Winter Academy on Intercultural Competence – Register Now!

Posted on November 2, 2012 by laura.schaack

The end of 2012 doesn’t mean the end of intercultural learning opportunities! Students in many places around the world may have a break from classes, but experiential learning outside the classroom is at the heart of the AFS experience! To this end, the first Winter Academy on Intercultural Competence organized by InterCultur gGmbH (the non-profit subsidiary of AFS Germany which was founded in the beginning of this year) and Jacobs University will take place in January 2013, and hopes to encourage and develop intercultural competence, knowledge and skills! The Winter Academy will take place 14-25 January on the campus of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany.

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).

Intercultural Dialogue Day 2012

Posted on October 1, 2012 by laura.schaack

27 September 2012 was the 5th annual Intercultural Dialogue Day (IDD), a day of intercultural awareness and diversity promotion organized by the European Federation of Intercultural Learning (EFIL). Across Europe, AFS organizations and intercultural enthusiasts celebrated with events centered around creating a dialogue on the value of intercultural learning.

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!

Global Youth Voice Conference

Posted on September 21, 2012 by laura.schaack

International opportunities for interculturally-minded youth to get involved and collaborate with each other are becoming more and more accessible. A great example is “Global Youth Voice“, an international youth conference which brings together 200 young people from all over the globe with the common intention of finding out how young people can make the world better, together. An innovative approach to international organization, the project began in 2011 with a small group of 8 young people who dreamt of a place where all the intercultural-driven youth could collaborate and be in contact.

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.

Language + Culture with VWZ Roeland

Posted on September 14, 2012 by laura.schaack

Intercultural Learning is becoming increasingly recognized as a necessary piece of how modern, global citizens are educated. Some argue that a necessary characteristic of all global citizens is the ability to communicate in a language other than the native tongue. As many languages correspond with one or more cultures and fluency in a specific language could imply competence in a society and culture that speaks that language. To separate the two institutions of language and intercultural learning is to ignore a critical aspect of culture.

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.

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.

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!

EU: an Intersection of ICL & IR

Posted on June 21, 2012 by paul.edinger@afs.org

Intercultural learning and international relations are distinct fields, but they often overlap at the practical level. An example of this interconnectedness is the considerable amount of activities funded and implemented by the European Union (EU). While the European Union is primarily thought of as an international political and economic organization, it fosters many initiatives specifically related to intercultural learning.

The Agenda fo Culture proposed by the European Commision singles out intercultural dialogue as one of its key aspects. Furthermore, projects such as “Sharing Diversity” are funded by the EU to increase understanding among Europe’s diverse cultures by way of intercultural learning. The European Union collaborates with many different organizations and think-tanks that are dedicated to the advancement of intercultural learning and understanding. At the same time, the European Union works with its members at the political and state level on other issues that are less related to ICL and more related to international relations. People who work for the EU can work heavily in either field.

As a result we can see how the two separate fields intertwine and complement each other not only at the educational or scholarly level, but especially at the practical level. Within Europe, the EU’s economic and politcal agreements, traditionally aspects of international relations, help create a platform to advance opportunities for intercultural learning, while the increase of intercultural learning facilitates the politcal cohesion of the Union. The European Union can serve as a vast, real world example of how international relations and intercultural learning, while distinct, are so interrelated and complementary.

AFS helps its audiences form global relationships and increase their intercultural competence through its educational content. Both of these are essential skills for those individuals aspiring to work in the fields of intercultural learning and international relations.

Paul Edinger is a contributing writer for the ICL Blog. He was an intern at AFS International in 2011 in the Development and Branding department, and continued in 2012 in the Intercultural Learning department. He holds a B.A. in International Studies.

The European Mobility Folktales Project – Educational Activities Available Online

Posted on April 30, 2012 by charlotte.steinke@afs.org

The European Mobility Folktales Project aims to support European teachers in helping their students to learn about intercultural topics. At the core of the project are the Mobility Folk Tales. Mobility Folk Tales are stories about travelling experiences, and about meeting people from different cultures. They can be listened to online or downloaded, and you can use them to conduct educational activities for building intercultural competence and awareness. There is a whole set of activities that can be downloaded from the Mobility Folktales Project webpage for free!

Europe

The activities are tailored to students from ages 8-14, but a number of them can also be adapted to audiences above this age. They address three categories: culture, difference, and language. For each category, activities are provided that can help you to facilitate intercultural learning. All of them include a folk tale from different parts of Europe: Portugal, Austria, Greece, Poland and Cyprus. The activities are in English. However, many of them are translated into Greek, German, Polish and Portuguese. You can also find an English presentation on how folk tales can be used to promote intercultural education.

The aim of these activities is to help build knowledge and positive attitudes towards differences. They can raise interest and excitement about other cultures and languages, and can help people find out more about the history and traditions of the cultures through their stories. In some of the activities, learners are also engaged in a process of self-reflection regarding their differences from and similarities with others, and develop the ability to “learn seeing the world through someone else’s eyes”. This is very important when intercultural relationships are built, and central for being able to resolve conflicts, especially intercultural ones, in a constructive way.

Some of the activities that fall under the category “language” also raise interest in other languages, and help participants to identify lesser known languages. The activities are designed to be fun for the participants, and to help them to see the power and fascination that lies in cultural and linguistic differences. We can use or adapt these activities when sharing our enthusiasm with fellow AFSers about the cultural richness of the world, and excite others about getting involved in our work.