This in-depth activity teaches participants the value of different perspectives and practices their communication skills as they work with different perspectives.  Our staff had originally used Meteorite as part of a teamwork certificate series with STEM students; however, the lack of scientific accuracy in the details of the exercise caused the students to spend more time decrying its inaccuracies than learning from its larger meaning. With these difficulties in mind, CILMAR's intercultural learning specialist, Dr. Dan Jones, re-wrote Meteorite and named the new exercise Ice Sculpture. 

This informative lecture, with accompanying PowerPoint, explains the intercultural metaphors of culture as an onion, an iceberg, a fish in water, lenses, and several others.

This activity teaches the common intercultural concept of the iceberg and visible/invisible culture. 

This discussion starter challenges participants to reflect upon how we (often unknowingly) put new people into categories. These categories can determine how we form relationships. 

This activity focuses on teaching participants how to develop self-care guides that are inclusive of individuals from a variety of backgrounds. 

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.

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."

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.

Stringer and Cassiday's exercise challenges participants to examine the relationship between values and behavior.

Complete instructions for this Thiagi exercise can be found here.

This lesson offers learners the opportunity to think about how values are reflected in the proverbs which are commonly used in English.

The survey included in this exercise gives participants the opportunity to choose a best possible solution for themselves and then to guess how their peers would answer the same questions.

Given a list of values, participants are asked to choose the five which are most important to them.

The accompanying worksheet for this lesson challenges participants to investigate their beliefs about basic human nature, human relationships to nature, how they think about time, the balance between being and doing, and appropriate human relationships.

"What Is the Message?" is another version of this type of activity, published in Stringer and Cassiday's 52 Activities for exploring values differences (pp. 91-94).

Stringer and Cassiday have published another version of this type of cultural simulation, this time called "Toothpicks," in their book 52 Activities for improving cross-cultural communication (pp. 47-49).

Stringer and Cassiday's version of this type of simulation, which they call "Rockets and Sparklers," can be found in their book 52 Activities for exploring values differences (pp. 161-165).

This Thiagi "Jolt" can be found a in his book Jolts! Brief activities to explore diversity and inclusion (pp. 72-75) and is not the same as the Thiagi "Jolt" called "Mingle" which can be found at http://thiagi.net/PAC/pacGameBooklet.pdf

In this activity, participants are assigned to different groups and asked to enact various nonverbal communicative behaviors while engaging in a cocktail party simulation. Participants then debrief the experience and what they noticed. 

Participants are given one of five colors of paper with cultural rules to follow while trying to find out the favorite color, movie, and food of participants with a different color of paper.

Purdue used this version of the I Am Poem in training for Residential Advisors in Spring 2013.  It was created by Amanda R. Goodenough.  

The source for the exercise is a long forgotten Interpersonal Communications Workbook called, Nothing Never Happens by Johnson, K., Senator, J, Leiby, M. and Milor, G. published by Glencove Press, 1974, Beverly Hills, CA. 

Portrait poems with templates and examples