A mother (Deborah Homeistar) and son (Ryan Spahn) were able to grow closer and become more understanding of each other during the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine, despite their significant political differences (Homeistar voted for Trump and Spahn voted for Biden). This article features a recorded conversation between the two. They discuss how they manage their differences and what more they could both do to better understand each other. 

In this piece, Meghan Markle (Duchess of Sussex) recalls the time when a reporter asked her if she was okay. It's a powerful moment that she remembers because no one else had asked her that question up until that point (since she became a member of the royal family). Markle discusses how this one simple question can help people to know that they are not alone and help them to heal. She argues how important this is in our current age, with the pandemic, protests, and the polarization that exists between Americans. She also discusses how this question helped her cope with a miscarriage, and how it might help other women and their partners deal with such a painful situation. 

Would "Are you okay?" be such a healing, helpful question in other places outside of the United States?

Readers of The New York Times sent in six words that described what they made them in thankful during the year 2020. Responses range from "The crinkling eye above the mask" to "Fell in love six feet apart." Common responses also included references to the 2020 presidential election in the United States and the upcoming vaccine for COVID-19. 

With remote work on the rise during the pandemic, workers from tech companies and other large companies have been relocating from big cities, such as San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle, to smaller cities, like Burlington in Vermont. This NPR article discusses this trend and how it might affect both big and smaller cities culturally. 

This collection includes resources for engaging in dialogue across party lines.

This activity challenges participants to learn how to identify dialogue blockers and understand how they obstruct conversations. They will be provided with a transcript for a conversation that was derailed by dialogue blockers, and they must identify where they appear in the conversation.

Intercultural learning experts agree that developing empathy for those who are different from us is a key component of intercultural competence. However, are there ever cases where extending empathy would be inappropriate or detrimental? This activity asks participants to consider two sides of one coin: 1. Times when they have extended empathy and connected with people who were different from them; and 2. Moments when they have chosen to not extend empathy.

This activity challenges participants to consider the “dark side” of empathy and how empathy can sometimes foster tribalism. They will listen to a podcast and discuss the concepts of empathy and tribalism, as well as how attitudes toward empathy have changed over time.

This activity is based on Jamil Zaki’s concept of the empathy gym, which he discusses on the podcasts Hidden Brain and Clear + Vivid. In those episodes, Zaki describes how he developed empathic skills as a child of divorced parents with two very different sets of values and priorities. He also discusses the positive and negative aspects of empathy in addition to providing some techniques that anyone could use to increase their level of empathy. This activity adapts one of those techniques, which he calls “Disagree Better,” and provides participants with tools for better understanding and empathizing with individuals who they may disagree with.

The bias blind spot, a term first coined by Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin, and Lee Ross (2002) at Stanford University, is when an individual fails to recognize their own biases and how they impact their perceptions and judgments. This activity engages with this concept by first asking participants to perform a selective attention test. Then, they will watch a clip that describes a social experiment facilitated by CBS This Morning co-host Tony Dokoupil, where he showed Republicans and Democrats the exact same clip of a confrontation between police and protestors and asked them who they believed was the aggressor. Participants will discuss this clip, along with the selective attention test, using the concept of the bias blind spot and reflect on how they might check their own bias blind spots in the future.

This reflection activity uses a word cloud generator tool so that participants can identify themes/patterns in their thinking and knowledge about intercultural learning concepts and demonstrate their complexity. 

This activity uses a video, "What I Learned from President Obama - Smarter Every Day 151," to enable participants to reflect on the importance of civil discourse and how they might engage in civil discourse in the future. 

This media resource introduces the concept "foodways" and focuses on the practice of slurping. Watching it enables participants to discuss the cultural contexts and meanings behind slurping, develop empathy for individuals with different foodways, and discuss how culture and foodways are intertwined. 

This article, written by Tamara Hardingham-Gill, features chefs and bakers around the world who have created coronavirus-themed food. For example, Chef Hoang Tung in Hanoi, Vietnam created a hamburger bun shaped like the virus and Schuerener Backparadies bakery in Germany created small cakes shaped like toilet paper rolls. 

Dance moves include things like, "Can I get six feet, please?"

Erika Funkhouser, Lecturer, Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT teaches a Poetry Writing Workshop. The students in her class during the Spring 2020 semester wrote poems to describe their feelings during the pandemic. 

This article features an art exhibition in Beijing that depicts China's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition aligns with the government's official stance and narrative about their response. 

Here's another one for TESOL teacher in training. It uses concrete examples and an inductive approach to critique the language often used in US media and other discourses to describe other cultures, turning that language back on aspects of US culture that are difficult to understand for cultural outsiders (in the vein of the classic anthropological reading, Nacirema).

I love this activity. It does require face to face instruction, though, and it takes quite a bit of time to organize the materials, especially for larger groups. But, it's wonderful for highlighting semantic organizations and how they differ across cultures/languages as well as individually.

This is not an activity I would do with ESOL learners themselves, but it is great for TESOL teacher training, especially for monolinguals or for those who haven't studied a language in good while. What a great reminder of the frustration, anxiety, and exhaustion of trying to communicate in a language you are not fluent in. It's a wonderful empathy builder for the language learner experience. I think it would also work well in the virtual context, although I haven't tried it that way.

If you are trying to get your ESOL students to stop equating culture with nationality, this is a great activity to complicate their thinking. It's low tech and results in great discussions that utilize crowd-sourced geographical and cultural knowledge.

While we are a metaphor kick - this one would be more appropriate for advanced ESOL students unless you conducted it in their L1. It is great for highlighting the important role that language plays in constructing meaning and interpreting experience, though. 

I am a fan of talking and thinking about culture in TESOL classrooms, and I also think it is fun to dissect language, so this one has double the appeal. It's a great powerpoint that gets learners thinking about the implications of conceptualizing culture itself in different ways: an iceberg, onion, fishbowl, glasses, etc. Great for beginners, and could be used in a mixture of L1 and L2 if need be.

This is one of my favorite ice-breaker activities, and it can also be used as a debriefing/reflection tool. It is just a collection of little charms and miniature objects, but in my experience learners love putting their hands on them. It is an instant change in atmosphere from afraid to talk to eager to explain their choices: a real conversation starter that encourages deep thinking through metaphorical connections. For this reason I think it is perfect for language learners who have so much more to say than their level of fluency and speech anxiety will sometimes let them.