Everyone who participated in the IDD made wonderful contributions to furthering the awareness of intercultural learning. As well, many stayed connected through IDD’s facebook page, which is where the winners of the photo and video contest were announced. Congratulations to the winners from AFS Hungary and AFS Russia!

Watch the best video and see the best picture on the IDD facebook page!

The Winter Academy on Intercultural Competence will not only present theoretical frameworks regarding intercultural learning, but also practical competencies and knowledge, to enable participants to work as intercultural trainers themselves in the future.

All courses will include workshop sessions with both theoretical and practical content offered by academic professors and AFS trainers. This collaboration will bridge the gap between theory and practice!

The Winter Academy addresses people who are interested in teaching intercultural competence themselves. Such as:

• Students with an intercultural area of studies or/and their own international experiences, who would like to pass their theoretical knowledge through practical trainings.
• Trainers, who have already gathered experience and would like to start working in an intercultural context.
• Young professionals and/or multipliers, who are committed or devoted to intercultural learning, e.g. teachers or practitioners in the field of international youth work.

Enrolled students have the opportunity to obtain 5 European Credit Points (ECTS) for participating in the first seven course days. This is a standardization of higher education within the European Union that accumulates points which lead to the completion of a degree. One year of coursework usually counts for 60 points.

As well, after participating in the entire duration of the Winter Academy (10 course days), participants will be awarded the certificate “Intercultural Trainer” issued by Jacobs University and InterCultur gGmbH.

The Winter Academy offers a great opportunity for people who are involved in (intercultural) training activities. Through the Winter Academy, AFS will not only give students the opportunity for a diverse intercultural education experience, but will also demonstrate our competence at a university level and confirm our identity as an educational organization.

The registration deadline is 15 November 2012. If you have any questions regarding the program, please contact Barbara Langholf (Barbara.Langholf@intercultur.de).

Are you looking for the latest publications on multicultural, intercultural, and/or cross-cultural issues IN FRENCH? Well, here’s a link for you! L’Harmattan publishers, based in Paris, France, offers wonderful intercultural books and journals for our francophone readers. Their books can be found in several French bookstores, as well as online. There is even a space for video media to be accessed, including movies, documentaries and author interviews.

L’Harmattan emphasizes diversity, education and the importance of multicultural awareness and competence, which makes this resource an incredibly valuable tool for interculturally-focused French speakers.

Dr. David Kolb

Many of you may already know David Kolb‘s work with experiential learning styles. They were originally published in 1984 and put David Kolb on the map as an important educational and cognitive theorist. This year, David Kolb and his team developed a new and improved version of the learning styles, Kolb 4.0, expanding from 4 to 9 ways that people learn, as well as exploring how to expand your capability to learn outside  your preferred style. Anna Collier of AFS International had the chance to sit down with Mr. Kolb and talk about his approach to learning. Look for the following interview in Volume 3, Issue 4 of the Intercultural Link Newsletter, to be published very soon!

It was when I first became a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, right after completing my Ph. D. in social psychology from Harvard. I was teaching organizational psychology by lecturing to graduate students on the psychological topics I found fascinating but they were getting bored. So, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. At the same time, I was also working for the Peace Corps (an international volunteer organization based in the United States) back when they first started, running a self-assessment workshop for volunteers. Back then, the Peace Corps used psychologists to study volunteers, to see if they were fit to go overseas. The self-assessment we proposed was based on experiential learning. We ran training programs for volunteers that gave them experiences such as teaching and working in inner city neighborhoods. The volunteers were helped to reflect about how they handled these experiences, and then decide if they felt they would be successful with work like this in their prospective host country. The program had a positive result and we were successful in reducing the number of volunteers who returned early because they couldn’t handle the experience. It was then that I decided to apply the experiential learning cycle in my lecture courses. I developed exercises based on the group dynamics theory of Kirk Lewin and my work in the Peace Corps, and then applied them to my classes.

Since the original study groups were primarily U.S. Americans, have you applied your model and/or found it relevant in other cultures?

Yes, in subsequent years I used it in a number of different countries. If you go to our website, www.learningfromexperience.com, there is a section called the Research Library that has a bibliography of research papers. There are over 3000 articles published by researchers from all over the world. Many of the papers are on intercultural topics that would be of interest to many of your readers.

Which aspect of intercultural learning or communication has your work primarily focused on?

In my work with experiential learning, I noticed that people seemed to prefer and be most comfortable with different stages of the learning cycle. I coined the term “learning style” to describe these differences and developed the Learning Style Inventory, which has become a very popular tool for individuals to understand how they learn best. From my point of view, however, the most important idea is the learning cycle and the idea that it’s a process–That you become more effective at learning by managing your own learning process. This is the most powerful idea.

What do you wish more people would understand about intercultural learning?

For me, it is the idea of experiencing. I guess the big idea about experiential learning is that you have to experience to learn. Many times people don’t learn because they don’t allow themselves to experience. They have distractions and preoccupations and expectations that cause them to be trapped in their head telling themselves their own narrative. In addition they can actually create a social world that preserves their narrative. Expatriate managers, for example, often withdraw into a group of their countrymen that limits experiencing and learning about the host culture. Experiencing is a key part of the cycle of learning that has been overlooked. Some theorists have left out Experience altogether, while others confuse it with Action.

It is also important to realize the central role educators can take to help people go through the stages of the learning cycle. When transitioning from Experience to Reflection, an educator plays the role of Facilitator, for example. In the move from the Concrete realm to Reflexive, one needs to be facilitated. You need to draw people out, understand them and develop a relationship so that they feel comfortable saying and revealing their innermost thoughts and feelings. Abstraction requires a teaching and expert role, so that you can guide learners forward. The Action phase requires standards-setting and evaluating from the educator, so that you can say ‘you need to know this, and this, and this…’ The transition from Action to back to Experience needs coaching. These four educator roles are all necessary to take people through the learning cycle.

What inspired the updating to the Learning Style Inventory 4.0 this year?

It stemmed from feedback from users. Four styles didn’t adequately describe people’s styles. Some scored in the middle, so some styles were in between. It’s a result from years of experience with the instrument; we’ve given it a sharper resolution. In addition we have added a measure of learning flexibility to emphasize that learning styles are not fixed traits but dynamic states of learning that we all go through. We also changed the wording to be more understandable and user-friendly.

What would you suggest for people new to the ICL field to read as they get started?

A great article would be Using Experiential Learning Theory to Promote Student Learning and Development in Programs of Education Abroad, which I co-authored with Angela M. Passarelli. It was published in a brand new book that came out in June 2012 by Michael Vande Berg, along with Michael Paige and Kris Hemming Lou: Student Learning Abroad: What Our Students Are Learning, What They’re Not, and What We Can Do About It. Another interesting focus is “Deliberate Experiential Learning” that involves mindful management of one’s learning identity, learning relationships and deliberate practice.  There is a paper on this on our website www.learningfromexperience.com, as well as papers on mindfulness and experiential learning. You can deliberately choose to learn, and educators can help by making you aware of that.

What are the hot topics in ICL these days? And who do you consider to be producing the more intriguing thoughts that in turn advance your own contributions?

Great new theories have been produced by James Zull in his books The Art of Changing the Brain (2002) and From Brain to Mind (2011). He says concrete experiences come from sensory receptors in the brain, to the pre-temporal lobe, to the frontal lobe, then into the action region of the brain as the learning cycle progresses. The Student Learning Abroad book that I mentioned also has a lot of great articles in it that I would recommend.

Do you consider yourself a global citizen? Would you like to become more involved in global issues? The organization New Global Citizen (GNC) provides globally conscious youth with opportunities to make their reach go farther and their impact stronger in relation to some of the world’s greatest challenges. It’s an organization for youth– and by youth!

One youth team focused on the right to education for all children around the world.

GNC offers a wide range of global projects, such as providing sanitation and clean water, shelter, education and doing many more important works to improve vulnerable populations around the world. Their main focus is sustainable development that is not the “cookie-cutter” approach. Instead, they hope to find solutions while keeping the population and culture in mind.

For those of you in education, they also have initiatives for you to use in your classroom, including team building exercises and curriculum to develop intercultural competency.

If you are a youth interested in global causes, this is an organization you might want to explore! Learn more on their website: http://www.newglobalcitizens.org/ or their blog:  http://newglobalcitizens.wordpress.com/

Examples include AFS Boznia and Herezgovina who offered a screening of the movie “East is East” in Banja Luca. AFS Latvia partnered with the Central Baltic INTERREG project “Youth Space”, holding a seminar in Riga about Intercultural learning, including team-building activities, discussions, and experience sharing from exchange students. These are among the many activities centered around IDD. You can also check out the map of Intercultural Dialogue Day events around Europe, or look forward to photos and comments posted on Intercultural Dialogue Day’s Facebook page.

EFIL also just opened the IDD Best Video and Best Photo contest that will extend until 14 October 2012. AFS volunteers are invited to post photos and videos of their IDD events on the Wall of the Face Book page, together with the description of the IDD event itself. It is very important that each video and picture submitted for the contest is accompanied by a description of the IDD event. For each of the two categories, the submission that receives the most votes – “Likes” – will win a free registration for one volunteer team member at the EFIL Volunteer Summer Summit 2013. Inspired by the top three finalists in each category (photo and video), EFIL will develop ‘IDD toolkits’ that will be replicable by volunteers across Europe in the next edition of the IDD. Be sure to enter with what you were doing on Intercultural Dialogue Day!

This year’s conference took place in Moscow, Russia on the 18^th of August, and was held at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. It is one of the three conferences that together make up the AISEC International Congress, an international event to plan projects for social and economic development. At the Global Youth Voice event, two AFS staff members had the opportunity to take a more active role and act as facilitators for one of the sessions.

Tom McLeod, an AFS returnee (Australia 2000-2001) and current Intern at the AFS Russia office in Moscow, along with Nonna Kovrizhnykh, Partner Director of AFS Russia, and Organisational Development Coordinator Natalia Zakharova facilitated a session on Intercultural Dialogue and Tolerance. The 10-day conference hopes to foster a positive global impact in the way youth collaborate and interact, and aims to build a global perspective for future generations.

Roeland, a Belgian non-profit company promoting language skills in youth, seems to agree. In cooperation with AFS International, Roeland and AFS Partners in Argentina, China, Finland and Switzerland, provided the first group of students to participate in a full English language immersion camp that carried an intercultural component in the United Kingdom this summer.

The aim of this pilot was to test alternative ways of delivering short language programs with an extra focus on intercultural learning, while also being targeted toward a younger age group. Sixteen AFSers between the ages of 13-16 spent 12 days with 50 Belgian students in Sutton Valence, England to gain both linguistic and cultural knowledge. Apart from participating in intensive English language lessons, there were a number of activities, workshops and sport opportunities focusing on ICL, a trip to London and various daily themes such as British Day, Rhythm and Rhyme Day or Fame day. Throughout the camp, students had to follow a very strict “English-only!” rule.

Belgian and AFS Student Participants

Three very dedicated AFS volunteers: Jens Poulsen (AFS Switzerland), Sonja Gustafsson (AFS Finland) and Meng Zhou (AFS China) took charge in bringing the intercultural learning component into action, helped to deal with support issues throughout the camp and supported various other activities at the camp. The work of these volunteers showed how cooperation with like-minded organizations can help us to further the AFS mission of providing intercultural learning opportunities.

AFS International is now in the process of evaluating this pilot program in the hopes of using lessons learned to design a format for possible future collaboration. In the meantime, we hope that this was an opportunity for the almost 70 young students to get a taste of the life-long intercultural learning path, one that has inspired them to explore further avenues with AFS programs and other language-learning organizations.

One concept that has been affected by innovation is Groupthink. The term was invented by Irving Janis in 1972 when he wrote Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, and it is used to refer to the dynamics of a group that collaborates to create, decide, deliberate and destroy. We seem however, to misrepresent Janis. Many societies look at Groupthink as a positive way of co-existing and communicating — a trendy work environment to accompany the trendy new iPad. Work environments want to create a Groupthink feng shui (shared spaces, de-cubalization, and brainstorming stations), and lost was Janis’ true theory. The group, he said, can in fact present a problem.

by Andy Rementer

A recent New York Times article, The Rise of the Groupthink, may be the first step to put Mr. Janis to justice. Studies from a number of accredited universities across the U.S. have done studies on this topic, and have reached similar conclusions: creativity, innovation, efficiency, an increase in both quantity and quality of work, are all possible in isolated environments rather than products of the infamous Groupthink. Some of the greatest innovators in the world have been introverts, working alone in their office without anyone’s input or distraction. A great example could be Steve Jobs, but look one step closer and we find the “introverted Steve”. With all the new noise from the electronics we have, a culture of the extrovert has developed. All the attention and credit goes to the charismatic type. Meanwhile, the basis of the Apple empire started with one man, in a dimly lit basement, with nothing but his own ideas and determination to keep him company.

by Andy Rementer

To clarify, the article does not suggest that personal relationships and social interaction are not important. Instead, it highlights some research conclusions that suggest the peak of creativity happens in solitude. With attention paid to these types of studies, we see how the brainstorming session may not always be ideal. We might take a different approach, creating an office space with a cafe-style atmosphere where you have the possibility of casual interaction and cooperation, but also have the opportunity to work in an individually-structured and focused way. No man is an island, but give him a desk surrounded by oceans and you might be surprised at what he can do.

The ways group dynamics, human interaction, and work environments have been affected by technology and innovation are many and varied – and this varies in the many cultures and countries we live in and visit. What prominent changes have the cultures you identify with experienced?

Howard Gardner

Each learning style theory is different and there is no “best” theory. In this post, we are featuring several free on-line tools to determine your learning style based on Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences.

The first site, businessballs.com, offers a relatively detailed overview of Gardner’s theory as well as offline learning style surveys you can download (one even self-calculates your scores).

A second online resource is learning-styles-online.com, which gives you free information on which type of learning style suits you and and how to use that knowledge to your advantage. The 70-question test gives you clear, graphic results to best guide you to your most optimized learning experience! Or you can browse the types of learning styles and read about each one.

This visual (to the left) and the text provided on the website explain how the different learning styles interact and are related.

It’s very useful to be aware of the approaches that support your preferred way of learning, allowing you to maximize your learning potential. Also, if you identify the learning styles that you struggle with the most, you can use resources like those on the website, Brain Training Games, for example, to improve aspects of your learning.

As noted, Howard Gardner is just one of numerous theorists who have explored the concept of learning styles. His theory is not perfect, nor does it speak to everyone, but it is a very useful tool for analyzing and reflecting on our preferred ways of learning. There are several books available on Gardner’s theory, if you are interested in more information.

Happy learning!