During the "Experiential Tools for Answering: Why Do All of the ______ Kids Stick Together?" session, the question was raised as to how CILMAR decides which experiential activity we use with which group. The short answer is that we use backward design, beginning with learning objectives. In answering the question, I also commented that we do a needs analysis, and some were interested in seeing the chart we use for this purpose.

A presentation to the Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky state NAFSA joint-meetings on June 23, 2021

Kruse, J.A., Didion, J. & Perzynski, K. Utilizing the Intercultural Development Inventory® to develop intercultural competence. SpringerPlus 3, 334 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/2193-1801-3-334

The purpose of this study was to assess the cultural competency of students, faculty, and staff from a small Midwest-university college of nursing.

This study was part of a larger interventional study to enhance the cultural development of the College of Nursing faculty, staff, and students. The sample for this study included 314 participants (students, faculty, and staff) in phase one of the parent study. Phase one included the initial administration of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI®) over a two year period with analysis of the pre-test results. Phase two includes the implementation of cultural development interventions with a post-test IDI® survey and is currently in process.

Richards, C. A., & Doorenbos, A. Z. (2016). Intercultural competency development of health professions students during study abroad in India. Journal of nursing education and practice, 6(12), 89–98. https://doi.org/10.5430/jnep.v6n12p89

This was a mixed methods study, with a pretest-posttest, within-subjects design, and content analysis of student reflection journals. The curriculum was designed to increase students’ sensitivity to different cultural worldviews and support attitudes such as curiosity and openness that lead to relational abilities such as flexibility and adaptability. Students completed the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS) and Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES) both 3 months prior to and immediately following the trip. 

As a standard part of the curriculum, students were given journals with activities and guided reflections. These were designed to address different competencies in the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ (AACU’s) Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE Rubric.

Gray, J. S.,  Connolly, J. P., & Brown, M. A. (2019). Measuring intercultural knowledge and competence in college essays: Does a performance-based rubric have construct validity? Studies in Educational Evaluation, 62, 142-148.

This study explored the construct validity and reliability of a performance-based rubric, the Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE Rubric (Rhodes, 2010), the items of which are posited to measure elements of Social Responsibility (SR). 

Scenery, Machinery, People asks learners to analyze who in their lives they categorize as scenery to be observed or ignored, who is machinery to be used, and who they actually allow to be the people. Learners also analyze to whom they themselves might be scenery, machinery, or people. After this analysis, we discuss the energy that must be expended to let someone move from scenery to machinery and from machinery to people. It’s really much easier to leave people in the category that you originally put them in. For example, the person who takes your money at a fast food place is just a machine until you ask them how their day is going. Only then do they begin to move from being machinery toward being a person. But as a participant once told me, “If I wouldn’t give you a kidney, then I don’t have the energy to let you be in the People category.”

Likewise, if you are used to seeing students who are different than you in some way as only the scenery, it is easy to leave them there, to other them, and not to ever really get to know them. Only when we exert the energy to change our sorting mechanism to default to “different than me is more interesting than same as me” will we begin to see progress in our students—and in ourselves.

“25 Questions” gives practice for domestic and international students to ask one another interesting questions that they might not think of on their own. “Different Similarities” offers polarized students the opportunity to see how they are similar to someone that they thought was much different, and it also gives students who minimize difference the opportunity to find out just how different they might be than others. “Find a culture partner” asks participants to find someone in the room who is different than themselves in six ways which aren’t appearance-based. “Find a culture partner” is a great way to partner people up for “25 Questions.”

In the activity entitled “Living in a Bubble,” learners analyze the places that they regularly go for sameness and difference and discuss the pros and cons of experiencing heterogeneous and homogeneous communities.

A similar but different tool which increases self-awareness about our own personal networks is entitled Auditing Your Personal Networks. In this activity, participants sort their contacts based on feelings of intimacy—how close they feel to people in different zones. Groups include personal relationships in the middle, social relationships in the blue circle, and the public in the outermost circle. Participants put actual names in each circle and then talk about how they could draw more people into their circles.

Both the Bubble and Auditing tools begin with a reading of a 2019 article from The Atlantic by Green entitled “These are the Americans who live in a bubble." The Auditing tool also includes a reading of an article by Kos entitled “Relationship circles—the most important diagram of your life.” The sources for these are included in the HubICL Toolbox.

Another activity that gets at this idea of how we sort people is called Critical Mass. This particular activity builds off of a reading in Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi, entitled “The Strength of Stereotype Threat: The Role of Cues.” Steele begins the chapter by talking about how it felt for Sandra Day O’Connor to be the only woman on the Supreme Court. There was a little less stereotype threat when Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG) was added, but there were still a lot of comments by reporters that mentioned “one of two women on the court.”  It wasn’t until there were three women on the court  that it began to feel like women had reached critical mass and that RBG, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan could speak on behalf of their own opinion and not on behalf of all women.

After reading the chapter on critical mass and stereotype threat, we ask participants to look at their own college’s webpages and analyze who is represented, who is missing, who might feel excluded, whether the pages challenge or reinforce stereotype, etc.

The tool Language, Culture, and Perception: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis comes with a complete lesson plan for talking through each of the videos and applying the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In the particular context of the class in which we talked about sorting, this could have made a nice follow up to talk about how each of their languages reinforces the way that they categorize objects, ideas, and even people. I especially like this particular activity because it asks viewers to either watch the movie Arrival or to watch one of the many YouTube videos about Arrival, along with a popular TED talk by Lera Boroditsky. 

Kris Acheson-Clair has created another variation of Language Envelopes, which she calls Language Coding, that asks learners to sort sentences in a similar way to sorting objects. We offer both a hard copy of this for you to use with a group face-to-face and a ready-to-use jamboard for your use with virtual groups.

If you were to visit my office, I have 30 envelopes each containing the items that you see on the screen. Depending on how many students are in the room, I number them off in such a way that there are two 1’s, two 2’s, two 3’s, two 4’s, etc. in the room, and no one originally sitting side by side has the same number. The two people who have number 1 sit facing one another with the envelope of objects between them. The two people who have number 2 sit facing one another with the envelope of objects between them. The two people who have number 3 sit facing one another with the envelope of objects between them, etc. until the entire room is paired off with someone that they were not sitting by when they came in the room.

Silently, one member of the pair empties out the envelope and sorts the objects while the other person in the pair observes. When all is sorted, the observer guesses the sorting logic that was used, and the sorter acknowledges whether the observer is correct in their guess. Then the roles reverse—the sorter becomes the observer, and the observer becomes the sorter.  Taking turns, each player should get to sort 3 times and observe each time, each time using a different sorting logic.

Let me give you an example of a couple of ways that I’ve seen this sorted. If I were to put the pencil, the nail, the screw, the coffee stirrer, the stick, the toothpick, and the Q-tip into a pile together, you might guess that I had sorted those objects by what qualities? If I put the feather, the leaf, the shell, the rock, and the stick together, you might guess that I sorted those objects by what characteristic?

As I said, I facilitated this activity with the group, and then we discussed the natural ability and tendency of humans to sort and our ability and tendency to see the similarities of things that have been sorted. I am going to leave this story for a time and come back to it in the end, so I can tell you what else is in the HubICL that you might be interested in for answering this question.

As a result of the pandemic this past year and so many things moving to on-line learning, this particular tool in the HubICL also includes a jamboard for you to use and copy, so you can partner off participants into breakout rooms, and they can manipulate pictures of the items, just as they would the real items.

In this TEDTalk, Celeste Headlee advocates for active listening and other strategies to better help individuals understand the viewpoints of those different from them. 

This rubric, created by the American Association of Colleges & Universities in 2010, and endorsed by the Purdue Faculty Senate in 2011, forms the foundational definition and sorting method for the activities & materials in this digital toolbox.  the rubric measures: cultural self-awareness, knowledge of others' cultural worldview frameworks, empathy, communication, curiosity & openness.

In today's world, it is vital to understand teamwork as a frequent source of intercultural conflict and to work intentionally on intercultural teamwork skills! This assessment measures: 1. Participants' level of supportive communication, and the abilities to enact (a) civil conflict resolution, and (b) a group-oriented work ethic.

This assessment measures: 1. Participants' level of intercultural competence in the following areas: curiosity, respect for diversity, cultural self-awareness, knowledge of host-country language, knowledge of host-country context, critical thinking, adaptability, and conflict resolution.

Originally Published in Italian in December, 2019. English translation published in February 2021 (see Links tab).

This assessment measures: 1. The extent to which participants are "advancing just, fair, and conscientious global exchange, learning, and service partnerships" (Hartman, 2015). Downloadable pdf.

This Critical Reflection Rubric draws heavily on Patti Clayton's "Describe, Evaluate & Analyze Learning" (DEAL) model for deepening experiential and service learning outcomes. In this version, Clayton's rubric is mapped onto elements of the AAC&U Intercultural Competence Rubric.  Comes with a lesson plan. 

Scholars have shown a correlation between time spent living and working abroad & creativity.  Of pertinence to successfully negotiating cultural difference, the creativity rubric measures: willingness to take risks, innovative thinking, the ability to embrace contradictions and to synthesize knowledge.

This rubric was adapted primarily from the 2014 article on assessing intercultural content in travel journals, published by Malleus and Slattery. It measures the writer's comments in five categories of data: culture shock, communication challenges, cultural appreciation, cultural comparisons & reports of adaptative behavior.

This rubric was developed primarily from the 1976 Inventory of the same name by Dr. Brent D. Ruben, of Rutgers School of Communication (retired), filtered through the lens of the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (Bennett, 1986). It allows an observer to categorize or "grade" behavior that indicates: respect, openness, empathy, tolerance of ambiguity & posture towards authority. This HubICL tool comes with a lesson plan.

Akdere, Mesut & Acheson-Clair, Kris & Jiang, Yeling. (2021). An examination of the effectiveness of virtual reality technology for intercultural competence development. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. 82. 109-120. 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2021.03.009. 

This study examines the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) technology as an innovative learning platform in developing intercultural competence, including intercultural knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs.

Bailey, A., & Gruber, A. (2020). Challenges and other feedback: Integrating intercultural learning in the Digital Age. The EuroCALL Review, 28(1), 3-14. doi:https://doi.org/10.4995/eurocall.2020.11982

This mixed method case study explored globalization and complex relationships through a virtual exchange project between students from Germany and Colombia in upper intermediate level English classes. The authors believed by providing a space for online conversation, written collaboration and discussion, students would enhance their plurilingual and pluricultural competence as well as their communicative competences through the medium of English as an international language (EIL).  The aim was also to enable students to investigate cultural complexity and to develop cultural curiosity.

Citation:

Warner-Ault, A. (2020). Promoting intercultural learning through synchronous video exchange: A talk abroad case study. International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching (IJCALLT), 10(1), 1-14.

The current study explores utilizing the ACTFL cultural framework to structure synchronous video-based speaking activities and subsequent class discussions. The study includes 39 students in two sections of an intermediate-level college Spanish course who engaged in five 30-minute conversations with native speakers of Spanish via Talk Abroad during one semester. Quantitative and qualitative data from the semester suggest students' oral proficiency and critical cultural awareness improved. A comparison of survey data indicates that student-reported satisfaction and learning via Talk Abroad was comparable to that of virtual exchanges coordinated by professors during previous semesters. These findings suggest third-party providers can provide students a similar level of learning and engagement for less of an investment in time, technology, and institutional resources than has been reported in previous studies.