This simulation provides participants the opportunity to develop techniques for verbal and nonverbal communication with characters with backgrounds and motives different than their own, articulate how different decision-making models within the simulation result in different experiences and end results for the simulation, practice and assess their own ability to suspend judgment and value interactions with characters with different backgrounds and motives than their own, and to explore their relationship to ambiguous contexts based on missing or unreliable information presented by their own character or other characters in the simulation.

In this activity, participants listen to one another's stories with the purpose of discovering one another's values.

According to Erasmus+, which provides free on-line instructions for "Building a Tower," the aims of this activity are to:

• Develop creativity
• Develop leadership qualities
• Deal with success / failure
• Develop communication
• Develop team work

"American Textures, a 78 minute documentary by Crossing Borders Films, follows six young Americans of Black, White and Latino origin on a road trip through the southern United States to confront race through dialogue. Their journey moves them to push through the wall of silence/fear/discomfort that surrounds race in Today’s America and face the presence of segregation, bias, and blindness, not only in US society, but also inside themselves. Their courage, vulnerability and honest interactions become emotional examples of ways to follow in their footsteps."

"Rebekah Fitzsimmons, a 34-year-old English professor at Georgia Tech, is a millennial.

"So are some of her students.

"But despite being members of the same generation, there are some pretty big differences between them."  See the article for more...

“The lack of empathy between Baby Boomers and Millennials isn’t the result of an inability to understand the attitudes and motivations of people born into a different generation. I think it’s caused by a deep-rooted conviction that a whole generation has a lesser capacity for empathy than your own.

“So before you judge another, judge yourself. Is your colleague apathetic to the needs of the business, incapable of understanding others, obsolete or inexperienced, and has a lot to learn…or is it you?”

My colleague Wilfrido "Willie" Cruz and I began using Mark Williams' Ten Lenses: Your Guide to Living and Working in a Multicultural World for staff development in 2006.  We have prepared many different versions of the training over the years, which has sometimes included monologues, skits, video clips...The various versions have taken anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours to present.  This particular version was created to give an overview of Williams' theory at the NAFSA Region VI conference, held during the first week of November 2019 in Columbus, OH.

Syllabus designed to help university students interested in future Peace Corps or other intercultural not-for-profit settings develop intercultural competencies. 

Of interest to the preparation of the presentation on "Teaching the skills of intercultural communication and empathy across the generations" was the following:  

“Dr. Sara Konrath, Assistant Professor at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University and one of the authors of the 2009 study, spoke with BTR to discuss its findings.

“’What’s interesting is that [our study] didn’t look at the attitudes of previous generations toward college students, but actually surveyed the beliefs of college students themselves,’ Konrath explains. ‘When asked about some core empathy traits, we tended to see responses such as, “I don’t think about others when they’re in need, when someone is suffering it doesn’t move me,” and so on.’"

"BARNGA is a simulation game that encourages participants to critically consider normative assumptions and cross-cultural communication. It was created by Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan in 1980, while working for USAID in Gbarnga, Liberia. He and his colleagues were trying to play Euchre but all came away from the instructions with different interpretations. He had an ‘A-ha’ moment that conflict arises not (only) from major or obvious cultural differences but often from subtle, minor cues. He created the game to tease out these subtleties. In this activity, students play a card game silently, each operating with a different set of rules, unbeknownst to them."

Participants take turns trying to discern one another's values by listening to one another tell a story.

Through the use of this formative assessment, learner will begin to be able to see how values are expressed through behavior. If used with an instructor debrief or group discussion, learner may also begin to understand that other individuals or cultures have similar or different values.

In this experiential activity, participants are asked to place themselves on an imaginary line which spans the learning space, depending on their agreement with dichotomous statements. Interest is added when participants are asked to change their placement within different contexts--home, business--and how their own views are different than their children or grandparents.

"From an applied standpoint, the BEVI [Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory] helps individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions: 1. Understand better what they believe and value about themselves, others, and the world at large. 2. Reflect upon how such beliefs and values may - or may not - be conducive to learning, personal growth, relationships, and the pursuit of life goals" (thebevi.com).

"From the perspective of evaluation and research, the BEVI: 1. Helps answer questions such as 'who learns what and why, and under what circumstances.' 2. Allows for the examination of complex processes that are associated with belief/value acquisition, maintenance, and transformation. 3. Analyzes the impact of specific experiences that are implicitly or explicitly designed to facilitate growth, learning, or change" (thebevi.com).

In this activity, participants engage with and treat all others based on the face value of the card on that person's forehead.

Using a template, participants write about their own life experiences and then share their reflections with others.

According to Thiagarajan and van den Bergh (2017), in this 'jolt' "team members anonymously vote out a colleague to reduce the size of the team.  The debriefing discussion deals with the emotional consequences."

This simulation provides participants the opportunity to develop techniques for verbal and nonverbal communication with characters with backgrounds and motives different than their own, articulate how different decision-making models within the simulation result in different experiences and end results for the simulation, practice and assess their own ability to suspend judgment and value interactions with characters with different backgrounds and motives than their own, and to explore their relationship to ambiguous contexts based on missing or unreliable information presented by their own character or other characters in the simulation.

Based on the work of Polish anthropologist Alicja Iwanska , Jones (2017) has written an interesting blog called "Scenery, Machinery, People--Rethinking our view of humans." After reading the blog, participants are asked to enter into a discussion concerning the people in their lives who fall into various categories, as well as the various categories participants fall into when looked at by other people.

Redundancia: A Foreign Language Simulation invites participants to experience the difficulty of choosing parts of speech, thinking of syntax, working through vocabulary in an unfamiliar verbal context.  Although Redundancia must be purchased, Talk-Speak--a Thiagi 'Jolt'--and Piglish provide the same experience at no cost. Both are linked above. 

According to Maureen Ryan (n.d.), "Migration: An Empathy Exercise is a multi-step reflective exercise designed to build empathy and personal insight into processes of loss, change, and reconnection associated with the disruption of personal and cultural connections to landscape. In the first step, students reflect individually on their experiences in unfamiliar landscapes and how they might feel were they to move away from a home landscape. Second, they envision personal means of building connection with new or unfamiliar landscapes. Having considered these questions at a personal level, students read or are presented with case studies of human movement and their consequences (historical or current). Finally, students reflect on new questions that arose as they considered case studies after thinking about migration or displacement at a personal level."

In this activity, participants listen to one another's stories with the purpose of discovering one another's values.

This activity asks participants how their lives would change if they belonged to a people group different their own--a different country of origin, a different sexual orientation, a different gender, a different ability/disability, etc.

"Dividing the Spoils" is a simulation which asks groups of participants to divide a certain amount of fictional money, depending on the amount of time and effort assorted characters put into a project.  Individualist and collectivist mindsets become apparent.  A more complicated version called "Alpha-Beta Partnerships" is also available.

According to the TED Talk description on YouTube, "Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."