a global education program, this study traced the history and development of a course on global innovation, in order to uncover the design principles visible in the opportunities for learning afforded students in an innovative global initiative in engineering education, the Non-Distance Education (NDE) program.;Situated in the NDE program in which the instructor engaged in an ongoing reflexive process of curriculum design over a seven-year period (2010--2016), this study presents two ethnographic telling cases. Each telling case was constructed by tracing the instructor's actions at a certain level of analytical scale, in order to explore design principles and factors that had not been examined in previous research. The first telling case examined the changes in the processes, practices, and activities afforded students as inscribed in the course syllabi across seven iterations of the course. The second telling case examined a two-hour focal event in 2016, to uncover the opportunities for learning intercultural communication that were structured across three phases of activity developed by the instructor.;Guided by the interactional ethnographic epistemological process, the study demonstrates a conceptually-driven approach to studying what was proposed, recognized, acknowledged, and socially constructed in and through the discourse and action in the curriculum-in-making process, rather than examining the planned or predefined curriculum. Analysis of the intertextual relationships within and across moments, events and actors made visible the historical developments of the course and the roots leading to identified changes in activities, processes and practices.;Furthermore, analysis of the three public texts constructed by the three groups of students in the focal event, Cultural Day 2, made visible how student groups interpreted and undertook a common task in different ways. By analyzing how students interpreted the differences and used the differences as resources to transform their actions and understandings in subsequent activities, the study made visible how the ways the instructor designed and structured the learning activities supported students' exploring cultural differences across national contexts.;Taken together the two telling cases lay a foundation for developing theoretical inferences from the processes, decisions, resources, and actions involved in designing, developing, and implementing an innovative curriculum in a global education initiative. The study, therefore, further contributes to developing understandings of the processes involved in researching and understanding the curriculum-in-the-making. |
