Analyzing the form and extent of emotion labor among US public school foreign language teachers with the Emotional Labour Scale

Acheson, K., & Nelson, R. (2020). Analyzing the form and extent of emotion labor among US public school foreign language teachers with the Emotional Labour Scale. In C. Gkonou, J.-M. Dewaele, & J. King (Eds.), Language teaching: An emotional rollercoaster (pp. 31-52). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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CILMAR Annual Cycle of Assessment: 2023 Report

A report assessing whether CILMAR met its goals in 2023.

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Questions Across Cultures

An intercultural activity which teaches Dr. Stella Ting-Toomey's EAS model for asking effective, appropriate, and satisfactory questions

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A Life Without Questions or No Questions, Please!

An exercise by Dr. Nagesh Rao 

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Teaching Intercultural Curiosity that Builds Bridges instead of Barricades

Slides for the presentation

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SIETAR-USA presentations

A presentation on emotion labor was given at the SIETAR-USA national conference in November 2022 and again in a webinar format in January 2024. This Collection contains both versions, with little difference between the two.

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Potato Activity

This activity works to "eliminate stereotypes and to recognize the uniqueness of each individual" (AFS; PennState Extension).

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Group Drawing: A Collaborative Reflection Activity for Online or In-Person Experiences

Created by Jen Stanchfield, this is a reflection activity in which a group is asked to depict their experience together in a visual format. 

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Duck or Rabbit

In this activity, participants will be asked to look at a picture and indicate whether they think it is a duck or a rabbit. They will then be invited to switch between perspectives. 

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Draw a Tree

This activity asks participants to each draw a tree and then reflect on the elements included or not included in their drawing.

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Cultural Artifact (Show and Tell)

This activity challenges participants to analyze and discuss culture based on objects of cultural significance. All participants will bring in an object that has some sort of cultural significance to them. Upon arriving, they will place that object on a table. Then, everyone in the group will choose an object that interests them and discuss why. Finally, the owner of each object will reveal themselves and explain its significance to the group.

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DIE (D-I-E) (Describe-Interpret-Evaluate)

This activity challenges participants to recognize the importance of observation and to step back and describe something before interpreting or evaluating it. They will learn the framework description (D), interpretation (I), and evaluation (E) and apply it to various examples.

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Radio Garden

In this activity, participants experience music and cultural discourses from global cultures by listening to live radio stations all over the world. 

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Picture Storytelling

This activity uses VisualsSpeak (Martell & Tiernan, 2005), a method that uses images to help participants develop team-building skills and discover other participants’ values. VisualsSpeak can be used for many different purposes including icebreakers, team building, leadership development, conflict resolution, and intercultural awareness, among others.

Martell, C., & Tiernan, T. (2005). VisualsSpeak. https://www.visualsspeak.com/

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Pick-a-Postcard

From Jen Stanchfield: "This carefully selected collection of unique postcard images captures a group’s attention and inspires meaningful reflection and conversation. The postcard collection is popular with teachers, counselors, trainers and group facilitators looking to start off a class, training session or team-building program with style, or as a way to reflect or celebrate the strengths and achievements of individuals or the group. The postcards are an impactful tool for vision setting, helping participants resolve conflict or establish group norms, or as a dialogue prompt in restorative justice circles. Postcards inspire creative writing and can be used as journaling prompts for self-reflection. The Pick-a- Postcard Kit is a compelling and engaging tool for practicing the use of metaphor and figurative language."

Stanchfield, J. (n.d.). Pick-a-postcard kit. Experiential Tools. https://experientialtools.com/collections/teaching-facilitation-tools/products/pick-a-postcard

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Perspective Taking and Microfiction

In this activity, participants explore micro-fiction, which differs from longer form narrative pieces in relying wholly on the perspective of the reader to interpret what is happening. Participants will practice active reader engagement to gain an immersive exploration of perspective taking and the creation of their own narrative worlds. This activity centers around developing critical interpretation skills in perspective taking.

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Miniature Metaphors

This activity uses figural charms to spark reflection and dialogue. 

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Language Envelopes

This activity challenges participants to identify how culture plays into what we deem important and how we sort and categorize the world around us. Participants will be divided into pairs and each pair will receive an envelope with various objects within it. The pairs will take turns silently sorting the objects, and they will attempt to guess the rationale behind their partner’s categories.

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A Christmas Carol

"'A Christmas Carol' is an excellent activity for setting context, sharing historical events, and building a vision of the future."

Hughes, G., & Thiagarajan, S. [SMARTasHellVideo]. (2013, May 16). Photo jolts activities: A Christmas carol. [Vieo]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmVigkKY6xU

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Albatross

This activity challenges participants to be open to unfamiliar experiences and reflect on how they might react to cultural difference. They will participate in a scene acted out by a simulated culture, the Albatrossians, and then discuss their feelings and reactions after the performance.

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Creating a Memorable Debriefing

This blog includes important tips, frameworks, and activities to create opportunities for meaningful debriefings.

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It's All in the Debrief

This document outlines the key elements of effective debriefing.

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Five Nosy Questions

This activity challenges participants to build empathy and a sense of team identity by listening and sharing in response to "five nosy questions."

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Million-Dollar Question

This activity (not open access) encourages participants to discuss their values in a group and examine how values are determined by experience and culture. 

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The Kluckhohn Questionnaire

This activity from Sparrow (not open access) can be found in Gochenour's Beyond Experience: The Experiential Approach to Cross-cultural Education. In this activity, participants will examine cultural identity and self-awareness by assessing how their beliefs and cultural attitudes have changed from childhood to adulthood. 

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The Home Questionnaire

This activity from Sparrow (not open access) can be found in Gochenour's Beyond Experience: The Experiential Approach to Cross-cultural Education. In this activity, participants will reflect on the concept of "tribal identity."

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Cultural Question Jar

This activity includes a list of 30 questions around topics of social identity. 

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Conversation Starters: 200 Questions to Get to Know Someone

This activity includes a range of 200 questions to get to know someone.

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Worldview Questionnaire

This activity challenges participants to interrogate the complexity behind how culture affects an individual’s worldview. 

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Twenty-Five Questions

This activity challenges participants to develop an attitude of intercultural openness by initiating and developing relationships with people who are culturally different from them. 

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Spectrum Activity

This activity challenges participants to reflect on their identities and how they are perceived in different contexts. They will consider identities such as race, gender, and sexual orientation and contemplate how those identities may be privileged in different environments and therefore affect their interactions with others.

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Questions Across Cultures

We often hail curiosity in getting to know culturally different others as an interculturally competent trait, but not many tools exist to help develop skills for deploying curiosity appropriately. This activity dives into the inner workings of curiosity. Participants will be challenged to reflect on their embodied experiences of acting on curiosity with culturally different others and to imagine possible approaches to satisfying curiosity that balance their own desire for learning with the rights and needs of others.

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A Life Without Questions or No Questions, Please!

This activity challenges participants to seek information in creative ways. They will engage in a conversation and attempt to learn more about their partner without asking them any questions. Then, they will consider the role of questions in conversations and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.

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Kahoot Questions

This activity uses the Kahoot! Learning platform to teach participants about the five Intercultural Development Continuum stages. Participants are presented with questions and statements that reflect each stage and they must choose the stage within which the question or statement falls.

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It's All in the Debrief

This document outlines the key elements of effective debriefing.

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Creating a Memorable Debriefing

This blog includes important tips, frameworks, and activities to create opportunities for meaningful debriefings.

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A Video Demonstration of "Don't Just Smile" and "Emotion Labor in Careers: Case Study Analysis"

This video demonstrates how to facilitate two emotion labor activities (both within this collection) within a group.

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Emotional Resilience Worksheet

This worksheet was originally developed for coping with the things that bug us when interacting across difference and dealing with life transitions, but the tools within it can be applied across a whole host of situations, including those that demand emotion labor. This activity encourages participant to name frustrations and consider self-care activities for de-stressing.
 

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Setting Yourself Aside

This activity challenges participants to set aside their own beliefs and attempt to truly listen to a perspective different from their own.             

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Story Circles

As a result of this activity, participants will be able to practice listening for understanding, demonstrate respect, curiosity and empathy for others, and develop relationships with culturally different others.

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Invitational Rhetoric Activity

In this activity, participants will practice offering perspectives without the goal of persuasion and practice listening to other’s perspectives without judgment.

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Willingness to Listen Measure

This instrument is designed to measure orientation toward listening with relation to listener perceptions of a speaker. 

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“On Your Feet!”: Addressing Ableism in Theatre of the Oppressed Facilitation

This article cautions that while Theatre of the Oppressed workshops work toward inclusivity and equity, workshop facilitators can easily fall into assuming participants' physical abilities, with the potential to lead to exclusion and inequity. The author therefore provides resources to maintain and continuously improve equity in facilitation by highlighting disability scholarship and Universal Design pedagogy to include and honor the diversity of bodies in workshops. 

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[Lost in Citations Podcast] The Burnout Spiral: The Emotion Labor of Five Rural US Foreign Language Teachers

This podcast addresses emotional labor in the foreign language classroom.

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Icebreaker Activities

This article offer a list of 18 icebreaker activities from Professor Wendy Smooth and The Ohio State University with the goal of "building connections and starting conversations" (The Ohio State University).

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Establishing Opening and Closing Routines

This article emphasizes the importance of classroom routines in supporting student well-being.

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Lost in Communication

For better or worse, group dynamics form quickly in team settings and are informed by many factors. Within every diverse team setting, groups have the potential to collaborate effectively and creatively, however, miscommunication and misunderstandings are inevitable. Solutions to issues must be identified and addressed for positive shifts to occur. This activity encourages participants to consider their own communication styles and the styles of others when working on diverse teams and to reflect upon and enact behaviors that contribute to healthier and more inclusive team dynamics.

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Contextualizing Identities

A key aspect of intersectionality is the context in which an identity is expressed. With each of our identities, we both perceive ourselves and others receive us differently depending on the context and circumstances. We are always who we are, but we don't think about certain parts of ourselves in the same way until we change school, company, location, etc. In this activity, participants will explore how different identities become more salient under different circumstances.

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Beans Don't Have Culture

This activity introduces a case study of international development and humanitarian aid to participants to consider the ways in which intensity factors impact cross-cultural interactions and collaboration. Participants are introduced to the background of the case study step-by-step, with each step introducing additional insight and nuance into the complexities of the situation.

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Interactive—Even Fun!—Resources for Reviewing the Intercultural Development Continuum Slides

These are the slides from my session presentation entitled "Interactive—Even Fun!—Resources for Reviewing the Intercultural Development Continuum."

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Kahoot Questions

In this activity, participants are asked questions that get them to identify the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC) stages and analyze the benefits and risks of each stage.

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Gay-Rights Movement Ventures Beyond Urban America

Gay-Rights Movement Ventures Beyond Urban America is an activity where participants read an article about gay rights and analyze it for the IDC stages. 

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Intercultural Development Orientations Classification Card Game

This activity challenges participants to familiarize themselves with the intercultural development continuum (IDC) and understand how the orientations on the continuum manifest through people’s attitudes and behaviors. They will draw cards with various statements on them and try to identify the orientation associated with that statement.

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Understanding Empathy Through Jojo Rabbit

One of the activities in this tool's lesson plan asks participants to analyze the movie Jojo Rabbit using the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC). 

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Ethics Across the IDC

This activity familiarizes participants with the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC) and provides opportunities for applying the five orientations of the IDC to different case studies.

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Intercultural Praxis Case Study

In this activity, participants will read a case study about a diverse group of students attending an environmental justice event, each with a different viewpoint about environmental justice based on their own cultural frameworks. Participants will be encouraged to discuss how they respond to statements they disagree with, their experience of shifting perspectives, their own positionality in terms of relationships of power, and their responses to the dialogue presented in the case study. Participants will also reflect on their thoughts and feelings, and how they could use their power, positionality, and privilege to create a more just and equitable world.

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Hofstede Website Activity

In this activity, participants will explore the cultural proclivities of their own cultures as well as compare them with others’ cultures, understanding that these are generalizations. Participants will also examine the generalizations presented on the website and reflect on the complex nuances that are excluded from these over-simplified categories.

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Invitational Rhetoric

This activity introduces participants to Foss's and Griffin's (1995) invitational rhetoric, an alternative to the traditional rhetoric of persuasion. Participants will be challenged to offer perspectives without the goal of persuasion and practice listening to other’s perspectives without judgment.

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Going Beyond the Comfort Zone

This activity will challenge participants to utilize the framework of Sanford's Theory of Challenge and Support to identify an image and quotation which describes their experience(s) moving beyond their comfort zone toward true learning and growth in new settings. Participants will also be encouraged to identify ways to access the learning zone in new settings when experiencing the realities of the comfort and panic zones.
 

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Centering Indigeneity

In this activity, participants will identify the value systems of indigenous populations who previously owned the land upon which they now live, reconsider the current values that program and education systems are centered upon, and apply indigenous values to these contexts by reflecting upon how to successfully decenter whiteness and center indigeneity.

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Questions Across Cultures

In this activity, participants will be challenged to consider the concept of curiosity and develop strategies for asking cultural questions that are effective, appropriate, and satisfactory.

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Re-imagining Rhetoric

In this activity, participants will be challenged to consider new and inviting ways of engaging with those who hold different opinions and perspectives.

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Mind the Gap

In this activity, participants will identify and describe the gap between cognitive and affective/behavioral competencies in new cultural contexts. Participants will also be introduced to a case study in which researchers are confronted with the gap and a third culture space must be negotiated.

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Intercultural Conflict Styles: Activity + Role Play

In this activity, participants will identify their own Intercultural Conflict Style and its impact in personal and professional contacts and reflect on what cultural and personal influences have shaped it. Participants will also be encouraged to develop in their comfort level adapting to other styles and identify how best to communicate with others who have a different Intercultural Conflict Style than they do.

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Types of Conflict & Identifying the Source

In this activity, participants will discuss sources of intercultural conflict, apply learnings to real-life examples of conflict, and extend analysis to their local contexts. 

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Sense of Belonging

In this activity, participants will identify the role of interaction and communication in fostering a sense of belonging and identify the differences and commonalities among people from different cultures or backgrounds.

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Creating an Inclusive Classroom

In this activity, participants will be encouraged to identify the challenges faced by students from various backgrounds in an academic setting and develop strategies to promote inclusion.

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Creating Intercultural Awareness (The 3-2-1 Worksheet)

In this activity, participants will be challenged to identify express the role culture(s) play(s) in shaping their identity.

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Intercultural Contact Hypothesis Activity

In this activity, participants will be introduced to the four contact conditions and discuss how the conditions can reduce prejudice and lead to better relations.

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Ethics Across the IDC Activity

This activity challenges participants to consider how the definition of ethics shifts for individuals within each stage of the IDC.

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Power Distance Case Study

This activity encourages participants to reflect on the cultural value dimension of power distance, while considering their own cultural perspectives of authority.

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TESOL Presentation 3/22/2023

This is the presentation entitled, "An experiential and interactive lesson plan for appreciating difference" from the TESOL 2023 conference.

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Hong Kong, Canada

This activity teaches participants to identify and describe language and identity conflicts that arise in the play Hong Kong, Canada by Tara Goldstein, and invites them to explore feelings of racism, xenophobia, and marginalization and describe the complexities of language discrimination.

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Birds of a Feather

This activity demonstrates to participants that people bring different talents, perspectives, and backgrounds to groups and helps them understand the benefits of forming diverse groups. 

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Pair Up

This activity invites participants to consider how they view people based on appearance and discuss two-way relationships. 

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CERCLL Collection for Language Teachers

This collection includes activities and simulations geared toward intercultural learning in the world language classroom.

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Purdue University School of Languages & Cultures Intercultural Learning Study Group, Fall 2019

This  collection  includes assessments, activities, and readings pertaining to intercultural learning. 

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Building the Skill of Empathy for Language Learners

This collection includes activities that help learners grow in empathy.

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Activities Easy to Adapt for Courses in World Languages

This collection includes activity ideas for intercultural learning in the world language classroom.

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Assessment of/as Intercultural Learning in World Languages

This collection includes recommended inventories, debriefing tools, and surveys for assessing intercultural learning.

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Frameworks and Theories for Intercultural Learning in the Language Classroom

This collection includes resources for language teachers pertaining to intercultural learning benchmarks, assessments, activities, and more within the language classroom.

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Beans Don't Have Culture

This simulation encourages participants to examine "the range of possible perspectives that can be brought to bear on [the] complicated work of international development and humanitarian aid."

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Reducing Stereotype Threats

This activity, created by Dr. Dan Jones, CILMAR, is based on the chapter by Toni Schmader, William Hall, and Alyssa Croft, “Stereotype threat in intergroup relations”. This activity will help participants recognize the mechanisms that cause negative impacts of stereotyping. This activity explores the ways to combat negative performance by identifying and removing stereotype threats. This activity and handout are especially beneficial to instructors and program leaders in addressing issues of academic performance among marginalized and minority students.

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Scenery, Machinery, People

Scenery, Machinery, People asks learners to analyze who in their lives they categorize as scenery to be observed or ignored, who is machinery to be used, and who they actually allow to be the people. Learners also analyze to whom they themselves might be scenery, machinery, or people. After this analysis, we discuss the energy that must be expended to let someone move from scenery to machinery and from machinery to people. It’s really much easier to leave people in the category that you originally put them in. For example, the person who takes your money at a fast food place is just a machine until you ask them how their day is going. Only then do they begin to move from being machinery toward being a person. But as a participant once told me, “If I wouldn’t give you a kidney, then I don’t have the energy to let you be in the People category.”

Likewise, if you are used to seeing students who are different than you in some way as only the scenery, it is easy to leave them there, to other them, and not to ever really get to know them. Only when we exert the energy to change our sorting mechanism to default to “different than me is more interesting than same as me” will we begin to see progress in our students—and in ourselves.

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Six Differences

“Six differences” asks participants to find someone in the room who is different than themselves in six ways which aren’t appearance-based. “Six differences” is a great way to partner people up for “25 Questions.”

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Different Similarities

 “Different Similarities” offers polarized students the opportunity to see how they are similar to someone that they thought was much different, and it also gives students who minimize difference the opportunity to find out just how different they might be than others. 

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Twenty-five Questions

“25 Questions” gives practice for domestic and international students to ask one another interesting questions that they might not think of on their own.

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Living in a Bubble & Auditing Your Personal Networks

In the activity entitled “Living in a Bubble,” learners analyze the places that they regularly go for sameness and difference and discuss the pros and cons of experiencing heterogeneous and homogeneous communities.

A similar but different tool which increases self-awareness about our own personal networks is entitled Auditing Your Personal Networks. In this activity, participants sort their contacts based on feelings of intimacy—how close they feel to people in different zones. Groups include personal relationships in the middle, social relationships in the blue circle, and the public in the outermost circle. Participants put actual names in each circle and then talk about how they could draw more people into their circles.

Both the Bubble and Auditing tools begin with a reading of a 2019 article from The Atlantic by Green entitled “These are the Americans who live in a bubble." The Auditing tool also includes a reading of an article by Kos entitled “Relationship circles—the most important diagram of your life.” The sources for these are included in the HubICL Toolbox.

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Critical Mass

Another activity that gets at this idea of how we sort people is called Critical Mass. This particular activity builds off of a reading in Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi, entitled “The Strength of Stereotype Threat: The Role of Cues.” Steele begins the chapter by talking about how it felt for Sandra Day O’Connor to be the only woman on the Supreme Court. There was a little less stereotype threat when Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG) was added, but there were still a lot of comments by reporters that mentioned “one of two women on the court.”  It wasn’t until there were three women on the court  that it began to feel like women had reached critical mass and that RBG, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan could speak on behalf of their own opinion and not on behalf of all women.

After reading the chapter on critical mass and stereotype threat, we ask participants to look at their own college’s webpages and analyze who is represented, who is missing, who might feel excluded, whether the pages challenge or reinforce stereotype, etc.

 

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Language, Culture, and Perception: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

This tool comes with a complete lesson plan for talking through each of the videos and applying the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In the particular context of the class in which we talked about sorting, this could have made a nice follow up to talk about how each of their languages reinforces the way that they categorize objects, ideas, and even people. I especially like this particular activity because it asks viewers to either watch the movie Arrival or to watch one of the many YouTube videos about Arrival, along with a popular TED talk by Lera Boroditsky. 

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Language Coding

Kris Acheson-Clair has created another variation of Language Envelopes, which she calls Language Coding, that asks learners to sort sentences in a similar way to sorting objects. We offer both a hard copy of this for you to use with a group face-to-face and a ready-to-use jamboard for your use with virtual groups.

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Language Envelopes

If you were to visit my office, I have 30 envelopes each containing the items that you see on the screen. Depending on how many students are in the room, I number them off in such a way that there are two 1’s, two 2’s, two 3’s, two 4’s, etc. in the room, and no one originally sitting side by side has the same number. The two people who have number 1 sit facing one another with the envelope of objects between them. The two people who have number 2 sit facing one another with the envelope of objects between them. The two people who have number 3 sit facing one another with the envelope of objects between them, etc. until the entire room is paired off with someone that they were not sitting by when they came in the room.

Silently, one member of the pair empties out the envelope and sorts the objects while the other person in the pair observes. When all is sorted, the observer guesses the sorting logic that was used, and the sorter acknowledges whether the observer is correct in their guess. Then the roles reverse—the sorter becomes the observer, and the observer becomes the sorter.  Taking turns, each player should get to sort 3 times and observe each time, each time using a different sorting logic.

Let me give you an example of a couple of ways that I’ve seen this sorted. If I were to put the pencil, the nail, the screw, the coffee stirrer, the stick, the toothpick, and the Q-tip into a pile together, you might guess that I had sorted those objects by what qualities? If I put the feather, the leaf, the shell, the rock, and the stick together, you might guess that I sorted those objects by what characteristic?

As I said, I facilitated this activity with the group, and then we discussed the natural ability and tendency of humans to sort and our ability and tendency to see the similarities of things that have been sorted. I am going to leave this story for a time and come back to it in the end, so I can tell you what else is in the HubICL that you might be interested in for answering this question.

As a result of the pandemic this past year and so many things moving to on-line learning, this particular tool in the HubICL also includes a jamboard for you to use and copy, so you can partner off participants into breakout rooms, and they can manipulate pictures of the items, just as they would the real items.

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How Effective Are Training Games?

In this article, Thiagi details important questions for facilitators to ask themselves to ensure effectiveness when deciding which facilitation activities to use. 

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So Many Games

In this article, Thiagi highlights his philosophy on game facilitation and adaptation, encouraging facilitators and trainers to consider new ways of implementing old games to build their skills and encourage new learning objectives.

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