Welcome!

The Intercultural Learning Hub is a crowd-sourced science gateway overseen and funded by Purdue University’s Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment and Research (CILMAR).

Intercultural Empathy in the Professional Development Zone (PDZ)

When I demonstrate the navigation of the Intercultural Learning Hub Toolbox, I usually start with the 6 facets of the AAC&U Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE rubric at the bottom of the left-hand menu. The 6 dimensions of the rubric are the attitudes of intercultural openness and curiosity, the skills of intercultural empathy and communication, and the knowledge of self-awareness and worldview frameworks. When I ask the audience which facet they would like to investigate in the HubICL Toolbox, the answer is often intercultural empathy.  

A discussion around the topic of intercultural empathy is especially fascinating as learners realize that not everyone experiences empathy in the same circumstances or in the same way. To assist educators, program providers, consultants, and other interculturalists in facilitating conversations about empathy with their target audiences, we’ve added a self-learning module to the PDZ.

If you’d like to see what this course contains, please log into the HubICL and go to https://hubicl.org/courses/empathy/. Once there, you’ll find a lot of helpful information, including an introduction and expectations video. Probably my favorite thing in this course is the opportunity to discuss and reflect on The Nail video. If you haven’t seen it, you really need to do it right now. There is also a YouTube playlist for the module.

Empathy in the Collections

You can tell how much we like this topic because it just keeps showing up in the Collections:

• When I was preparing to do a presentation on intercultural empathy at the 2020 WISE conference, my graduate assistant Lindsey Macdonald supplied me with research on the topic.
• The content from my 2020 WISE presentation is in a Collection entitled Empathy: The good, the bad and the ugly.
• As a result of the preparations Lindsey and I were doing in 2019 for the 2020 WISE conference, Aletha Stahl also created two collections of her own entitled Empathy on the path toward justice, depolarization, grace and another called The Shadow Side of Empathy.
• Some of you know that I started my career at Purdue as the administrator of a program for adults who were working on English language skills—some of the sweetest days of my 20 years at Purdue. In memory of that time, I created the Building the Skill of Empathy for Language Learners Collection.
• I revisited intercultural empathy again at the 2022 NAFSA Bi-regional in Pittsburgh (Regions VI and VIII), as we discussed Communication and Empathy.
• Probably the easiest-to-use Collection on empathy is at https://hubicl.org/members/1349/collections/all-things-empathy, as Kelsey Patton implemented her incomparable organizational skills to give newcomers to the concept the starter kit they need.

Wanting more on Empathy?

Go to https://hubicl.org/tags/?task=view&tag=empathy, and you’ll find 85 Tools tagged as empathy from the HubICL Toolbox listed! A favorite resource among our users is Empathy not Sympathy, https://hubicl.org/toolbox/tools/376/links, which features a video by Brené Brown.

Thank you to our users!

As always, we thank each of you for using the materials in the Intercultural Learning Hub and for submitting your own resources to share with others. The top users*, as of April 30, 2024, are:

Special congratulations go to Katherine Yngve, Natasha Harris, Bradley Dilger, Laura Starr, Katie Jarriel, Paula Memmer, Michael Bittinger, Nathan Swanson, and Michelle Campbell on surpassing the 2000-day mark!

*Top usage is tracked by the number of days between first and last login. We are also grateful to all of you who use the HubICL without logging in!

For the latest on what’s going on in the HubICL:

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              linkedin.com/company/cilmar

              purdue.edu/ippu/cilmar/learning/hubicl.html

1. AAC&U Rubrics
2. empathy
3. intercultural empathy
4. intercultural learning