The COVID-19 pandemic has effectively shuttered study abroad across the United States. With the loss of these valuable, often life-changing programs, faculty, staff, and students are yearning for alternatives where they can cultivate intercultural skills and experiences. Dr. Daniel Jones, Senior Intercultural Learning Specialist at Purdue University’s Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentoring, Assessment and Research (CILMAR), has worked the entire summer to adapt intercultural competence training originally designed for immersive study abroad programs for virtual environments.

Jones was first hired as an Intercultural Learning Specialist at Purdue after receiving his doctoral degree in German Language and Literature in 2017. In his current role, he oversees two flagship programs: the Intercultural Pedagogy Grant (IPG), which provides monetary support and training for faculty/staff who incorporate intercultural competence into their study abroad programs, and the Semester Abroad in Intercultural Learning (SAIL) scholarship program, which includes mentoring courses in intercultural learning for students studying abroad.

Because no students are currently studying abroad, the SAIL program is on pause. However, IPG is adapting to the “new normal,” and Jones has lead that transition.

In order to receive IPG grant funding, faculty/staff members are required to participate in a series of workshops on intercultural competence pedagogy. Normally, these workshops take place in classroom settings where faculty participants learn how to design and lead intercultural activities. However, this semester, the entire program has shifted to a virtual context, and the focus is now on embedding intercultural competence into virtual exchange programs rather than study abroad.

Previously, the IPG program consisted of four in-person, two-hour workshops (the materials associated with these workshops are available in a collection on the HubICL). This year, there will be 12 workshops total, and participants are required to complete eight: four compulsory for all participants and four self-selected.

Some workshops target specific types of virtual exchange, how to design activities for a virtual space, or how to facilitate teamwork through a virtual platform. However, some also cover the same material from previous years, such as how to use backwards design to create intercultural learning activities.

While IPG participants always had to complete pre-workshop readings and homework assignments, everything else was primarily synchronous and in-person. Now, the entire program is more asynchronous, with participants reading articles, watching videos, and engaging in conversation through discussion boards.

“The synchronous part has become shorter, so it has to be much more impactful,” Jones says. “I make it much less about me delivering information and more about facilitating the conversations that they have amongst themselves, and leading those live sessions has become much more about me demonstrating best practices.”

Some of those best practices include how to adapt face-to-face activities to virtual learning platforms, such as Zoom, as well as considering how you appear on camera. For example, during the first session of the virtual workshops, Jones discussed framing your background so that what you’re seeing on the screen matches the other person’s image, such as making your head appear the same size as the person on the other end. He also advises ensuring that your background has three dimensions so it feels as if you’re in a room with the individuals on the other end of the screen.

Additionally, Jones says that faculty/staff must now pay closer attention to the affective domain than they would in the classroom: “Now the focus is, ‘how do we develop comfort and connectivity in this disconnected venue?’ ‘How can we be more attentive to the students as people, as individuals, and address their emotional needs?’” This may perhaps be one of the most important lessons, as students are surely grieving the loss of these physical interactions and their planned study abroad experience.

All of the materials associated with these workshops, which will include short PowerPoints, readings, videos, handouts, and other supplemental materials, will be available in a new collection on the HubICL following the Fall semester.

The HubICL was created as a collaborative space for individuals to network and share resources from across the diverse and growing field of intercultural learning. This month, we feature one of our newest contributors, Susan Schaerli-Lim, Head of International Relations at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) School of Health Professions Institute of Nursing, whose I DIVE framework was published in the HubICL toolbox in August 2020.

Schaerli-Lim began her career as a registered nurse in Australia. Then, upon moving to Switzerland, she received her Diploma of Health Education, from Weiterbildungszentrum for Gesundheitsberufe in Aaurau, Switzerland, and through her work as a nursing faculty member, became interested in intercultural learning and subsequently received her Master’s in Intercultural Relations from University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Schaerli-Lim's personal intercultural experiences have also influenced her career as she describes herself as a third culture adult with three passports who has lived in four countries and studied in five.

In her current position at ZHAW, Schaerli-Lim wears a variety of hats and gets to call upon her extensive experience in nursing, pedagogy, and intercultural competence. She’s involved in developing curricula and programs, particularly for intercultural competence in nursing and for international exchange students; training nursing faculty, staff, and students in intercultural competence using the Intercultural Development Inventory; and facilitating nursing student and staff exchanges.

Schaerli-Lim’s I DIVE (Impact, Description, Interpretation, Values, Evaluation) tool is an adaptation of the classic D-I-E (Description, Interpretation, Evaluation) framework.

Like many other critics of the framework, using the word “die” in an intercultural activity didn’t sit well with her, so she was inspired to create something that sounded less dark and ominous—and that more explicitly guided students through the process of interpretation.

She attended the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication in 2009 where she took a course taught by Donna Stringer, who kept referencing impact and emotions. This inspired her to add the first “I” in “I DIVE.” 

“In the last couple of years, the emotional side of intercultural relations has started to become quite big and quite a bit of research is coming out on that,” Schaerli-Lim said. “So I thought it would be really cool to add this additional “I,” to the original framework, but then you still have “I-D-I-E,” and that’s even worse!” Therefore, she decided to also add the “V” for values because values, whether cultural or personal, will inherently affect how individuals interpret a situation.

Schaerli-Lim chose to share her framework on the HubICL because she believes that training resources should be available for free for anyone to use: “If someone has spent time creating something, then you don’t have to recreate the wheel, and that’s fantastic,” she said. “I think the idea is great, to share what we have, you can only improve on it, right? Why reinvent the wheel when there’s so many people who do good work?”

Another major project that Schaerli-Lim is working on, alongside a team of researchers that include Milton Bennett, is programming for training intercultural nurse educators. This initiative stems from a gap in research that Schaerli-Lim and her collaborators identified: “Vande Berg says that intercultural mentors are crucial for intercultural learning. However, there’s a huge gap in the literature about what is an intercultural mentor? What should they be able to do? What’s the profile of an intercultural mentor?”

To respond to this gap, Schaerli-Lim and her team first completed an extensive literature review in order to create a profile for an intercultural nurse educator. Now, they are in the process of creating a curriculum that will train individuals to serve in mentor roles as intercultural nurse educators.

The first iteration of the training is scheduled to begin in November 2020 (although there may be adjustments made due to the pandemic). Then, in May 2021, the newly minted intercultural nurse educators will become trainers for a group of nursing students, and Schaerli-Lim and her team will administer pre-and post-tests to measure the effectiveness of their “train the trainer” program.

Beyond this project, Schaerli-Lim is a co-author of a recently published book, Intercultural Interactions for Health Professions: A Critical Incident Approach, which is available in both English and German. She is also developing a card game with three other colleagues called Intercultural Puzzling Stories. The HubICL team is excited to see what Schaerli-Lim contributes next!