This activity asks participants to create their own retelling of a popular movie, comic, novel, or historical event and reflect on their experience of shifting perspectives.

This lesson challenges participants to practice thick description and dig deeper into how culture impacts how people design and use physical spaces. They will choose a space to observe and then write a thick description essay based on the notes that they take.

In this activity, participants read Hollaback’s description of the 5 D’s and the decision tree and then answer several discussion questions. The 5 D’s of Bystander Intervention Training were developed by Hollaback to help combat bias and harassment. The purpose of the 5 D’s is to empower individuals to support someone who is the target of harassment. 

In this lesson plan, participants describe an intercultural interaction. Participants choose an interaction in which they took part, as this will be more beneficial for them in terms of self-awareness. The interaction participants choose should have involved some confusion, misunderstanding, conflict, or offense of some sort, on their part or on the part of others involved, and which may or may not have been resolved. Participants identify who was involved, where they were and under what circumstances, what was said or not said, and what happened. 

This lesson presents the concepts of etic (outsider/objective) and emic (insider/subjective) understanding of culture. The slides explain the differences in these two perspectives, offer motivation for developing emic perspectives by discussing the value of this viewpoint, list some strategies for learning to see a culture from the insider viewpoint, and use concrete (published) case study examples as fodder for practice and instruction. 

This lesson challenges participants to think more deeply about how culture contributes to everyday norms/behaviors and habits. With a partner, they will choose several cards from two sets: cultural contexts and behaviors/norms. Then, they will talk through their life experiences and attempt to “connect the dots” between how their cultural contexts have affected their behaviors/norms in particular scenarios. Finally, they will complete a debriefing reflection on what they learned about themselves and their partner.

This lesson will challenges participants to think more deeply about scenarios that cause unintentional harm. They will first identify several situations where they have either experienced or caused unintentional harm. Then, they will place those scenarios on a Jamboard shared with several group members and reflect on how they felt and how they might have handled the situation differently. 

This lesson challenges participants to consider how a mismatch between intent and impact can cause conflict and develop strategies for mitigating problems. They will first learn the differences between intent and impact and then find real-world examples where intent and impact did not match. 

In this activity, participants are divided into groups and tasked with crafting a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement that reflects their team’s beliefs, values, and priorities. 

This lesson challenges participants to consider the complexity of power dynamics and how they affect their professional, academic, and/or personal interactions. 

This lesson prepares participants for scenarios where they might have to work closely with someone who holds different or opposing values to them by asking them to create a "third culture space" with someone culturally different from them. 

This lesson will challenge participants to consider how culture affects their professional correspondence. In this activity, they will mine their “Sent” folder in their email and identify language patterns within their responses. They will then reflect on how the context and their cultural norms or values might have affected how they responded in particular instances.

This course introduces basic concepts and principals in intercultural communication and examines the intersections of culture, communication, and language learning. The course explores the many ways in which culture interacts with and influences second language acquisition. The course is designed to encourage students to synthesize theoretical concepts in intercultural communication and apply them to language pedagogy in critical and creative ways.

This activity presents a method to encourage participants to study up on each other’s names, and gives them an excuse to ask and clarify about their names when given a few minutes at the start of the game to check in with each other and review names together.

This blog post suggests that icebreakers are often uncomfortable or awkward. As an alternative to the traditional icebreaker, Stanchfield  recommends beginning with rapport building and reflective dialogue with a partner or small group sharing activities and starting with simple, non-threatening — but relevant, context setting– questions or an object/picture/quote to use as a talking point. This allows participants an opportunity to warm up by interacting with just one or two others at a time before sharing with the larger group.

This article stresses the importance of using language carefully and adapting an attitude of openness and curiosity rather than anger or distrust. "People want to feel heard," the article advises. The article eschews an us-against-them approach in controversial topics such as gun control, abortion and healthcare, and espouses a larger, more unified perception of self and others to enhance intercultural communication. 

This activity covers the five stages of intercultural competence as codified in Bennett & Hammer's Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC). Students use color-coded cues to compare the feelings, strengths & challenges of each stage, as well as the stage-appropriate skill which needs to be developed in order to move forward.

In this community-building activity, participants study each other’s names and remind each other about the correct pronunciations of their names. 

As a result of this workshop, participants will be able to: 1. Define intercultural learning. 2. Compare analogies for culture. 3. Identify domains from the AAC&U Intercultural Knowledge & Competence VALUE Rubric and apply them as learning outcomes for experiential activities. 

As a result of this activity, participants will be able to: 1. Learn the basic presentation structure and components in American academic presentation. 2. Articulate the similarities and differences in presentation styles between American academic culture and their home cultures. 3. Acquire incidental knowledge about the presentation styles in the home cultures of their peers. 4. Analyze the structure of American presentations independently and in groupwork. 5. Apply their new knowledge of American presentation styles to their own presentations

As a result of using this media resource, participants will: 1. Improve their intercultural communication skills. 2. Develop their ability to bridge difference. 3. Increase their cultural competency.

Learners articulate their own cultural norms and biases that they bring with them to their teaching in undergraduate biology courses; practice reflective awareness of how students' own cultural identities may be different from their own and how that could affect their participation and learning in courses; and identify and practice teaching and interaction strategies to employ to engage ALL learners in their classrooms

What's on family dinner tables around the globe? Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book "Hungry Planet."

"This international hodgepodge strikes many shoppers and food purveyors as antiquated. But [according to reporters at The New York Times] doing away with it isn’t as easy as it might sound."

According to the NPR website, "In Seoul, gyms are banned from playing up-tempo music, such as K-pop hits. The regulations are intended to prevent people from breathing too heavily, which could spread the virus."

During the "Experiential Tools for Answering: Why Do All of the ______ Kids Stick Together?" session, the question was raised as to how CILMAR decides which experiential activity we use with which group. The short answer is that we use backward design, beginning with learning objectives. In answering the question, I also commented that we do a needs analysis, and some were interested in seeing the chart we use for this purpose.

A presentation to the Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky state NAFSA joint-meetings on June 23, 2021

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.

“25 Questions” gives practice for domestic and international students to ask one another interesting questions that they might not think of on their own. “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. “Find a culture partner” asks participants to find someone in the room who is different than themselves in six ways which aren’t appearance-based. “Find a culture partner” is a great way to partner people up for “25 Questions.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In this TEDTalk, Celeste Headlee advocates for active listening and other strategies to better help individuals understand the viewpoints of those different from them. 

David Leonhardt discusses how the largest vaccine gap seems to stem from class rather than other factors such as race, ethnicity, or political affiliation. He relates this phenomenon to the growing class gap in the United States and how it has lead to worse health and quality of life outcomes for working class individuals. 

Shehrose Charania, whose parents immigrated from Pakistan, became the first person from her family to graduate college during the COVID-19 pandemic. She had to overcome many struggles to get there, including moving back into her parents' small home after the dorms shut down, caring for her mother—and herself—when they both caught COVID, and helping her dad pay for basic necessities after he lost his job. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants identify the competing values at their organization and propose strategies for achieving balance between them. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants analyze the cultural behaviors of others in their organization and identify positive cultural behaviors that they aspire to. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants envision a mascot for their organization as a way to construct some aspirational cultural values. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants use a MadLibs style worksheet to characterize what makes their organizational culture unique. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants analyze another organization's culture and identify the elements that they would like to either emulate or avoid within their own organization. 

In this community-building activity geared toward workplace professionals, participants characterize the stated values of their organization and attempt to analyze the organizational culture and values from an outsider's perspective. 

Sometimes the best way to cope with the negative physical, mental, emotional, and social impacts of adaptation processes, sometimes called culture shock, is to gain more self-awareness of your reactions. This mindfulness allows for reflection on potential causes and solutions. A medical model of culture shock is employed in this activity to help learners think through the implications of employing short vs long-term strategies for “treating” the symptoms of transitioning into an unfamiliar cultural environment.

A brief memoir by Dr. Neal Goodman, CEO of Global Dynamics. He describes his journey to creating Global Dynamics. 

This list of articles (with links) covers the following topics:

• Cultural competence
• Global teams and organizations
• Neuroscience
• Global leadership
• Global diversity
• Language and accents
• Inclusion
• Unconscious bias
• Harassment
• Racism
• Hospitals & Healthcare
• Leadership
• Measurement
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Organizations

In this activity, participants will play Among Us, an online multiplayer (4-10) social deduction game where individuals are categorized as either crewmate or imposter. Each round everyone either completes tasks or, as an imposter, they must kill the other crewmates without being discovered. When a body is discovered, or someone calls an emergency meeting, everyone has to explain what they were doing, and the imposter must lie and protect their identity. Players of the game are quickly aware of the other players’ various communication styles and often have to adapt a different style to successfully play the game. For example, will they be quieter when everyone converses to hide their deeds? Do they tend to talk over individuals to demonstrate their innocence? Are the pauses between their sentences something to be suspicious of?

This activity is based on the chapter by Toni Schmader, William Hall, and Alyssa Croft, “Stereotype threat in intergroup relations” (see citation below). 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 is especially beneficial to instructors and program leaders in addressing issues of academic performance among marginalized and minority students.

This activity helps participants prepare to look for themes in their data and build an argument around those themes.

A recent trend in corporate marketing is to attract consumers through social responsibility. This strategy typically involves demonstrating how the company makes a difference in the community or raising awareness of a social justice issue related to the product or service that the company sells. This activity focuses on commercials created by two different companies—Gilette and Egard—and how those commercials use social responsibility to promote cultural values and beliefs surrounding masculinity.

One aspect of cultural difference is the use of land/space, which is often dictated by both formal laws and informal practices. This activity uses regional variation in what are called fence laws (“fence in” or “fence out”) to get participants talking about how their own and other cultures think about and use land/space. The facilitator will first introduce the concept of fence in/fence out and provide examples from both ends of the spectrum. Then, participants will identify where their own culture falls on the spectrum and reflect on how historical and cultural norms/values determine the use of land/space.

In this activity, participants will engage with an intercultural concept, continuum, or scale to articulate the complexity surrounding cultural norms. Participants will go on a media scavenger hunt where they will look for examples that demonstrate a “typical” value or norm associated with their culture. Then, they will search for counter-examples that defy that norm.

Real-time word cloud builders can be used to generate discussion surrounding intercultural learning concepts. This activity provides general guidance for how facilitators can use word clouds to get participants talking about intercultural learning concepts in both face-to-face and virtual environments. These word clouds will demonstrate themes/patterns in the participants thinking about the concept, as well as the concept’s complexity.

In this activity, participants will first analyze an “Emotion Labor in Careers” case study in small groups. Then, they will design their own case for the future occupation of one or more participants in their groups using the existing cases as a model.

In this activity, participants will discuss the concept of emotional labor and reflect on the emotional labor that they and others perform in various situations. They will first think of a situation where they felt intense feelings and then discuss what it would be like to have to either suppress those feelings or pretend that they shared those feelings with someone else. This will then lead into a discussion about coping with situations where emotional labor is required.

In this workshop, participants define intercultural learning, compare analogies for culture, and identify domains from the AAC&U Intercultural Knowledge & Competence VALUE Rubric and apply them as learning outcomes for experiential activities. 

In 1902, sociologist Charles Horton Cooley coined the concept the “Looking Glass Self,” which he describes as an interactive process where our perceptions of ourselves are determined by how we believe others see us. We first imagine how we appear to others. Then, others react to us and we interpret those reactions and adjust our self-image accordingly.

This activity uses the Looking Glass Self to enable participants to reflect on how they view themselves in relation to how they believe others perceive them. They will first draw two self-portraits—one that represents how they see themselves and the other that represents how they believe others see them—and write labels surrounding those portraits to further capture their perceptions. Then, they will debrief and reflect in small groups and as an entire group.

Purdue University Archives and Special Collections is creating a collection that focuses on the memories, stories, and artifacts (such as videos, photographs, records, and physical objects) related to the Purdue community's experiences with the pandemic. There is a website where faculty, staff, and students can contribute to the collection. 

This article features Brown University junior Molly Cook, who collaborated on a research project on how the media covered the COVID-19 pandemic. The study found that the American media covered the pandemic more negatively than international news outlets. 

New York Times writer Sarah Lyall commemorates the one-year anniversary of working remotely and The New York Times office shutting its doors due to the pandemic. She reflects on the loss of connection from not being able to go to the office and communicate with co-workers in-person. 

This article details the lives of current or former higher ed employees and how their day-to-day responsibilities have been affected by the pandemic. 

A report outlining CILMAR's goals for 2021. 

A report assessing whether CILMAR met its goals in 2020. 

In this activity, participants build rapport and reflect on their interactions with others through a variety of handshakes. 

In groups, participants draw representations of what they learned during an activity. 

Stjepan Hauser, world-renowned cellist known for his involvement in 2Cellos, plays Nessun Dorma in Dubrovnik for his Alone, Together series.

This interactive article describes the tension between ultra-Orthodox groups and secular society in Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

During this discussion activity, participants pass around a ball of yarn, twine, or string every time a person speaks. By the end of the activity, there will a web to physically demonstrate the connections made throughout the conversation. 

In this activity, participants highlight both the similarities they share and the differences between them. 

This activity challenges participants to reflect on themselves and their culture while learning more about each other. Participants are provided with a handout, and they write their name, a culture with which they identify, a key message that they heard from someone influential, and their role/profession on a piece of paper that will then become a name tag. Then, they share what they wrote with other participants.

This activity enables participants to understand the differences between individualist and collectivist cultures and identify which cultural behaviors align with this cultural value dimension.

In this activity, participants practice fostering openness as part of a team, develop comfort with ambiguity, implement a process-driven rather than product-driven collaboration, and engage in active listening as part of one-on-one communication. 

Much like the well-known concept of speed dating, participants will move around the room asking each other questions to get to know each other. 

Through this activity, participants develop greater awareness of others' backgrounds and learn to describe their own background in an inclusive manner.

In this activity, participants experience and discuss feelings of inclusion and exclusion and practice watching and assessing the behavior of others. 

Participants use this activity to develop goal-setting skills, resolve conflict or establish group norms, and reflect using metaphor and figurative language.

Personal Identity Wheel challenges participants to reflect on their identities beyond social groups and get to know others in the group. They brainstorm words that describe their personal interests, skills, hobbies, etc. and then compare them with others.

Social Identity Wheel challenges participants to reflect on their identities in relation to social groups and get to know others in the group. They consider identities such as race, gender, and sexual orientation and contemplate how those identities manifest themselves in different environments and impact others’ perceptions.

Spectrum Activity challenges participants to reflect on their identities and how they are perceived in different contexts. They 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.

These three tools can be used in conjunction with each other. 

For this activity, participants generate and share ideas for solving a specific problem or exploring a topic. 

In this activity, participants practice negotiating a win-win solution while learning how to manage conflict and competition. 

In this activity, participants reflect on goal-setting, create group norm agreements, learn to resolve conflict in effective ways, and appreciate the individual strengths and positive attributes of others. 

In this activity, participants assess how a person's personal appearance and culture influence our assumptions or biases. 

This activity can be used as a discussion starter between two participants, where they use their cultural value maps to identify the similarities and differences between their cultures. 

The facilitator will perform a mathematical card trick and then encourage participants to dig beneath the surface of the trick through asking questions. Then, participants will connect their curiosity about the card trick to intercultural curiosity. 

This activity challenges participants to interrogate stereotypes and recognize how individuals are unique. Each participant will be given a lemon and asked to closely examine it and note its unique characteristics. Then, their lemon will be mixed up with all the others and they will be asked to pick it out from the group based on their previous observations. Finally, they will reflect on how this activity relates to stereotypes.

This activity enables participants to share information about themselves, learn about others in the group, and actively move around the room and engage with others. It's a classic icebreaker that is easily revised with a specific group in mind. 

University of Michigan LSA Inclusive Teaching Initiative offers a variety of icebreakers that can be used to build community in a classroom setting.

In this activity, participants write short poems where each line begins with “I Am,” which will allow them to describe what’s most important to the formation of their identities.

In this activity, participants write short poems where each line begins with “I am from,” which allows them to describe their heritage using the details and memories most important to them. Through their poems, they can reflect on their own cultural heritage and connect with each other. 

This activity challenges participants to recognize and analyze their reactions to a variety of cultural values. Participants will move to various locations around the room based on their opinions about value statements read by the facilitator.

This activity challenges participants to build empathy and a sense of team identity by listening and sharing. They will ask and answer some questions that help them better understand each other as both individuals and cultural beings

Participants first write a short poem about where they're from and then share either with the entire group or with a partner or small group. 

This activity challenges participants to expand their curiosity about unfamiliar cultural experiences. Using a deck of picture cards, they will compare their familiar and unfamiliar experiences with others in the group to gain insights about cultural difference.

During this activity, participants will be asked to draw a floor plan of a house based on their own experiences and understandings of how houses are typically arranged. They will then compare their floor plans and discuss the differences between them. The goal is to help participants understand cultural differences in the organization of space.

In this activity, participants discover similarities between one another, discuss how we perceive difference, and analyze how we form groups and how our perceptions play into group-formation.

These questions enable participants to increase their level of curiosity about others and develop active listening skills. 

This assortment of buttons serve as conversation starters and help participants employ different roles and perspectives in a group. 

After passing around an apple and dropping it while saying something mean about it, participants will then pass around a different apple and everyone in the group will compliment the person holding it. 

In this activity, participants identify the similarities and differences across the group, as well as what makes each individual unique. 

This Thiagi activity enables participants to understand the benefits of forming diverse groups rather than flocking to individuals who are similar to them.