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Intercultural Learning Activities
- Contextualizing Identities (1 hour)
In this activity, participants explore how different identities become more salient under different circumstances. - Reclaiming our Stories: Narratives of Identity, Resilience and Empowerment (4 hours)
This text encourages learners to empathize with the perspectives of contributing authors who describe the often ugly and painful realities they have confronted since an early age, acknowledge the systemic racism and inequality of opportunities present in the communities the authors describe, analyze themes such as trauma, outrage, healing, triumph, and love present in the collected narratives, and recognize how storytelling can support the resilience and empowerment of storytellers as well as readers. - Seeing You Seeing Me (1 hour)
In this activity, participants learn to compare and contrast how they see themselves and how they perceive others see them, discuss nuances of their hidden and visible identities and the stereotypes that other people seem to apply to them, and identify examples of the Looking Glass Self process of self-image development in their own lives. - Tradition and Identity in Whale Rider (3 hours)
In this activity, participants watch the movie Whale Rider and discuss the relationship between traditions, values, and identity, recognize how traditions, values, and beliefs change across generations, and reflect on how traditions, values, and beliefs have changed within their own families. - Curious "Show & Not Tell" Icebreaker (30 minutes)
In this activity, participants bring an item with them, answer questions about it, and practice curiosity by asking questions of others without knowing the identity of the object owner, making guesses about that individual's life and possible culture. - Mapping Social Identity Timeline Activity (30 minutes)
In this activity, participants create a timeline demonstrating how their identities have developed throughout their life to help them understand how social interactions affect their identities. - The Spectrum Activity, Questions of Identity (10 minutes)
In this activity, participants "consider their identities critically and how identities are more or less keenly felt in different social contexts," recognize "how privilege operates to normalize some identities over others," and appreciate "their shared identities...as well as the diversity of identities" involved in the activity (LSA Inclusive Teaching Initiative, University of Michigan, 2017). - Personal and Social Identity Wheel, Identity Circles, Beads, and Molecule, The Paseo (Circles of Identity), Circles of My Multicultural Self (30 minutes - 1 hour and 30 minutes)
These 7 activities encourage participants to identify and describe personal identities, explore multiple identities, and examine the stereotypes associated with different identities. - The Five Minute Poem (5 minutes)
In this activity, participants write a short poem express their identities through "I am from..." statements related to familiar sights, sounds, smells, foods, sayings, and friends. - Identity-Based Rejection Sensitivity (45 minutes)
In this activity, participants describe the phenomenon of identity-based rejection sensitivity and its consequences and analyze potential solutions that avoid self-fulfilling prophecies of rejection based on a stigmatized identity. - Through Other Eyes (10 minutes)
This is a quick perspective-taking activity that asks participants to close their eyes and imagine different identities, concluding with a debrief discussion on how cultural identities can be both empowering and limiting. - Training Culturally Diverse You (45 minutes)
This activity begins with a discussion about what influences our identities (universal things, unique personalities, culture, etc.). Participants then discuss and map out a network of groups they belong to and discuss factors that impact how they behave in different contexts. - Who Am I? Echoes of Culture (1 hour)
In this activity, participants learn to "understand how identity is shaped and reinforced by the cultural discourse that has been internalized, understand and accept how culture shapes us as individuals and distinguishes us when we find ourselves in new cultural circumstances, and listen for the cultural discourse that has shaped and continues to shape the people in the new culture and environment where they find themselves" (Cassiday & Stringer, 2015, p. 101). - I Am From Poems (30 minutes)
This activity is similar to the Five Minute Poem activity. Participants will write short poems where each line begins with “I am from,” which will allow them to describe their heritage using the details and memories most important to them. - The Kluckhohn Questionnaire (no duration provided)
In this activity participants learn to examine cultural identity and self-awareness, assess how their beliefs and cultural attitudes have changed from childhood to adulthood, and analyze and describe their current cultural beliefs and values. - Paper Basket Exercise (25 minutes)
In this kinesthetic activity, participants explore the concept of privilege by throwing a ball into a paper basket. - I Am Poems (30 minutes)
Another identity poem option, this activity provides several poem options for exploring identity with learners. - Who Am I? Identity Dialogue (1 hour)
In this activity, participants list up to 12 identities and reflect on them in order to articulate how they perceive their own identities and analyze why they place value on certain aspects of their identity. - Voices from the Past (45 minutes)
In this activity, participants share their name, a culture they identify with, a key message they heard from someone influential in their life, and their role or profession to "gain insights into what drives fellow team members, interact at a personal and powerful level from the start of a program, and set the tone for deep discussions on identity and cultural values" (Berardo, 2012, p. 143). - Sherlock Holmes (1 hour and 15 minutes)
As a result of this activity, participants "understand the importance of the constant self-reflection needed to be interculturally competent, explore how each of us sees the world around us and how we make meanings, and appreciate that we have multiple cultural identities and that combinations of identities work together in different contexts" (Rao, 2012, p. 179). - Name Story, aka The Name Game (1 hour)
In this activity, participants share about their name, who named them, and its origins. The activity is designed to help participants "identify the importance of names as part of personal identity, identify different cultural ways of naming people, and understand the importance of calling people by the name they prefer—and pronouncing it properly" (Stringer & Cassiday, 2009, p. 157). - Cultural Autobiography (45 minutes)
In this activity, participants construct a cultural autobiography, exploring their different identities and contextual and cultural factors informing these identities.