Chair:
Annette K. Benson, MS.
Senior Public Relations Consultant
Purdue University-Main Campus
Lafayette, IN

Description:
This session was born from an invitation some years ago to speak to a group of international university students on the topic of "why it is difficult to make American friends." When I arrived, I discovered that the students had grouped themselves by nationality and/or language. Unwittingly, the students engaged in their classroom in the same exclusionary behavior which they claimed to dislike in the majority population. This session demonstrates the series of activities I used to move the students toward self-awareness and intercultural empathy.

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss the part that sorting and coding have in our tendency to group ourselves with others like us.
• Define Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and critical mass and their role in causing us to look for others like us.
• Define intercultural empathy and its difference from the usual definition of empathy.
• Define stage-based empathy and how to use it to move students along the Intercultural Developmental Continuum.

1. empathy
2. exclusion
3. friendship
4. IDC
5. intercultural empathy
6. Sapir-Whorf
7. self-awareness