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. 

This icebreaker activity helps participants become more comfortable with taking risks and sharing about themselves. 

For this activity, the facilitator writes icebreaker questions on a beach ball. Participants throw the ball to each other and answer the question under their right thumb. 

This Thiagi activity can be used as an icebreaker to learn more about the common personal experiences they share. 

In this activity, participants mingle with others in the room and find a partner who is different from them in at least six ways (beyond physical appearance). 

In this activity, participants pair up and ask each other 25 questions that develop deeper connections through the sharing of life experiences and intellectual/emotional positions. 

In this opinion article, Michele Gelfand presents research on the differences between more strict, rule-abiding cultures and looser, rule-breaking cultures and how those differences have contributed to the COVID-19 pandemic's effects across the world. 

This article identifies the positive aspects of multicultural teams and proposes paths for more rigorous research in the future. 

This paper demonstrates how multicultural teams can foster new perspectives related to problem solving. It also suggests how a project manager can best organize and influence multicultural construction project teams. 

This study found that multicultural experiences increase a group's collective creativity. Multicultural, diverse groups were found to perform better on tasks related to fluency, flexibility, and novelty—three dimensions of creativity. 

This blog post outlines the importance of debriefing and provides tips for success. 

This intercultural learning module enables learners to develop empathy for individuals with different accents and also place responsibility on themselves, as the listener, to understand accents different from their own. 

This module is currently only available to Purdue faculty and staff through Brightspace. To request access, please email Dr. Aletha Stahl at stahl23@purdue.edu. 

A newsletter that features international snacks, beverages, and fast food. 

Participants can only use their first language to communicate with others in their group while attempting to build a tower. 

This activity challenges participants to practice their communication and teamwork skills by working in groups to build a tower with particular constraints such as limited materials or communication barriers.

In this activity, participants examine how to speak in a non-native language, relate to and try to understand the feelings of non-native English speakers, and think about what words or speech patterns impair meaning. 

In this activity, participants develop empathy for people from varied backgrounds and experiences, demonstrate intentional listening, and build relationships through sharing experiences.

This activity helps participants get better at actively listening for the meaning behind the words.

This reflection can be used to collect useful ideas; identify and share best practices, personal stories, or factual information; or solve problems. 

In this activity, participants listen and learn about each other's values. 

In this activity, participants learn to deal with and express their emotions, develop comfort with others' expressions of emotion, and develop empathy for others and practice empathetic listening. 

In this activity, participants identify expectations for an intercultural experience and practice active listening.

While playing this game, participants practice suspending judgment and asking deeper questions.

Participants get the opportunity to listen to other's poems and compare and contrast the cultural influences in their lives with other participants. 

This assessment measures participants' ability to goal-set for communicative competence in seven different domains of communication, including listening, writing, and presentational speaking.

This activity allows participants to practice listening to other's experiences and perspectives without judgment. 

This assessment measures four modes of receiving verbal information: receptive listening, consensus-based listening, exploratory listening, and action listening.

This activity helps participants increase their level of curiosity about others and develop active listening skills. 

This activity asks participants to reflect on the meaning and importance of civil discourse, which includes listening to other points of view. 

Participants use photos to engage in active listening. 

In this activity, participants identify what to do and what to avoid in becoming more inclusive, analyze sentences to develop a checklist for increasing inclusive behaviors, and identify friendly behaviors that make outsiders feel welcomed and valued. 

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

This worksheet enables participants to apply the metaphor of a pendulum to their own experiences for a more robust and realistic understanding of their own intercultural competence.

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. 

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.

This publication presents a new metaphor for understanding and explaining the Intercultural Development Continuum.

This report discusses learner outcomes of 24 "faculty-led" programs ranging in length from one to four weeks abroad, and compares outcomes of leaders who have had intercultural mentoring training as opposed to those who have not.

This report discusses institutional outcomes of 2016-17 short-term "faculty-led" programs; both those programs which used qualitative assessment methods and those which used quantitative. It also analyzes the effect of leader pedagogy training on outcomes.

This report serves as an exemplary case-study in how student affairs staff can, using backwards design and formative assessment methods, more effectively mentor under-represented students towards greater professional confidence and competence. It details a very conscious connecting of all learning activities to the AACU Intercultural Competence Rubric and evaluation of outcomes of that effort using the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a self-designed survey on confidence and competence, and open-response questions.

This presentation, given at the CILMAR "Scaling Up" institute in 2018, nicely weaves together the literature on intercultural mentoring (see definition in Paige and Goode, 2009) and globalizing Engineering Education.

This white paper describes the instructor’s efforts to add a one-credit “culture-general” certificate program to a popular six-week summer study abroad program in Florence, Italy.

This white paper summarizes major findings of an in-progress study analyzing learning outcomes of two types of mentoring during semester-long study abroad, as compared to a control group (which received no mentoring while abroad).

Participation in a service-learning (SL) study abroad (SA) program has been shown to enhance cultural competence (Krishnan, Richards & Simpson, 2016) as measured via the Public Affairs Scale (PAS; Levesque-Bristol & Cornelius-White, 2012).

This study corroborates previous findings on the effectiveness of mentorship in study abroad and offers innovations for scaling up institutional efforts to support intercultural learning to reach larger numbers of students.

In this report, which serves as a meta-analysis of one year’s short-term study abroad outcomes at a public land-grant university, qualitative methods were used to analyze program leaders’ professional practice. The findings suggest that program leader training in reflective intercultural pedagogies supports more effective teaching and learning. 

Participants gather artifacts that represent cultural values and beliefs at their study abroad destination. They then use those artifacts to reflect on the intercultural differences they have experienced between them and their host culture. 

In this activity, participants use photography to analyze and reflect on the local culture in their study abroad destination. 

This activity asks participants to record their reflections as they learn a new language while abroad. 

This activity empowers participants to use journaling to reflect on how their study abroad experiences relate to their learning and personal growth.

This resource includes 17 guided writing exercises that can be used during study abroad or other types of intercultural experiences.

This manual includes readings, reflections, and activities/exercises (icebreakers and analytical exercises) for both leaders and participants of study away programs. Individual exercises may also be appropriate for classroom or seminar use. 

In the Spring of 2015, Dr. Michael "Mick" Vande Berg came to the Purdue-West Lafayette campus at the invitation of the Office of the Dean of International Students to lead an intercultural workshop.  During his keynote the night before the workshop he began, he challenged the group of learners with the findings of the Georgetown Consortium; under the leadership of Dean Michael Brzezinski, the recommendations made by Dr. Vande Berg have become a reality.  The attached presentation traces how CILMAR has put into practice what Dr. Vande Berg shared with us 3 years ago.

The Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment and Research hosted an institute February 22-23, 2018, which featured practical tools, along with background research, as to how to scale up intercultural learning in both the academic classroom and in co-curricular programming.

To contain the spread of COVID-19, France has lifted a ban on employees eating at their desk. Previously, this practice was banned so that employees were ensured a break from work. 

In the poem she read at the Super Bowl, Amanda Gorman honors individuals who have stepped up and become leaders/helpers during the pandemic. 

Bruce Springsteen teamed up with Jeep in their latest commercial, aired during Super Bowl 55, to envision a United States with a common, middle ground. 

In this webinar, several interculturalists discuss the meanings surrounding liberal vs. conservative and how their differences result in cultural divides. The goal of this video is to help heal the national divide in the United States and promote tolerance and inclusion across party lines. 

Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow of Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, and Mitch Daniels, President of Purdue University, discuss his upcoming book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, which highlights how individuals can support the pursuit of truth during a time when facts have become negotiable. 

In this article, Rauch presents evidence for the return of human tribalism and the decline in loyalties towards larger institutions, such as countries or nation-states. 

Beckie Supiano writes about a workshop developed by Martha Fay Burtis, a learning developer and the associate director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative (CoLab) at Plymouth State University. In this workshop, faculty members use storytelling to process and reflect on their experiences teaching during a pandemic. The storytelling strategies implemented in this workshop are similar to those used in intercultural learning. 

Italian architect Stefano Boeri designed 1,500 special pavilions where the coronavirus vaccine will be administered across the country. These pavilions feature a primrose theme and go hand and hand with Italy's vaccine program slogan: "With a flower, Italy comes back to life." 

This article, written by Lee Skallerup Bessette, describes how the wellbeing of staff members —who have helped to keep campuses up and running during the pandemic —  has largely been ignored or forgotten. 

In this commercial, a Turkish family shares their dinner (in a socially distanced way) with an elderly German man who lives alone and has been diagnosed with COVID-19. 

This documentary, directed by Cassie Jaye, focuses on the men's rights movement. Watching this film will enable participants to listen to perspectives on this movement and issues facing men and boys, as well as discuss issues related to gender, power, and privilege. 

Individuals from around the world (such as South Korea, Senegal, Singapore, Germany, and Australia) were shown videos and statistics centered on the United States' response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of their responses were negative, and they compared their own countries' responses to those of the U.S. 

This page features a compilation of pieces by Purdue photographers and videographers. Some of these pieces focus on Purdue's response to the pandemic, including changes to Boiler Gold Rush in light of the Protect Purdue guidelines.

A mother (Deborah Homeistar) and son (Ryan Spahn) were able to grow closer and become more understanding of each other during the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine, despite their significant political differences (Homeistar voted for Trump and Spahn voted for Biden). This article features a recorded conversation between the two. They discuss how they manage their differences and what more they could both do to better understand each other. 

In this piece, Meghan Markle (Duchess of Sussex) recalls the time when a reporter asked her if she was okay. It's a powerful moment that she remembers because no one else had asked her that question up until that point (since she became a member of the royal family). Markle discusses how this one simple question can help people to know that they are not alone and help them to heal. She argues how important this is in our current age, with the pandemic, protests, and the polarization that exists between Americans. She also discusses how this question helped her cope with a miscarriage, and how it might help other women and their partners deal with such a painful situation. 

Would "Are you okay?" be such a healing, helpful question in other places outside of the United States?

Readers of The New York Times sent in six words that described what they made them in thankful during the year 2020. Responses range from "The crinkling eye above the mask" to "Fell in love six feet apart." Common responses also included references to the 2020 presidential election in the United States and the upcoming vaccine for COVID-19. 

With remote work on the rise during the pandemic, workers from tech companies and other large companies have been relocating from big cities, such as San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle, to smaller cities, like Burlington in Vermont. This NPR article discusses this trend and how it might affect both big and smaller cities culturally. 

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. 

This media resource introduces the concept "foodways" and focuses on the practice of slurping. Watching it enables participants to discuss the cultural contexts and meanings behind slurping, develop empathy for individuals with different foodways, and discuss how culture and foodways are intertwined. 

This article, written by Tamara Hardingham-Gill, features chefs and bakers around the world who have created coronavirus-themed food. For example, Chef Hoang Tung in Hanoi, Vietnam created a hamburger bun shaped like the virus and Schuerener Backparadies bakery in Germany created small cakes shaped like toilet paper rolls. 

Dance moves include things like, "Can I get six feet, please?"

Erika Funkhouser, Lecturer, Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT teaches a Poetry Writing Workshop. The students in her class during the Spring 2020 semester wrote poems to describe their feelings during the pandemic. 

This article features an art exhibition in Beijing that depicts China's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition aligns with the government's official stance and narrative about their response. 

In this clip of The Today Show, the candidates in the Utah Governor race discuss the ad that they made together where they called for respect and unity between both sides of the political aisle. 

This article depicts two families with differing political views who put signs in their yard to demonstrate that they still love and respect each other despite their differences. 

This activity challenges participants to define the concept of emotion labor, identify their own and others’ emotion labor, and reflect on coping skills and positive outcomes for emotion labor.

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 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 first learn the theory behind emotion labor. Then, they will perform various emotions/roles associated with emotion labor as they complete a group activity. Finally, they will reflect on how they felt as they performed these roles and consider how emotion labor might affect their own professional careers.