This is a pretty cool innovation for language and intercultural learning - check out FIU's virtual reality virtual exchange with English and Arabic students.

A 10-minute podcast describing the Pendulum article, generated by the AI tool at Google's NotebookLM site. Amazing that this thing was created at the click of a button!

Thanks for all the suggestions for openness activities contributed by participants of the webinar. This was fruitful crowdsourcing! See the links above for:

-More than one story

-How does a behavior mean?

-Yes/No

-The Great Game of Power, aka Chair Power

-Two truths and a lie (see Annette's collection Icebreakers for more like this)

-Scenery, machinery, people

-Sandra Lo'pez-Rocha suggested: Start a dialogue by saying, “I’ve heard x as a stereotype about people in my group, but that doesn’t apply to all, because…” It is often more effective to bring a photo showing a stereotype and deconstruct it together.

-Tracey Laird also noted:

With first-years, I have had good experiences early on with collage-making as a means of introducing themselves to one another — seems to open up students who may otherwise be more reserved, and also makes clear the “situatedness” of identity for each individual…

We have a “maker’s space” on campus that includes magazines, paper, scissors, glue/tape, and so it’s very old-school.  They seem excited about the hands-on, and also eager to share.  (I had a student this past year who used Canva to create a digital collage due to accessibility issues, so she was able to participate as well…)

As requested by participants, here are some resources for agreements to create safe dialogue spaces.

In the link to Crossing Borders Education's site, scroll down through the slide deck list to Dialogue Agreements. This is a great resource for walking groups through constructing their won agreement.

The list from Intergroup Dialogues also contains some of my favorite agreement phrasings, such "Take space and make space"

If you would like to review any part of the webinar video, you can access it here.

For review purposes, you can access the slides from our webinar here.

This webinar series promotes backward design of learning experiences - starting with the end result of your desired outcomes and working backward from there. Find out more at this site from MIT's Teaching + Learning Lab.

A classic intercultural activity with new twists. Great for getting learners to see the cultural lenses through which they interpret new experiences. See the HubICL toolbox for more info.

Other similar tools with analysis of experience frameworks include:

• DAE hubicl.org/toolbox/tools/30/objectives 
• DIVE hubicl.org/toolbox/tools/498/objectives 
• I DIVE hubicl.org/toolbox/tools/688/objectives

This is an icebreaker that teaches - a great tool for getting people to open up and talk more deeply about who they are as cultural beings. See the HubICL toolbox for more details.

Other similar activities include:

• 25 Questions hubicl.org/toolbox/tools/1/objectives   
• Question Jar hubicl.org/toolbox/tools/360/objectives

CBE is a non-profit organization that works with youth around the world. In addition to high quality documentary film resources that promote intercultural dialogue, CBE has pioneered a mediated peer dialogue methodology that is scalable and effective.

I love that this dialogue game was created by an immigrant group with the goal of promoting openness, but it works well in other contexts as well. It's fun and easy to use, and can be done in person or online. It's appropriate for learners of all levels. Find out more in the HubICL toolbox.

This activity is a dialogue-based approach to nurturing openness. It focuses on disrupting cultural stereotypes by telling counter-narrative stories. I have found it works best with advanced learners. See the HubICL for more details.

This is one of several similar story-telling structures that foster openness, especially in diverse groups. Story Circles is promoted as an intercultural dialogue activity by UNESCO.

Although it does take work to set up and does not lend itself well to virtual environments, this is one of my favorite activities related to openness. I have used it many times with learners of all ages and in many contexts, and it has always been eye opening for them to see how many different valid ways there are to categorize or organize information (beyond their first instinctive effort). See the HubICL toolbox for more details.

This experiential activity that builds openness is versatile in that it can be adapted to a range of contexts and is appropriate for use with learners across the spectrum of orientations toward difference. See the HubICL toolbox for details.

One of the experiential activities I recommend that supports development of openness is this online YouTube Ethnography assignment. See the HubICL for details.

Tolerance for Ambiguity Scale is a short open access instrument that can be used in a cloud software platform to provide automated feedback to learners as a formative assessment. See the HubICL toolbox for details, and contact cilmar@purdue.edu if you would like a demo of how we have the survey set up in Qualtrics.

The Miville-Guzman Universality Diversity Short Scale is sometimes used to measure intercultural openness. You can learn more about it here in the HubICL toolbox.

The Intercultural Attitudes, Skills, and Knowledge Short Scale Plus is a quantitative instrument aligned with the AAC&U VALUE Rubric for Intercultural Knowledge and Competence. Check it out in the HubICL Toolbox.

You can see Dr. Horane Diatta-Holgate explain how to use the ASKSS and other short scales aligned with the AAC&U VALUE rubrics by clicking on the link to the Research Repository. The slides for that video are attached here as well.

You can download the VALUE rubrics free from the AAC&U site.

This series of seven 90-minute webinars offers professional development in the facilitation and assessment of one facet from the AAC&U Global Learning (GL) VALUE Rubric and/or the Intercultural Knowledge and Competence (ICKC) VALUE Rubric during each webinar. The series begins in early August 2024 and ends in mid-June 2025.

See the CILMAR website for additional information about other sessions in the series.

We have been using the Amazing Race in Study Abroad support courses for many years at Purdue, but I think it has applications to the language classroom as well. You would just need to adapt the instructions, and I can envision two ways to do that: moving the context to a target-language area of the local community, or changing it to a web-based activity.

Do your students need some basic instruction and practice in listening and observation skills that can help them learn about culturally different others? Here are two new options from CILMAR: Thick Description and Emic Perspectives.

Here are 3 activities you can use to hone those cultural discovery skills in your language learners: Grocery Store Ethnography, YouTube Ethnography, Martian Anthropology.

There are a ton of resources linked from the Critical Incident tool under Links. Check out all the ways that you can get your learners to imagine themselves in a culturally fraught situation and think/talk/write through how they would respond.

Another great simulation is Barnga, especially if you want to highlight how different cultures "play by different rules" and "define winning in different ways". It is easy and cheap to run and students enjoy it.

Albatross is another oldie but goodie - it is relatively easy to perform and adapt to different contexts. The learning is both in the discomfort of the simulation itself and especially in the debriefing. I would recommend that newcomers to the simulation try to watch it done (I have seen videos online) before trying it themselves. What I like about simulations like this is that they give learners such an embodied experience to process and reflect on.

More kinesthetic options include these simulations that have been around forever in different forms: BaFa BaFa requires quite a bit of accoutrement, but Toothpicks and Cocktail party are easier and cheaper updates. Great for highlighting cultural differences in norms and behaviors and giving learners that embodied experience of discomfort in an unfamiliar environment. 

Draw a House is a good proxemics activity. Rather than the more typical focus of personal space bubbles in most proxemic learning exercises, this one emphasizes the differences in how people around the world arrange their living spaces. I like it because it reveals both similarities and differences. It also engages learners kinestheically.

This activity, the Scissors Game, has been around forever, but I still like it because it is simple, fun, kinesthetic, and effectively makes the point that students need to pay attention to other peoples' bodies. 

Don't neglect nonverbal communication in the language classroom! Not only can attention to nonverbals be very helpful to language learners in interpreting what they hear, but also they can get students into trouble if they assume universality in nonverbal communication because of the way it varies across cultures. HINT: To find tools on any topic, you can search Tags (under the Discover menu) or the full HubICL site (top right Search link) for key words such as nonverbal, gesture, proxemics, etc. These are the hits that come up in the Toolbox for nonverbal.

Whether you are assigning conversation partners amongst your own students, or pairing them with native speakers externally, it is extremely useful to provide some structure and guidance for their communication. To focus on cultural learning as well as listening and speaking practice, try out these sets of discussion prompts. The last one, Keep it Real, is an actual board game that would be great for in-person classroom use and really gets at issues of inclusion and social justice.

Aletha Stahl has a great collection of resources for assessing intercultural learning in language classrooms. See her favorites here.

I love that the Human Values Continuum can be so easily adapted. I linked here not only the original tool, but also collection posts that discuss it being applied in different ways, including virtually. See also the last link to another activity that would make a great follow-up: It Depends!

For more advanced students capable of thinking critically about the underlying cultural metaphors that lurk in our subconscious and come out in language, this activity is great. It's probably too advanced for younger students or those at the very beginning of language study, though.

If you are looking for a way to get students to recognize and address stereotypes, this is a basic activity for changing stereotypes into generalizations. 

There are great cultural learning web resources out there. Some are proprietary and have associated costs (see Country Navigator as an example). The Hofstede website tool is free, but I always caution teachers against unintentionally reinforcing stereotypes with its use. That's why I recommend you check out this tool, which has suggestions for how to use the website to best effect. 

Culture mapping gets students to think about their own cultural values, which can be helpful both for self-awareness and in preparation to interact with someone from another language background. There are a ton of activities in the HubICL related to cultural values. TIP: Go to the toolbox and search for the word "values", or click on Tags under the Discover menu and search for values there.

Language Envelopes takes a lot of effort to put together, but boy is it worth it! I love seeing students creatively trying to arrange objects into categories and eventually coming to the conclusion that semantic and other linguistic categories are constructed rather than natural (and one of many options). There is also a virtual version that uses Jamboard, if your learners are not physically with you.

Part of openness, or the willingness to interact across cultural differences, is tolerance for discomfort (social, emotional, mental, physical), so activities like this can be helpful for students to become more self-aware and more skilled at managing uncomfortable interactions/situations.

One of my favorite media activities uses the TED talk "The Danger of a Single Story". It is highly engaging and can be used to inspire openness to multiple narratives and perspectives. Check out the HubICL tool for discussion prompts and links in a complete lesson plan.

Annette Benson pulled this toolbox into one of her collections, with lots of concrete details about where to find elements of the SALTO collection in the HubICL, so I am passing along that resource to you here.

For those of you who like to give your students something physical to manipulate, these experiential tools are great for icebreakers as well as debriefing learning. My absolute favorite is the Mini-metaphor set, so that is the one I linked here. Click Related Tools for other similar products, and check out under Links the video I made explaining how I like to use these.

Two of my favorite culturally focused icebreakers are Voices from the Past and the Name Game. You can read what I wrote about them in this TESOL collection or visit them directly in the toolbox. Both are great in diverse groups but also can be fruitful in more homogenous language classrooms.

In any collection for teachers I like to include a few icebreakers that are appropriate to the teaching context. Many teachers overlook the teaching potential of icebreakers, which are useful for more than having students get to know each other and can be a great source of cultural knowledge or at least an opportunity for self-awareness development. That said, there are some caveats to icebreakers, and I think this blog highlighted in Annette Benson's collection on Icebreakers that Teach is good food for thought. While you are there, check out the rest of Annette's handy collection!

If you'd like to take a deep dive into the Pendulum model, there is now an open access learning module in the HubICL's Professional Development Zone for you to explore and apply.

More recently, Sundae and I discuss the Pendulum model and our latest related project on Richard Farkas' podcast, The Intercultural Toolbox. You can find the video version here.

When the article first came out, Sundae and I talked it up on her award-winning podcast series, Expat Happy Hour.

You can download not only the article but a handy 2 page fillable pdf reflection worksheet on the Pendulum model from the Publications area of the HubICL.

Here's where it all began. The link here leads to the open access article available for free download from the publisher. This article is also available published inside the HubICL.

Here's another one for TESOL teacher in training. It uses concrete examples and an inductive approach to critique the language often used in US media and other discourses to describe other cultures, turning that language back on aspects of US culture that are difficult to understand for cultural outsiders (in the vein of the classic anthropological reading, Nacirema).

I love this activity. It does require face to face instruction, though, and it takes quite a bit of time to organize the materials, especially for larger groups. But, it's wonderful for highlighting semantic organizations and how they differ across cultures/languages as well as individually.

This is not an activity I would do with ESOL learners themselves, but it is great for TESOL teacher training, especially for monolinguals or for those who haven't studied a language in good while. What a great reminder of the frustration, anxiety, and exhaustion of trying to communicate in a language you are not fluent in. It's a wonderful empathy builder for the language learner experience. I think it would also work well in the virtual context, although I haven't tried it that way.

If you are trying to get your ESOL students to stop equating culture with nationality, this is a great activity to complicate their thinking. It's low tech and results in great discussions that utilize crowd-sourced geographical and cultural knowledge.

While we are a metaphor kick - this one would be more appropriate for advanced ESOL students unless you conducted it in their L1. It is great for highlighting the important role that language plays in constructing meaning and interpreting experience, though. 

I am a fan of talking and thinking about culture in TESOL classrooms, and I also think it is fun to dissect language, so this one has double the appeal. It's a great powerpoint that gets learners thinking about the implications of conceptualizing culture itself in different ways: an iceberg, onion, fishbowl, glasses, etc. Great for beginners, and could be used in a mixture of L1 and L2 if need be.

This is one of my favorite ice-breaker activities, and it can also be used as a debriefing/reflection tool. It is just a collection of little charms and miniature objects, but in my experience learners love putting their hands on them. It is an instant change in atmosphere from afraid to talk to eager to explain their choices: a real conversation starter that encourages deep thinking through metaphorical connections. For this reason I think it is perfect for language learners who have so much more to say than their level of fluency and speech anxiety will sometimes let them.

I have used this activity for years in language and linguistics classrooms (face to face) and have found it very useful for getting learners to a more complex understanding of culture when their minds automatically jump to differences at the level of national culture. It translates extremely well to the online context, either synchronous or asynchronous, and would be perfect for preparation for COIL because it gets people beyond thinking of nations as monolithic wholes represented by their peer counterparts.

This is a great activity for learners who need to know more about micro-aggressions (specifically those encountered by Asians and Asian-Americans in a higher education context) and how to counter them. I did it recently online with staff, but it could easily be used for students as well. It is a great mix of theory and practice, includes multimedia, and ends with a useful discussion of cultural humility.

For those of you abroad in TEFL settings with classrooms that are more homogenous... From the main Digital Toolbox page (remember, under the Discover top menu), try searching a) for an Experiential Tool, b) with no external cost c) that is not kinesthetic and d) focuses on empathy. One of the search returns should be A Flower’s Point of View. We’ve had great success with this CILMAR-original tool for achieving the learning outcomes with culturally homogenous groups: 1) exercising imaginative empathy, and 2) identifying both the possibilities and limits of empathy. It is one of my favorites because it combines individual reflective creative play (in writing mode) with peer-learning through dialogue (in speaking mode).

If you were to click on the Discover top menu and choose Tags, you could search for a term such as Icebreaker. Forty-three tools come up in that search. We think of these tools as “icebreakers that teach” – that is, activities that serve the dual purposes of simultaneously supporting intercultural learning and encouraging your students to get to know /grow more comfortable with each other. A couple I would especially recommend for the domestic TESOL setting, where you may have a room full of culturally and linguistically diverse learners, are the Name Game and Voices from the Past. Both of these activities capitalize on the diversity in the room to showcase the cultural values underlying naming practices and traditions in the first case and common sayings in the second. They both are easy enough for novice language learners but still interesting for those at an advanced level. They usually don’t take more than 20-30 minutes (depending on group size), and the materials for them don’t cost money.

Big thanks to the Forum on EA for helping us (myself and Drs. Jennifer Wiley and Carine Ullom) make this recent conference presentation available to the public. 

Just out from the Forum on Education Abroad is this introductory guide for international education professionals and faculty interested in COIL, virtual exchange, and other forms of online global learning. I was happy to contribute content to this guide and am excited to see it available to the public now!

Carine Ullom, a colleague at the University of Ottawa, sent me the link to this recent large scale longitudinal study that documents the impact of virtual exchange on learner development in teacher education programs in Europe. 

I recently created this table to encourage Purdue faculty and staff to explore virtual alternatives to more traditional ways they may have previously engaged students in intercultural learning. I hope it is inspiring!

I highly recommend the modules offered by CoreCollaborative International in collaboration with Crossing Borders Education. They use an innovative method and evidence-based best practices and have been demonstrated with research at Glasgow University to be highly effective in engaging students (increasing retention of elective course participants from 40-95%). 

Some excerpts from student comments in the Glasgow study:

• The group that I was allocated to were from different backgrounds. We shared our fears, goals and we even opened up and talked about our daily issues. I felt as if I knew the other students before.

• The workshop yesterday was particularly emotional, as every participant in my group was able to open up its heart, to share its deepest feelings, fears and hopes without fear of being judged. Furthermore, the topics addressed offered an opportunity to reflect and practice immediately, offering a new perspective on things: for example, much has been said about women feeling unsafe around men at times, which made me reflect on how my behaviour could have, at times, been misinterpreted as “threatening” or “source of anxiety”. 

As is obvious from these student comments, through these modules, learners share in meaningful peer learning across difference. The modules use an innovative patent-pending methodology that encourages participants to engage interactively with peers in transformative learning activities and discussions. The "Virtual Fishbowl Process" is based on a four-step Modeling-Reflection-Dialogue-Debriefing paradigm. 

Embedding this module within existing courses supports campus comprehensive internationalization and campus climate improvement initiatives, as it connects students of different backgrounds both locally and abroad. The intercultural learning material is relevant across many disciplines, with content that is applicable to courses on many different topics. Group sizes are flexible, and instructors can facilitate the content themselves or outsource that mentoring to highly skilled facilitators.

The duration of the stereotypes module is 10 hours (3 weeks of micro-lessons and facilitated small group meetings). The cost, which can be covered by an institution or passed on to students as a "textbook" or "lab" fee, is $75 per student. 

The link above takes you to a contact form for more information. See also:

https:/crossingborders.education

http://corecollaborative.com 

Here are the slides from my recent Forum on Education Abroad presentation with Jen Wiley (James Madison University) and Carine Ullom (Ottawa University). 

This link sends you to a Google Doc compiled by Dr. Carine Ullom, Associate Dean of Instructional Innovation at Ottawa University that contains a very comprehensive and well-organized list of resources for COIL/VE/GCTL. She kindly shared this with the public at a recent presentation I did with her at the virtual Forum on Education Abroad conference. 

Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the SUNY COIL center, and I recently (April 2, 2020) facilitated a webinar on Virtual Exchange for the Forum on Education Abroad's free "Response to COVID-19" series.  The video and slides are both permanently available free from the Forum website: www.forumea.org/webinars. This presentation gives a basic intro to virtual exchange, provides three models of virtual exchange along with examples of each, discusses the process of developing a VE, and links to a wealth of training opportunities and resources. 

One of the challenges of COIL is to support connection and relationships between participants. Like intercultural competence development, we can't count on it to happen on its own naturally without careful planning. I found the tips on fostering social presence and interaction on Brigham Young University's site helpful for the Virtual Exchange context. Starting with icebreakers to help learners get to know each other and continuing throughout the course with best practices in relationship development and maintenance, social presence should be a constant in COIL instructor course design!

Stephanie Dorscher at FIU has put together a useful resource page for faculty engaging in COIL or Virtual Exchange. She has posted sample activities, recommended strategies, sources of information, and more.

While it was originally designed for study abroad pre-departure courses, Anthony Ogden's YouTube Ethnography Project is easily adaptable to a COIL context. Here is what I would do: 

1. Put COIL students in diverse pairs or small groups. 

2. Have them complete Step 1, creating their own videos. Alternately, they could find existing videos that represent their own culture(s). 

3. Instead of framing their ethnographic research on YouTube as trying to under their host culture, have them search for and analyze videos related to the culture of their diverse teammates, including the videos those learners have already posted. 

4. Team members can serve as cultural informants for each other, responding to conclusions drawn in the ethnographies when they are presented to the group.

This activity is a fun way to engage the digital native generation in critical thinking. It could easily be done asynchronously in a virtual exchange or COIL setting - simply give the instructions, have learners complete the activity alone or in pairs and write reflections on their findings, and then debrief in a discussion board. The debriefing could occur in a synchronous discussion if you prefer. 

HubICL manager Annette Benson has created a very robust (nearly a hundred posts, last time I looked) collection of activities that translate well to virtual platforms. For those of you overwhelmed by the number of options in the HubICL toolbox or in need of guidance about what works/doesn't work online rather than in person, this is a great starting point to find appropriate tools. Don't forget to always align your choices with your intended learning outcomes! 

If you are looking for a self-contained program of study out there that you could send learners to or incorporate into a course or training program of your own, Katherine Yngve has some suggestions for you in a HubICL collection called Online Intercultural Learning Curriculum Options.

Many COIL experiences use English as the medium of instruction, with a mix of native and non-native English speakers participating. In some cases, it's a good idea to prepare the native English-speakers for these interactions by helping them to understand what non-native speakers may be experiencing. Redundancia is a very effective (though not free) empathy-building activity that is a great way to make native speakers more aware of the power dynamics that privilege their own contributions to discussions and more willing to be accommodating listeners in COIL/international virtual education interactions with non-native speakers. Another option - and this can be done with the whole group, not just the native speakers - is to watch a relevant film clip from the Crossing Borders Education film, "The Dialogue" (#3 of the list of clips linked above - "On speaking a foreign language") and extract lessons from it in a debriefing discussion.

CILMAR Intercultural Learning Specialist Florence Adibu has recommended this reading to prep students for interacting with others whose names they may perceive to be "hard". She writes (in a review of the Name Game activity):

Consider reading this article about the importance of having an attitude of curiosity when learning unfamiliar names. "Names That Are Unfamiliar to You Aren't "Hard," They're "Unpracticed": "It's time to change the conversation around 'difficult' names."

Imaginative discussion activities such as "If I woke up tomorrow" make great reflective tools for empathy building and the development of capacity for perspective taking. I can see this particular activity being useful before a COIL/international virtual education experience (or in preparation for study abroad), during a program or course - for example when a critical incident occurs that students need help processing - or after an experience such as in a reentry course or debriefing. For COIL, you should probably tailor the activity so that students are perspective taking relevant to other cultural groups involved in the program. For study abroad, target various subgroups of the host culture.

This set of questions might be a good way for pairs or small groups to get to know each other in a COIL/international virtual education experience. I would encourage the use of synchronous meeting platforms so students can talk through their responses with each other. Note that there is the original version with 25 questions and a "mini" activity with only 5, so you have some options in terms of how much time you want to devote to the activity. If asynchronous communication is your only option, consider choosing 1-2 questions a week to jumpstart other discussions, so that group relationships deepen over time.

"Pacing" is a great activity for diverse teams to increase the effectiveness of communication and improve team dynamics. We use it often at Purdue both for on-campus courses and in preparation for study abroad (for example with students who prefer turn-taking but will be immersed in a host culture that uses overlapping). When you have a COIL/international virtual education program that will involve students from different communication styles, this activity would be very good preparation for students. I recommend doing with with all groups of students involved in a program in person before the experience begins rather than trying to adapt it to an online medium. 

We use this often on Purdue's campus in classes and programs that include a good mix of domestic and international students. If you are looking for an activity to encourage deep conversation about cultural values in diverse groups of students, this is a good pick. For this reason, I think it would work well with COIL/international virtual education (though I have never personally tried it in this context). Because it requires coming to a consensus as a group in multiple "rounds" of conversation, I think it would work much better with synchronous online discussions than spread over a longer time period asynchronously. Regardless of if you do this in person or online, pay close attention to the Notes tab, since there are multiple versions of the activity available for download and each has its advantages/disadvantages.

I think the assignments in this course are of particular interest to COIL instructors and international virtual education program developers because they are already adapted or were even originally designed for online use in distance learning. However, keep in mind that many of them are currently meant for individual use by students. If you want to use them with small groups, you'll need to alter some of the instructions. Big thanks to Dr. Dan Jones of CILMAR for collecting these resources together for easy access by  HubICL users.

The American Association of Colleges and Universities have created over the past decade or more a set of 16 rubrics referred to as the VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) - yes, higher education does love its acronyms. These rubrics are great tools both for choosing concrete learning outcomes and for measuring growth or achievement related to those outcomes. The two rubrics in the set that are most relevant to intercultural learning are: Intercultural Knowledge and Competence and Global Learning. The HubICL Toolbox is of course searchable by the 6 elements of the first of these two rubrics (the intercultural one): self-awareness, worldview frameworks, verbal/nonverbal communication skills, empathy, openness, and curiosity.

In addition to simply searching the Toolbox for relevant learning outcomes to your COIL programs/courses, you  might try going to the Discover menu above, choosing Tags, and searching for key words there. One advantage to this method is that it connects you with items in every area of the HubICL, not just the Toolbox. Also, you can snowball via tags - if you have found something interesting, try clicking on one of its tags (usually located at the top of the screen) to see everything else in the HubICL that shares that same tag.

COIL instructors or designers might want to check out these additional related collections, complements of the HubICL manager, Annette Benson.

D-I-E (Describe, Interpret, Evaluate) is an oldie but a goodie with an unfortunate name! When preparing students for study abroad or a COIL/international virtual education experience, it can be very effective to do this activity in an orientation. It provides essential perspective-taking skills by making students aware of the cultural lenses through which they are interpreting and evaluating events and experiences, and then providing them with an analytical process for examining their assumptions and gut reactions and imagining (or asking for) alternate interpretations and evaluations from other cultural perspectives. 

This activity is great for improving communication in diverse teams. More direct versus more indirect communication styles can be an issue in COIL/international virtual education as people with different cultural norms interact online. It might be helpful to talk explicitly about this difference in communication styles and help students practice "code-switching".  I would assign this in small groups or pairs with members of different cultural groups; they probably need to do the activity synchronously, especially if they include a role play. Some important points to emphasize: 1) there is no inherent hierarchy here, with one style always better than the other; 2) this is not a binary but a spectrum; 3) the same statement can be perceived as direct by some people and indirect by others - context matters!

Scenery, Machinery, People is an activity that we have been using at Purdue in various contexts - it seems really effective for encouraging self-reflection and empathy for others. In COIL/international virtual education as well as in study abroad, I think it makes students more aware of how they are treating others (and how that feels). To modify it for COIL, you could either assign a pre-reading or give instructions with the powerpoint in a synchronous meeting. Debriefing can be in groups via discussion board or individually in a reflective writing assignment. You'll want to be sure to focus discussion or reflective writing on the COIL experience via effective prompts, such as: when operating unthinkingly on "auto-pilot", when might you be in danger of treating others involved in this COIL experience as scenery? as machinery? how would you feel if others place you in that category? how can we intentionally work to treat each other as people in this course/program? how will this be beneficial?

This interactive online tool that allows users to explore cultural values in country comparisons based on Geert Hofstede's classic research works well for both COIL/virtual international education and preparation for study abroad. However, instructors really need to take care not to create or reinforce cultural stereotypes by dealing only with these aggregate means. It is so important to treat the research on this website as a starting point for discussion of within group variation and getting to know individuals in other cultures. For COIL, for example, you might assign students to explore a country comparison with the groups involved in the course/project and then to discuss among themselves questions such as: what did you think about the way your country was represented - does it apply well to you personally? did anyone have the experience of not being represented (your country is not listed)? in what contexts do you think this research leads to accurate expectations, and when would it be misleading for anyone relying on this information about your national culture? are their subgroups in your country that are strikingly different from these overall trends? based only on the website, what conflicts might be predicted among students in this COIL experience? now that you have more nuanced understandings of each other as individuals, do you think those predictions will hold true? what can you do as a group to manage conflicts and misunderstandings now that you have this information?

There are several excellent recent documentaries from CBE that work well to prep students for intercultural interactions, helping them to develop more self-awareness, openness, and empathy. These include the films "Crossing Borders" and "The Dialogue"

I really like these documentaries for both pre-departure for traditional study abroad and for COIL/international virtual education experiences. Watching and then discussing this film allows students to open up and be vulnerable about their own processes of becoming more aware of the cultural stereotypes they have of others as they prepare to interact more intimately through immersion or online interaction. If you don't have access to the whole film through your institution, cannot afford to purchase a copy, or simply want to use shorter film clips as part of a dialogue or written reflection activity, there are several excerpts available for free streaming from the Crossing Borders Education website. 

This is a great short (<20 min) video to incorporate into a COIL course if you are trying to get students to complicate their understandings of the members of other groups as well as work on self-awareness of their own stereotypes and preconceptions of others. For international virtual education, I would modify this activity by assigning the video to watch individually beforehand and then providing prompts for either synchronous or asynchronous discussion among students. Small or large groups both work. I would add some debriefing questions that apply the concepts in the video to the COIL context and the particular groups represented. For example: what stories are told of the places/peoples in the COIL group? who tells those stories? what are the limitations of understanding others in the COIL experience just on those stories? what stories do students wish out-group members could hear about their cultural groups? 

The Institute for Innovative Global Education is another leader on the world stage for COIL. They are especially committed to documenting with rigorous research the effectiveness of COIL and COIL + study abroad combinations of various kinds for intercultural competence development. See their website for more information on virtual education conferences, publications, sample course syllabi, and more. 

One of the quantitative instruments most commonly used to assess intercultural learning outcomes in COIL is the Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory. Several large scale government supported projects are using the BEVI. See http://www.kansai-u.ac.jp/Kokusai/IIGE/resources/BEVI-COIL.php for more information as one example of these research efforts.

SUNY (the State University of New York system) is one of the pioneers of international virtual exchange in the US and the world. See their website for resources, conference information, publications, and more.

This is another way for students in a COIL experience to get to know each other with an added cultural layer to the introductions. You'll need to modify it for a virtual setting. I think it works well to put 1-2 students from each university in a group together to exchange the stories of their naming in asynchronous discussions. 

I think this icebreaker is a great way to move beyond students in each group learning each others' names to a deep exploration of cultural values expressed in sayings heard during childhood/youth.  For COIL, the activity needs to be modified to utilize either a synchronous virtual setting or an asynchronous discussion board type setting. The latter seems to work better in my experience. In this case, you would ask each student to post the information the activity asks them to put on a name card, and then follow up with questions and comments for their classmates. 

John Dirkx and I are guest editing a special issue of the Journal of Transformative Education. The call is attached, and a brief description is below. Look for this journal issue to come out in 2020.

JTED Special Issue on Assessment of Transformative Learning

In spite of decades of important theoretical work on TL theory and its applications to myriad contexts, the discipline has struggled to operationalize the theory in such a way that transformative outcomes can be effectively documented. This special issue of the Journal of Transformative Education aims to address the dilemma of the need for assessment and the lack of assessment tools specifically for transformative learning by critiquing the current state of the field, presenting new approaches to operationalizing TL theory, and suggesting new directions for research.

When this chapter comes out (it is still in press), I'll ask the publisher if I can post a copy of it here. Meanwhile, if you want a pre-production copy, just send me an email at krisac@purdue.edu. 

This chapter involved a team of six researchers who piloted two methodologies, one quantitative (using the Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory, or BEVI) and one qualitative (based on the American Association of Colleges and Universities VALUE rubrics). We present the pilot results and discuss methodological implications.

Citation (APA): Acheson-Clair, K., Dirkx, J., Wiley, J., Ullom, C., Kapadia, S., & Bhuyan, D. (in press, 2020). Assessing transformation of the self in high impact learning: Methodological considerations. In C. Shealy (Ed.), Cultivating the globally sustainable self: How the human species might fulfill its potential. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

When this comes out (it is still in press), I will try to get the publisher's permission to post a .pdf of the chapter here. Meanwhile, if you want a pre-production copy, just send me an email at krisac@purdue.edu. 

With my co-authors, I present in this chapter two cross-walks that align Hoggan's (2016) typology for Transformative Learning theory with existing instruments that could be used to assess it - the Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory, or BEVI, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities' VALUE rubrics. 

Citation (APA): Acheson, K., Dirkx, J., & Shealy, C. (in press, 2019). Assessing transformative learning. In E. Kostara, A. Gavrielatos, and D. Loads (Eds.), Transformative learning theory and praxis: New perspectives and possibilities. Taylor & Francis.

One of my favorite TL theory pieces, because it takes us deep into what is really important - the soul work of transformative learning. John Dirkx rocks :-) If you can't find this book handy, email John at Michigan State University - I'm sure he'll send you a copy. 

Citation (APA): Dirkx, J. M. (2012). Nurturing soul work: A Jungian approach to transformative learning. In E. Taylor & P. Cranton (Eds.), The handbook of transformative learning: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 116-130). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass