Living in Interfaith

Posted on February 25, 2013 by arturo.romeropereda@afs.org

From wikipedia.org

Today we wanted to share a blog entry by Rev. Eleanor Harrison Bregman from the Huffington Post in which she talks about living with cultural differences within the family, at home – and with something as important as religion. Although she is a Christian Protestant Minister, Bregman is raising her children in an interfaith relationship as Jewish children and they attend a Jewish school. In her entry, she describes how she tries to participate in her children’s prayers and practices, in order to be a part of this aspect of their culture.

Looking for opinion texts on interfaith relationships or bicultural/bireligious households, one can very soon find many different authors with different opinions. This is such a thought-provoking topic that it is important to learn what interfaith parenthood, interfaith relationships and living with two religions means for different people and in different geographic contexts. Here are some links to articles that encourage you to reflect on this topic:

Ten Reasons to Teach Interfaith Children Both Religions: blog entry by Susan Katz Miller on her blog “On Being Both”.
How to Successfully Raise Interfaith Children: an interview with Psychologist Dr. Tara Boadu in which she reflects on how to raise children in a household where there are race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, socioeconomic status and religious differences.
Interfaith Children’s Movement: an online platform where you can find information about programs, activities and advocacy on interfaith children’s programs.
Bi-religious: a blog entry by an Israeli expatriate in the United States on the cultural adjustment of her daughter to religious holidays.

Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section!

Parlez-vous français?

Posted on October 22, 2012 by laura.schaack

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.

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.

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.

Up With People, Up with ICL!

Posted on June 25, 2012 by laura.schaack

Innovation in the way people are connecting is becoming more and more mainstreamed into youth culture, creating global citizens in such a multicultural world. Yet, there are several organizations, like AFS, that have had this as part of their missions for decades. One such organization is Up With People, a global educational organization that brings the world together through service and music. Founded in 1965, Up With People emphasizes the need for a global perspective, along with an attitude of volunteerism, community, and intercultural understanding. As they explain on their website:

Up with People was founded on the principle of using music as a means to communicate with and inspire people. In each city we visit, Up with People cast members perform a vibrant and inspiring musical stage show that brings the community together to enjoy a night of entertainment while sparking people to take action in meeting the needs of their communities, countries and the world.

Beyond performing with a talented group of international singers, Up With People also offers service opportunities for those participating in its programs. These service opportunities include hosting music summer camps and taking part in intercultural education initiatives, among other activities.

Learn more by visiting their site, or viewing the video below:

Many AFS participants return from their time abroad invigorated to contribute more toward intercultural understanding. Up With People is a great example of a way you can continue interacting with cultures and expanding even further your intercultural competence. Whether you were an AFS participant, host family, volunteer, classmate, or otherwise touched by AFS, you may feel a calling to further promote global interconnectedness and understanding. With organizations such as Up With People, its clear that your options are not limited, and hobbies are not necessarily secondary.

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!

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.

East meets West through Images

Posted on March 6, 2012 by paul.edinger@afs.org

Maria Popova maintains a blog called, “Brain Pickings” (http://www.brainpickings.org/) where she shares thought-provoking posts ranging from philosophy to intercultural learning.

One of Maria’s posts was on the artist, Yang Liu and her project, Ost trifft West (East Meets West). Chinese-born and German raised, Liu has a unique perspective of the differences between Eastern and Western cultures and Ost trifft West very clearly displays key cultural differences between China and Germany with minimal words and simple but insightful illustrations.

For example, Germans tend to be very punctual, whereas Chinese are generally a little more flexible. Liu illustrates this cultural difference through the image to the left.

Similarly, the image to the right from the Ost trifft West project demonstrates the cultural difference between China and Germany when people gather to form a queue.

And this image from her project attempts to illustrate the culturally acceptable level of noise in a German restaurant versus a Chinese restaurant.

Liu’s work is part of the ever-increasing interest in and importance of intercultural learning. AFS, like Liu, is continually seeking new ways to provide intercultural learning opportunities to its diverse audiences.

20,000 Dialogues: Watch a Film, Start a Dialogue, Make Peace Happen

Posted on December 12, 2011 by laura.kline-taylor

20,000 Dialogues is an initiative that uses discussions about films to promote pluralism, dialogue, and civic engagement. Films always spark great discussion, almost everyone has an opinion about a film and no one needs to be an expert to join in. Watching a film and discussing it is a common yet powerful experience, a practical, meaningful way of helping people share ideas and build new perspectives. 20,000 Dialogues equips grassroots people with the films, tools, and resources to turn dialogue into action.

The idea of 20,000 Dialogues started after the release of UPF’s first film, Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet. People around the world viewed and discussed the film in their efforts to understand Muslims and build relationships after 9/11. The 20,000 Dialogues initiative was launched in August 2007 with the national PBS broadcast of UPF’s Cities of Light and the endorsement of the World Economic Forum’s Top 100 Council of Religious Leaders. It has subsequently been supported with grants from the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, One Nation, a special project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Associates, and other institutions and individuals.

Find a film here or select one of the ICL films listed on this page and see how 20,000 dialogues suggests starting a living room dialogue to promote peace!