This activity introduces participants to the Intercultural Conflict Styles and gives them an opportunity to explore their own conflict style and learn about others’ styles. To enrich the activity, participants can take the fee-based inventory if time and funding allows, but the activity can still work without taking the inventory. The goal of this activity is to encourage participants to consider how their conflict style has formed over time and how their and others’ styles impact conflicts.

This activity gives participants the opportunity to re-envision conflicts by considering the source(s), toward more effective and enduring resolutions.

Foss and Griffin (1995) re-imagined traditional rhetoric by creating an alternative way of communicating across differences in opinion, namely through invitational rhetoric (IR). IR is a rhetorical practice that welcomes and honors all perspectives on a topic without the traditional rhetorical practices of persuasion and domination. This activity encourages participants to discover new ways of discussing and disagreeing across differing perspectives and provides real-world examples of IR practices.

Invitational rhetoric was created with the goal of understanding one another rather than persuading others to believe what the rhetor believes. As an alternative to contemporary communication theory (rhetoric as persuasion to change other people), invitational rhetoric fosters strong relationships. In this activity, participants will practice offering perspectives without the goal of persuasion, and practice listening to other’s perspectives without judgment.

This collection includes resources for engaging in dialogue across party lines.

This activity challenges participants to learn how to identify dialogue blockers and understand how they obstruct conversations. They will be provided with a transcript for a conversation that was derailed by dialogue blockers, and they must identify where they appear in the conversation.

Intercultural learning experts agree that developing empathy for those who are different from us is a key component of intercultural competence. However, are there ever cases where extending empathy would be inappropriate or detrimental? This activity asks participants to consider two sides of one coin: 1. Times when they have extended empathy and connected with people who were different from them; and 2. Moments when they have chosen to not extend empathy.

This activity challenges participants to consider the “dark side” of empathy and how empathy can sometimes foster tribalism. They will listen to a podcast and discuss the concepts of empathy and tribalism, as well as how attitudes toward empathy have changed over time.

This activity is based on Jamil Zaki’s concept of the empathy gym, which he discusses on the podcasts Hidden Brain and Clear + Vivid. In those episodes, Zaki describes how he developed empathic skills as a child of divorced parents with two very different sets of values and priorities. He also discusses the positive and negative aspects of empathy in addition to providing some techniques that anyone could use to increase their level of empathy. This activity adapts one of those techniques, which he calls “Disagree Better,” and provides participants with tools for better understanding and empathizing with individuals who they may disagree with.

The bias blind spot, a term first coined by Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin, and Lee Ross (2002) at Stanford University, is when an individual fails to recognize their own biases and how they impact their perceptions and judgments. This activity engages with this concept by first asking participants to perform a selective attention test. Then, they will watch a clip that describes a social experiment facilitated by CBS This Morning co-host Tony Dokoupil, where he showed Republicans and Democrats the exact same clip of a confrontation between police and protestors and asked them who they believed was the aggressor. Participants will discuss this clip, along with the selective attention test, using the concept of the bias blind spot and reflect on how they might check their own bias blind spots in the future.

This reflection activity uses a word cloud generator tool so that participants can identify themes/patterns in their thinking and knowledge about intercultural learning concepts and demonstrate their complexity. 

This activity uses a video, "What I Learned from President Obama - Smarter Every Day 151," to enable participants to reflect on the importance of civil discourse and how they might engage in civil discourse in the future.