Includes chapters on culture and communication and on diversity in group interactions. Otherwise, material does not address intercultural learning explicitly.

This simulation provides participants the opportunity to develop techniques for verbal and nonverbal communication with characters with backgrounds and motives different than their own, articulate how different decision-making models within the simulation result in different experiences and end results for the simulation, practice and assess their own ability to suspend judgment and value interactions with characters with different backgrounds and motives than their own, and to explore their relationship to ambiguous contexts based on missing or unreliable information presented by their own character or other characters in the simulation.

In this activity, participants listen to one another's stories with the purpose of discovering one another's values.

According to Erasmus+, which provides free on-line instructions for "Building a Tower," the aims of this activity are to:

• Develop creativity
• Develop leadership qualities
• Deal with success / failure
• Develop communication
• Develop team work

"American Textures, a 78 minute documentary by Crossing Borders Films, follows six young Americans of Black, White and Latino origin on a road trip through the southern United States to confront race through dialogue. Their journey moves them to push through the wall of silence/fear/discomfort that surrounds race in Today’s America and face the presence of segregation, bias, and blindness, not only in US society, but also inside themselves. Their courage, vulnerability and honest interactions become emotional examples of ways to follow in their footsteps."

"Rebekah Fitzsimmons, a 34-year-old English professor at Georgia Tech, is a millennial.

"So are some of her students.

"But despite being members of the same generation, there are some pretty big differences between them."  See the article for more...

“The lack of empathy between Baby Boomers and Millennials isn’t the result of an inability to understand the attitudes and motivations of people born into a different generation. I think it’s caused by a deep-rooted conviction that a whole generation has a lesser capacity for empathy than your own.

“So before you judge another, judge yourself. Is your colleague apathetic to the needs of the business, incapable of understanding others, obsolete or inexperienced, and has a lot to learn…or is it you?”

My colleague Wilfrido "Willie" Cruz and I began using Mark Williams' Ten Lenses: Your Guide to Living and Working in a Multicultural World for staff development in 2006.  We have prepared many different versions of the training over the years, which has sometimes included monologues, skits, video clips...The various versions have taken anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours to present.  This particular version was created to give an overview of Williams' theory at the NAFSA Region VI conference, held during the first week of November 2019 in Columbus, OH.

Syllabus designed to help university students interested in future Peace Corps or other intercultural not-for-profit settings develop intercultural competencies. 

Of interest to the preparation of the presentation on "Teaching the skills of intercultural communication and empathy across the generations" was the following:  

“Dr. Sara Konrath, Assistant Professor at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University and one of the authors of the 2009 study, spoke with BTR to discuss its findings.

“’What’s interesting is that [our study] didn’t look at the attitudes of previous generations toward college students, but actually surveyed the beliefs of college students themselves,’ Konrath explains. ‘When asked about some core empathy traits, we tended to see responses such as, “I don’t think about others when they’re in need, when someone is suffering it doesn’t move me,” and so on.’"

"BARNGA is a simulation game that encourages participants to critically consider normative assumptions and cross-cultural communication. It was created by Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan in 1980, while working for USAID in Gbarnga, Liberia. He and his colleagues were trying to play Euchre but all came away from the instructions with different interpretations. He had an ‘A-ha’ moment that conflict arises not (only) from major or obvious cultural differences but often from subtle, minor cues. He created the game to tease out these subtleties. In this activity, students play a card game silently, each operating with a different set of rules, unbeknownst to them."