August 7, 2024, 12:00pm-1:30pm EDT
Facilitators: Kris Acheson-Clair, CILMAR; Horane A. Diatta-Holgate, University of Notre Dame

Intercultural Openness is one of the requisite attitudes individuals should develop in order to engage in effective and appropriate communication across various cultural contexts and situations (Deardorff, 2006, 2009). In this opening session of the 2024-2025 AAC&U-CILMAR Global Learning Webinar Series we will discuss Intercultural Openness as defined on the AAC&U VALUE rubric for Intercultural Knowledge and Competence as well as explore experiential activities and different ways to assess individual's development of this construct. As a result of participating in this session, attendees will be able to: describe intercultural openness and its relevance in their particular teaching or training context, identify a specific experiential learning activity they can use or adapt in order facilitate their learners' developing intercultural openness, and select an appropriate method or tool for assessing intercultural openness in a way that aligns with their outcomes for learners.

A complete lesson plan is here.

Welcome CERCLL affiliates and ICC conference attendees! I have put together this collection of activities that you might find useful in supporting intercultural development in language classrooms, including great culturally oriented icebreakers and tools related to nonverbal communication, cultural worldview frameworks, and openness. Enjoy, and let me know if there are other activities you think should be included here.

Resources related to the pendulum model of intercultural competence development and maintenance

TESOL ICIS members - welcome to the HubICL! I have collected here some intercultural activities that are especially relevant to your teaching context, but feel free to explore the other 500+ tools in the Digital Toolbox. 

Faculty interested in or engaged in COIL can find resources here relevant to the development and assessment of intercultural competence in virtual international education.

Transformational education and transformative learning have become buzz words in higher education recently, often applied rather lightly to experiences and processes far beyond what is meant by the terms in traditions of scholarly literature, and often claimed with little or no attempt at assessment. This collection is meant to be a resource for anyone interested in learning more about the decades of research on Transformative Learning Theory sparked by the work of Jack Mezirow in the field of adult education in the early 1990s.