21st Century Icebreakers | Tools For Online Learning

Posted on September 5, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

It’s always difficult to begin a course or a training workshop when your peers are strangers, especially when they are people who come from a conext or a culture you know little about. Imagine then, how tricky it can be to go through this process online, without the possibility of doing ice-breaker activities in person, or the non-verbal cues we rely so heavily on in communication. When interacting online, sometimes we operate with very few cues at all!

Aditi Rao

Everyone who has facilitated an online learning activity knows that the biggest challenge of online cooperation and learning is to develop feeling for the interest, preferences, and habits of those “on the other side of the computer”. It is difficult when you can neither see them nor sense any of the (verbal and) non-verbal cues that most of us rely on when building a relationship. So if you can’t rely on these cues, what can you do to make the online interaction successful and satisfying for all involved?

Aditi Rao, who has recently published an article about 21st Century Icebreakers gives a number of very practical and easy-to-use tips for “breaking the ice” in an online interaction. Her suggestions are simpler than you might imagine.

For creative ways of getting to know each other: you can use Pinterest (ask everyone to take 10 pins to represent themselves) or ask the group to prepare a very short podcast about themselves. Another possibility is for everyone to introduce her or himself through a blog post. For younger or especially creative groups it may also be effective to ask everybody to create comic strips about themselves.
For tools to collect feedback: Polleverywhere, Google Forms, Survey Monkey, and many other tools are available – for free!
For interactive tools that keep everyone engaged, and to get dynamic feedback use Word Clouds, QR Codes, and Voki (a tool for creating speaking avatars). During the last months, participants of the Intercultural Link Learning Program have also had the chance to experience Voice Thread and Blackboard - two interactive programs that are helpful for conducting successful online learning activities.

For more tips to having successful interactions online and links to resources on Aditi Rao’s blog visit TeachBytes.

Word Cloud for this article

For those with little experience conducting webinars, Cate Brubaker, an intercultural trainer who is experienced in delivering webinars, also shares some helpful tips:

Attend enough webinars before you deliver your first own webinar.
Practice, practice, practice with friends, test groups, or by recording your own webinar.
Use a variety of strategies to deliver the content: pictures, graphs, polls, music, videos – whatever works best for you!
Cooperate with another person for the facilitation of your session. This way, you’ll have more time to focus on the facilitation of your session.
Choose a topic that you know a lot of people have questions about.
Don’t think too much – just do it!

On her website SmallPlanetStudio, Cate Brubaker offers other material, free teleclasses, and ideas for how to successfully facilitate intercultural learning – online and offline. In the past few years, AFSers all over the world have been using these tools and materials to better support the interpersonal and intercultural learning connected to the life-changing experience of going abroad and hosting a young person from another culture. AFS Volunteers and Staff involved in the Intercultural Link Learning Program have participated in anumber of these online learning activities and have used many of the above mentioned tools.

When our work is rooted in interpersonal communication and in effectively and appropriately engaging with cultural differences, we have a lot to learn from online learning and can make the most of it by exploring the myriad tools and options becoming available each day. Tell us what online tools you’ve used to facilitate intercultural online learning!

Connecting Young People Worldwide | The GNG Youtube Channel

Posted on August 27, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

The Youtube channel of the Global Nomads Group (GNG), an NGO that fosters intercultural dialogue and understanding amongst the world’s youth, offers 272 free videos that portray how young people from all over the world live, what they think, and how they discuss and cooperate with others from different countries. Many of the videos show how groups of young people (usually secondary school classes) from two completely different countries meet each other, listen to each other, and learn about each other’s realities through online classroom exchange, known as Exchange 2.0. Many other videos also show interviews with young people and portraits of their lives in the US, Uganda, Haiti, Spain, Vietnam, and many other countries.

AFS-USA, AFS Indonesia, AFS Malaysia and the US Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam have cooperated with GNG for a media literacy project called the Global Connections: one LENS program. This program is sponsored through the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Through this project, opportunities were offered to students and educators from Indonesia, Malaysia, the United States, and Vietnam to develop their media skills and to get to know each other better through working towards a common goal. The students met online (through video conferences and social networking), and later also in person. The project ended with a local media festival, where students had the opportunity to showcase their public service announcements or digital stories. On the Youtube channel below, you can find videos that were taken during the completion of this project.

This cooperation of AFS and the Global Nomads Group was a big success. It has become more and more common for us, especially for young people, to connect to others via online tools and video conferences. AFS and the Global Nomads Group have pioneered in the area of facilitating youth exchange using these tools, and their positive and very successful experience lets us hope that there is more to come in this area.

Deep Culture Learning | Webinar with Young SIETAR

Posted on August 20, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

Young Sietar is an international organization of young professionals in the field of Intercultural Learning that regularly provides its members webinars on numerous intercultural topics. One of these, an online webinar on “Deep Culture Learning: The Cognitive Unconscious and the International Brain” will take place on September 15, 2012 at 12:00 – 1:00 pm BST (British Summer Time). To check availability and to register for this webinar, click here.

This webinar addresses the fundamentals of neurology, cognition, and perception and by presenting the concept of “Deep Culture Learning” Joseph Shaules, author of the book Deep Culture: The Hidden Challenges of Global Living, invites participants to discover ways to get in touch deeply with a new culture - beyond the tip of the iceberg. Shaules argues that if we learn a culture, we will more deeply impact our brain’s unconscious “Auto-Pilot”, also known as our “Cognitive Unconscious”.

Joseph Shaules is an intercultural educator who has worked and lived in Japan, Mexico, and Europe for more than 20 years. He is now an associate professor at the Rikkyo University Graduate School of Intercultural Communication, Tokyo. He is the author of many books, including “Beneath the Surface: A Beginner’s Guide to the Deep Culture Experience” (Intercultural Press); “Identity” (Oxford University Press), and “Deep Culture: The Hidden Challenges of Global Living” (Multilingual Matters). Shaules works, thinks, and writes in English, Japanese, French and Spanish.

As an educational organization, AFS offers young people the opportunity to spend time abroad and to engage in intercultural learning. With support from volunteers and staff who have knowledge of intercultural concepts and skillful ways of applying that knowledge, the experience of each participant is shaped. Shaules’ webinar can be an opportunity to get deeply involved with intercultural learning, and to reflect on its importance for the contemporary world.

To learn more about Young Sietar, sign up for the 13th Annual Congress 2012, taking place from 6-9 September 2012 in Belfast, Northern Ireland!

UNESCO Guidelines on Intercultural Education

Posted on August 13, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) offers online Guidelines on Intercultural Education. These guidelines provide an overview and fundamental understanding of an intercultural approach to education.

The document defines culture, education, language, religion, and diversity (among other concepts) and explains how their interrelation can help clarify what Intercultural Learning means and how best to approach it. UNESCO addresses the question: What is the role of Intercultural Education? and indicates four main objectives:

1) Learning to know. This objective highlights the value of a obtaining a general education, which brings learners into contact with other areas of knowledge and encourages communication.

2) Learning to do. This involves helping learners find their place within society and cultivates specific skills as well as an ability to develop and apply a broad range of new skills in diverse environments.

3) Learning to live together. Acquiring knowledge, skills and values that contribute to a collective spirit of collaboration allow learners to co-exist in societies rich with diversity.

4) Learning to be. Solidifying one’s sense of personality in order to act with autonomy, judgement and personal responsibility. Regard of a person’s potential and right to cultural difference strengthens identity and builds cognitive capacity.

The document proposes three main principles for Intercultural Education:

I: Intercultural Education respects the cultural identity of the learner through the provision of culturally appropriate and responsive quality education for all. This means that the learning content should relate to, and build on the learner’s background and the resources they have access to; also, the knowledge transmission should be culturally appropriate, incorporating local pedagogy and traditional ways of learning and teaching. This way, learners can become deeply involved in the learning process.

II: Intercultural Education provides every learner with the cultural knowledge, attitudes and skills necessary to achieve active and full participation in society. This should happen by providing equal access to all forms of education, eliminating discrimination in the education system, facilitating the integration of migrant workers into the education system and respecting their special needs. It should also happen by eliminating prejudice about culturally distinct population groups within a country and by promoting an inclusive learning environment.

III: Intercultural Education provides all learners with cultural knowledge, attitudes and skills that enable them to contribute to respect, understanding and solidarity among individuals, ethnic, social, cultural and religious groups and nations. This should happen by encouraging learners to struggle against racism and discrimination. It can also occur through the development of curricula that promote knowledge about cultural backgrounds and their impact. This means that learners should be aware of how our way of thinking, feeling, and evaluating is shaped by our own cultural background and experience.

By understanding how our background has shaped our values, assumptions, and judgments, we build a base for effective, reflective communication and cooperation across cultures and social boundaries – thereby developing the knowledge, skills, and understanding to create a more just and peaceful world.

The Guidelines on Intercultural Education are a part of the UNESCO online library, where you can also find other materials to learn more about ICL, Human Rights, Education, Culture, and more.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking

Posted on July 23, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

In a recent TED talk conference, Susan Cain, author of the book Quiet – The Power of Introverts makes a case for acknowledging the power and contributions of introverts. Many introverts have a rich inner world and Cain acknowledges that they do not show themselves outwardly simply because they work best in quiet environments and don’t feel the need to self-promote. Cain suggests that introverts not be confused as being shy, as shyness is linked to a fear of social judgement. Being introverted, she says, is related to the environments in which a person feels they can do their best work and be most authentic.

Cain identifies as an introvert, and she describes often having forced herself to be extroverted having learned that some of American society may not value individuals who hesitate to communicate their knowledge, skills, and ideas. She passionately argues for accepting these differences and acknowledging the introverts around us (1 out of every 3 people is introverted). If we do so we may see that introverts have qualities that many extroverts lack; they are often strong team leaders, because they let people run with their ideas, instead of constantly talking about them or taking over with their own ideas.

Her book can make us think about how we may have a bias towards paying attention to those who talk most frequently or articulately, instead of carefully listening to all who are around us. She also encourages us to reflect on how we can create the space for quieter people to share their ideas.

Susan Cain entertains the notion of the extrovert ideal, a notion which she points out is evident in US American culture. Is this also a reality in all national cultures? Cain’s book includes a chapter that asks this very question: Do all cultures have an extrovert ideal? In many East Asian classrooms, she says, the curriculum is focused away from talking, and emphasizes listening, writing, and memorization for the learners and reserving the talking for the teachers.

As AFSers, many of us live our lives outwardly and easily connect to many people in many places around the world. We are curious about and restlessly question the world around us in order to learn about the lives of others. If we remember to remain open in these intercultural contexts and to listen and observe the opinions and messages that come through in quieter, more hidden forms we can learn a lot about others and about ourselves – we may even make more of the experience.

All Different-All Equal: A Wealth of Education Materials Online

Posted on July 10, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

On its website, the European Youth Center in Budapest (supported by the Council of Europe) provides a wealth of interesting, useful, and free materials – one of them is Compass: A Manual on Human Rights Education With Young People. Compass is a resource that can give you a lot of interesting ideas for how to conduct workshops with young people, and how to support them to find out more about world issues. Detailed session plans and materials are available to you – to facilitate sessions on globalization, social rights, peace and violence, discrimination, gender equality, and many other topics.

Another tool that is offered by the the European Youth Center in Budapest is the All Different – All Equal Education Pack. It provides basis for intercultural education, and can be very useful for facilitating sessions on the meaning of difference and how we deal with it across cultures of age, gender, ability, social class and ethnicity. Topics that the Education Pack touches on are discrimination, economical inequalities, and the way we think about and classify the world around us. An awareness of these differences is important for us to manage them effectively and appropriately.

In addition to an introductory discussion of these issues, more than 30 activities are listed and explained. They can help to explore what it means to be truly open to those from different backgrounds. You can also find a list of movies to illustrate the content and help facilitate discussions. The All Different – All Equal Education Pack is a resource that helps us take a deeper look at how we live together and how we can develop the curiosity that is needed in order to overcome the fear and uncertainty that often goes hand in hand with being confronted with difference. These tools are useful to support an AFS experience with the political and intercultural awareness that can help young people to really learn about the world we live in and have the knowledge, skills, and understanding to create a more just and peaceful world.

Recommendations for Building Interculturally Competent Leaders

Posted on July 6, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

In a recent issue of IIE Networker, a publication by the Institute of International Education, Darla Deardorff, Executive Director of the Association of International Education Administrators and editor of The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence (2010) offers advice on how to make our lives and those of others as successful and enriching as possible in an article on Building Intercultural Competence:

To build interculturally competent leaders, she says, we need to be mindful of the following:

1. Our intercultural attitudes: how open am I truly towards those from different cultural, socioeconomic, and religious backgrounds? Do I make quick assumptions about a person? Do I prejudge or do I try to explore all facets of the situation?

2. Our intercultural knowledge and awareness: am I aware of my own cultural conditioning? Can I describe the cultural values that impact my behavior and judgment, and how I communicate? Am I aware of the different worldviews of those I work or live with, and of how they are different from my own perspective?

3. Our intercultural skills: do I actively observe the subtle nuances of my and other’s interactions? Do I reflect on how I interact with those I work or live with? Do I seek to understand the reasons for the incidents I experience, and what I can learn from them?

4. The outcomes of the intercultural communication for ourselves: do I adapt how I interact and communicate? How flexible am I in responding to the needs of those I live or work with?

5. The outcomes of our intercultural communication for others: how appropriate is my behavior and communication style in the eyes of the other? Do I meet the goals of the communication in an appropriate and effective way?

As leaders and facilitators of intercultural learning in AFS we need not only ask others to understand the complexity of intercultural competence, to design workshops and courses to go beyond knowledge transmission and towards intercultural understanding and application, but we must also encourage each other to provide feedback and reflect on our intercultural journeys with others from diverse backgrounds.

To do this successfully, we must recognize the relevance of intercultural understanding. Deardorff warns that if we ourselves don’t see the relevance, we may lose our way. She reminds us that over the course of five decades research that provides definitions and rameworks can offer a starting place for an organization such as AFS to define what Intercultural Learning (ICL) means for us.

With Intercultural Learning and increased intercultural competence, leaders can grow beyond the operational and results-oriented approach to a process-oriented one that recognizes the importance of critical reflection and analysis in lifelong learning. Find the original article here.

Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters – An Online Tool

Posted on June 29, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

How do you feel when you live or work together with someone who is very different from you – when this person has different ways of communicating, evaluating things, different ways of enjoying life, a different understanding of “how things are”, and different values guiding him or her through life? Are you curious, anxious, neutral – or does it even make you angry? What thoughts and feelings do you experience?

The set of materials called Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters provides useful tools for you to reflect on your encounters with individuals from different backgrounds. You can ask yourself: what could I have done differently in this situation? How were my actions influenced by an idea I had about the other? What puzzled me? How did I adjust? How did the other person adjust? What did I understand only after reflecting on the experience?

The Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters is a reflective tool you can use by yourself or ask your trainees to use; facilitator’s notes; context, concepts and theories, concepts for discussion, and an Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters for younger learners with respective facilitator’s notes, text cards, and picture cards. Find an overview with links to all of these materials here.

When we learn about intercultural adjustment, communication styles, and the different historical developments that have shaped societies all over the world, we may better be able to connect our experiences to our new knowledge. Having cases and situations in mind that have puzzled us can help bring clarity to theories on intercultural communication – and to link them to our lives! This clarity can help us navigate through daily life in an intercultural environment and to develop strategies to improve our interactions and experiences.

To cooperate successfully in an increasingly globalized world is becoming increasingly important. As an AFSer, you can probably recall many encounters where things didn’t go as you planned. Your experiences may have taught you a lot about cultural differences and about how you react to, process, and learn from them. If you want to deepen your understanding, access the materials here and use them alone or to facilitate the intercultural learning of others. Reflecting on what made the communication difficult, what puzzled or confused you, and how you could overcome these difficulties makes for rich learning opportunities – and best of all: it’s free and available in French and Italian as well!

Yabla – An Online Resource For Language Learning and Beyond

Posted on June 18, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

Yabla is a new way to learn French, Italian, German, Chinese, and Spanish online! For a very moderate monthly fee you can have access to a lot of videos – news, music videos, funny videos and other, in the language you want to learn – with subtitles in the original language and in English, and in several difficulty levels. But not only this, of course: you can click on each of the words to see them translated. Once you do so, the words will go to your vocabulary trainer. The different languages have different learning tools (yabla also offers grammar lessons for some languages) – even if you didn’t subscribe yet, you can go to the yabla page and explore them!

Language and culture are closely intermingled – and these videos show you how! By using this tool, you can also learn something about the cultures the videos come from – how people talk to each other, about the contexts, and sometimes even about ideas and attitudes. Of course every video, like every person you get to know and what this person tells you, shows you only an aspect – but all of these aspects will enrich your knowledge about the regarding society.

This way to learn a language is very similar to the way you learn it when you are in a foreign country: you listen, eventually manage to understand more and more, and you get used to what is right and wrong. When you finally learn a grammar rule, you will be able to explain why some things always sounded right to you, and others wrong!

When we are sensitive to and respectful for culture differences, in addition to speaking the other’s language, we can further improve our interactions – with host families, exchange program participants, and other AFSers from around the world!

The CONTACT Program – Conflict Transformation Across Cultures

Posted on June 12, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

Are you interested in a combination of Intercultural Learning, Peace Building, and Conflict Transformation? If you are, the CONTACT program, offered by the SIT (School for International Training) is worth knowing about! It is a program that offers learning opportunities that aim to make transformation of conflicts across cultures possible. The program has a special focus on the intercultural conflicts that we are confronted with and which often need special attention in an increasingly globalized world. In many cases, they are more difficult to transform than conflicts that occur with people from familiar contexts. In addition to this, many of them are even further compromised by stereotyping and other challenging intergroup dynamics.

The CONTACT Program deals with dynamics of intercultural conflicts, and with how these conflicts can be transformed. More specifically, the program introduces participants to the tools that can be used to achieve this. In the 3-week Summer Peacebuilding Program that takes place every year in Brattleboro, VT in the United States, practitioners from all over the world come together to learn more about intercultural conflicts and to share their experiences. The Contact program also offers a 2-semester-distance Graduate Certificate Program, which includes a field seminar. In addition to these two options, CONTACT now offers a Program in Kathmandu, Nepal, for South Asians who are interested in learning about the topic. Participants take part in a process which combines theory, self-reflection, community building, and collaborative problem solving which, within a multicultural learning environment, is extremely powerful.

The Contact program can support us in achieving the goals that we as AFSers have set ourselves: to provide intercultural learning opportunities to help people develop the knowledge, skills and understanding needed to create a more just and peaceful world. This may be a reason why more AFSers than ever are signing up for structured Intercultural Learning opportunities around the world. Find out more!