In this activity, participants compare and contrast features of houses around the world; articulate how and why cultures organize spaces, such as homes, differently; and consider when and how to adapt to different spaces.

This activity uses the movie Jojo Rabbit to help participants build skills in order to work well with people from other parts of the world as well as to emotionally connect and engage with people from other cultures. It also enables them to develop an ability to understand other perspectives and feelings.

In this activity, participants watch and analyze the play Hamilton to develop awareness of their own cultural rules and biases and conduct research and critically analyze media that will help shape their response to cultural biases.

This activity uses board games to help participants develop an understanding of their own worldview values, discover their peers' values through interactive interviews and games, engage with peer groups of other cultures, ad practice teamwork skills. 

This reflective activity enables participants to develop awareness of the complexity of culture while celebrating similarities and differences. It also helps them to ask complex questions about other cultures and articulate answers that reflect multiple cultural perspectives.

This activity enables participants to articulate definitions of empathy and intercultural empathy and apply the concept of intercultural empathy to improve a problematic situation.

This article, by Jason Beaubien, details Rwanda's significant efforts to curb the effects of the coronavirus within the country. It discusses how citizens are asked if they want to be tested as they are going about their day. The tests are voluntary, but there is social pressure to comply. The Rwandan government has also been extremely diligent and successful with contact tracing, and they have dedicated facilities for those who test positive to isolate. 

Paper 4: Increasing Communicative Effectiveness through History: An Intercultural Competence Perspective, Valentina Concu and Jessica Rohr (Purdue University)

This paper reviews what recent literature suggests intercultural learning to involve and then reports on a year-long e-mail exchange between Spanish and English second year university language learners. Using the results of qualitative research, the paper identifies key characteristics of e-mail exchanges which helped to develop learners' intercultural communicative competence.

Crossman, J., & Bordia, S. (2011). Friendship and Relationships in Virtual and Intercultural Learning: Internationalising the Business Curriculum. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 51(2), 329-354.

This paper reports on a qualitative research study concerned with the perceptions of university business students who collaborated on a virtual and international project to learn about intercultural communication. The findings indicated that participants capitalised on the opportunity the project presented to find friends and to negotiate and deepen relationships. In addition, the analysis revealed that social interaction also characterised and influenced the learning experience itself and had implications for engagement. 

Linked here are a PDF of all four conference presentations in this collection as well as a link to the icebreaker activity, "The Title Game," used at the start of the symposium.

Dr. Jenn Simms, Assistant Professor of Sociology and author of Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future, in conversation with Twitter followers points to White Fragility as a useful and necessary starting point for many white students, who are by and large racially illiterate, before they're able to "appreciate and understand more critical and structural works."

Several months after the killing of George Floyd, Resmaa Menakem, who offers trauma-based therapy in Minneapolis and authored My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, and Robin DiAngelo discuss everything from willful white ignorance and virtue signaling to "repair" and the world they wish to live in. 

Paper 3: Mentored Intercultural Learning Courses for Semester Abroad, Daniel C. Jones (Purdue University)

This presentation furthers prevailing research asserting that facilitated intervention provides greater gains in intercultural development (IDI) scores compared to no intervention during long-term study abroad programs. Additionally, differences in intercultural growth resulting from individual-mentored and group-mentored interventions are discussed in regard to curricula, methods, and approaches for each intervention type.

For this activity, participants listen to an episode of the podcast Gravy called "Coming Out Meatless," where a young man named Choya describes his experiences of disclosing his various identities (being gay, being vegetarian) to his family. Through this podcast, participants will discuss the term intersectionality and how intersecting or overlapping identities can lead to internal and/or familial conflict as well as discrimination and disadvantage. 

CBS This Morning. (2020, June 5). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dteOQPzc_so

PBS News Hour. (2020, July 8). https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-anti-racism-is-a-treatment-for-the-cancer-of-racism

Bergner, D. (2020, July 15). 'White Fragility' Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work? The New York Times Magazine.

Daniel Bergner points to the surge of attention given to Robin DiAngelo and her book in the wake of the protests of the killing of George Floyd and considers the effectiveness or lack thereof of antiracist workshops.

McWhorter, J. (2020, July 15). The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility. The Atlantic. 

John McWhorter argues that DiAngelo's book is both designed "to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves" and entails "dehumanizing condescension toward Black people." 

Jackson, L.M.  (2019, September 05). "White Fragility" Has a Whiteness Problem. Slate Magazine. September 05, 2019. 

Lauren Michele Jackson points out that DiAngelo's white fragility remains "enthralled by whiteness" whereas there also needs to be a focus towards others and towards next steps. 

DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press. 

To cite the Beacon Press blurb (linked above) about this New York Times best-seller: "In this 'vital, necessary, and beautiful book' (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and 'allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’' (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively."

The Beacon Press website also includes several reading/discussion guides and a quiz to see if you exhibit white fragility.

For those of you abroad in TEFL settings with classrooms that are more homogenous... From the main Digital Toolbox page (remember, under the Discover top menu), try searching a) for an Experiential Tool, b) with no external cost c) that is not kinesthetic and d) focuses on empathy. One of the search returns should be A Flower’s Point of View. We’ve had great success with this CILMAR-original tool for achieving the learning outcomes with culturally homogenous groups: 1) exercising imaginative empathy, and 2) identifying both the possibilities and limits of empathy. It is one of my favorites because it combines individual reflective creative play (in writing mode) with peer-learning through dialogue (in speaking mode).

If you were to click on the Discover top menu and choose Tags, you could search for a term such as Icebreaker. Forty-three tools come up in that search. We think of these tools as “icebreakers that teach” – that is, activities that serve the dual purposes of simultaneously supporting intercultural learning and encouraging your students to get to know /grow more comfortable with each other. A couple I would especially recommend for the domestic TESOL setting, where you may have a room full of culturally and linguistically diverse learners, are the Name Game and Voices from the Past. Both of these activities capitalize on the diversity in the room to showcase the cultural values underlying naming practices and traditions in the first case and common sayings in the second. They both are easy enough for novice language learners but still interesting for those at an advanced level. They usually don’t take more than 20-30 minutes (depending on group size), and the materials for them don’t cost money.