This activity works with any and all groups! It's fantastic for getting them to really question how we all automatically start from a position of assumptions and biases. It's a great, non-threatening way to explore frame-shifting and perspective-taking. Caution, you may be confronted with that one student who takes the definition of 'describe' to the extreme and argues that the only appropriate "description" of photograph is either dots or pixels of varying color and shade. Consider yourself forewarned.

An oldie but a goodie! When preparing students for study abroad or a COIL/international virtual education experience, it can be very effective to prepare students with 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 very versatile thus making it applicable and adaptable to any world language and to any context.

Depending on the image choice for the original activity, using images pertaining to the target culture, it can be integrated in any unit or content. It can also be repeated in the advanced levels of the target language by performing the activity in the target language. At Purdue Italian it has been integrated in the Unit on food and supplemented by a follow-up activity on unusual typical Italian food. It will also be integrated in a unit on art. Since introducing this activity, in the School of Languages and Cultures, we have learned that Classics has also adopted this activity in the curriculum of one of their courses using images from their chosen target culture(s).

Duration of the activity can be modified lengthened and shortened. It has successfully been applied in one 50-minute class period.