Recently, my colleague Aletha Stahl encouraged our CILMAR/HubICL staff to create an agreement for how we would like to proceed with a discussion on a difficult topic. One of the points we agreed upon has stuck with me for the last few weeks: we agreed not to freeze ourselves or others in time, emphasizing and empathizing with one another that we are all growing, changing beings whose beliefs may not always be the same over time. It was a timely metaphor as we were experiencing the defrost of the ground in our home state of Indiana after a long winter.

I suppose that being frozen in time can be one of the tolls paid by great minds such as philosophers, diplomats, and religious leaders. For example, the Intercultural Learning Hub (HubICL) Toolbox includes a 14-question quiz called the Who Said It? Quiz by Paul C. Gorski, founder of the Equity Literacy Institute and EdChange. Offering a collection of quotations from famous historic individuals, the quiz can startle participants when they realize that they might not have known these well-known personages as well as they thought they did.

Sometimes I cringe when I think of the things that I said when I was at different stages of my life. I hope that those who love me do not have me frozen in time as saying these things. Perhaps the same is/was true for these great minds. I think it would be interesting to take the quiz with colleagues and then to ask them to share how their own thoughts have changed over time. What would the age limit be for effective conversation on this one? Do college students have enough life experience to be able to have this conversation?

Perhaps at no time in our students’ lives are they more challenged to question their own frozen-in-time thinking than when engaged in intercultural encounters—denying difference, polarized by difference, minimizing difference, thinking deeply about the moral and ethical implications of difference…unfreezing thinking is what study abroad and other intercultural programs are all about; right?

So what are the intercultural learning tools we can use to support our students’ thinking process as they experience difference and hopefully continue their journey across the Intercultural Development Continuum? I would like to tell you about three more activities besides the quiz above: Adapt or Be Yourself, Adaptation Scenarios, and Changed or Not? If you have more ideas, I’d love to hear about them in the Comments below.

Adapt or Be Yourself, by Kris Acheson-Clair and Lindsey Macdonald, is based on a chapter on transcultural communication competence by Stella Ting-Toomey (1999). In this exercise, participants are given a series of progressively challenging situations—cross-cultural greetings, interacting with authority figures, undergoing body modification, accepting food or drink which goes against dietary restrictions, to name a few. In each instance, participants ask themselves the following questions:

• Do I have the skills and knowledge I would need to adapt; i.e., can I adapt effectively?
• Do others want or expect me to adapt; i.e., is it appropriate to adapt in this situation?
• Would adapting violate or conflict with my deep-seated morality or ethics; i.e., would adapting be satisfactory?

In her introduction to this activity, Kris Acheson-Clair notes,

…There’s sometimes the assumption that we always need to adapt to other people, and I found that not always realistic both in terms of capacities to adapt, but also in terms of what other people want from us. We’re not always expected by others in social situations to adapt, so this activity really acknowledges the messiness of real-life when it comes to adaptation processes…

In a similar activity entitled Adaptation Scenarios, Kris provides Jamboards in which participants in break-out rooms can place sticky notes listing scenarios of their own creation under one of four headings:

1. I eagerly and effortlessly adapt.
2. I want to adapt but struggle to do so.
3. I have mixed feelings about adapting.
4. Nope, not going to adapt.

Adaptation Scenarios can serve as an introduction or as a follow up to Adapt or Be Yourself, or it can be used as a stand-alone activity.

Finally, I’d like to bring your attention to an activity in which Katherine Yngve challenges students to choose a song which could serve to tell the story of their own study abroad experience in an activity which she entitles Changed or Not? As Katherine says, in her introduction,

When you return from study abroad, many people will ask you, ‘So, how was {insert country name here}?’ This is a typically a question to which mere words will not do justice. So, in this assignment, we invite you to prepare for that question by choosing a song which represents your semester of study abroad (or an aspect of it) and using it to explain ‘how it was.’

Katherine suggests that this song may represent “your study abroad journey better than a mere essay ever could.”

As we think about our journey toward adaptation, a song to end this blog might be Jakob Dylan’s 1990’s hit “One Headlight,” written for his group The Wallflowers. It picks up on the sentiment expressed by Kris when she talked about the messiness of adaptation. The writer laments, “Man, I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same.” …Could be the theme song of many an intercultural encounter; couldn’t it?

References

Ting-Toomey, S. (1999). Transcultural communication competence. Communicating across cultures (pp. 261-276). Guilford Press.

1. adaptation
2. CILMAR staff collection
3. cultural adaptation