GlobalThis set of online workshops focuses on raising awareness of the experiences of international students in our classrooms, as well as mindsets, approaches, and simple, versatile, low-stakes activities (things you can do!) that support meaningful cross-national interactions in our globally diverse classes. You will also learn simple, yet high-impact ways to intentionally establish and foster a welcoming, supportive, and inclusive learning environment. This is important because students do not enter our learning spaces on equal footing, and some feel marginalized, including many international students who have reported feeling like a “ghost,” and “unwanted” or “invisible.”
Objectives
- Gain a deeper awareness and understanding of the experiences of international students in class, including contributions they can make to learning and the challenges they face
- Reflect on asset- vs. deficit-based approaches, and learn purposeful strategies for engaging students from an asset-based mindset
- Learn and experience simple, high-impact, evidence-based practical approaches, strategies, and activities that promote inclusion, integration, and engagement of ALL students
Workshops
This package includes twelve online workshops, with a total of 10 contact hours.
How do we as teachers facilitate intercultural learning that centers on the diverse perspectives students bring to our classrooms? Join us for an interactive online workshop where you will have the opportunity to expand and deepen your teaching strategies to engage the global diversity in your classes. Faculty and instructors from all disciplines face increasing demands to help students develop the intercultural skills necessary to thrive in today’s world. During this workshop, you will learn from leaders in the field of intercultural education and practice strategies to facilitate interactions among students in your globally diverse classrooms.
“[This is] an OUTSTANDING workshop: [The facilitators] do such a wonderful job of modeling the skills they are teaching about as they facilitate deep and meaningful discussions about real situations. Regardless of your experience level with this topic it is really worthwhile attending this workshop." — past workshop participant
Let’s talk about how we can leverage all interactive classroom activities for deeper content learning and interpersonal and intercultural development. In this webinar, we will share considerations, strategies, scripts, and tools (including a student handout you can adapt) that can help you and your students realize the full potential of classroom interactions. When you facilitate student interactions around content area learning objectives, students are not only engaging with content, they are also engaging with each other. This affords them an additional learning opportunity to practice critical interpersonal and intercultural skills with intention. Naming these skills for students and providing periodic opportunities for reflection are all essential for building students’ global competence. We can’t assume students are aware of or thinking about these competencies. Just as with subject-area learning outcomes, we need to actively and intentionally facilitate this learning.
“I'm so glad to have a concrete framework to give students a way to think about how they engage with each other in class discussions or group work! I hadn't thought about asking them to put this into words, and I'm really glad to have a way to ask them to think about this in addition to the context we cover in my course.” — past workshop participant
This one-hour interactive webinar is designed to introduce you to the mechanisms in our brains that prevent us from being interculturally inclusive and those that make such inclusion possible. It will include a brief summary of recent findings from cultural and educational neuroscience as well as practical strategies that could help you create more inclusive classrooms. There will be several interactive activities that will help you connect what you are learning from this webinar to your classroom practices. No previous knowledge on neuroscience is required.
You will experience one quick and easy “check-in’ activity, the 7-Word Story, and discuss others that can be integrated into your course design in order to 1) build and strengthen a sense of community among learners, 2) broaden participation, 3) provide frequent and brief opportunities for students to engage content and practice and develop interpersonal and intercultural skills, and, very importantly, 4) for you to gather valuable information from students about the students themselves and/or about what and how they are processing class content.
This 30-minute webinar is designed to help you consider the role of cultural communication styles in your classroom, so you can help your students deepen their intercultural communication skills. During the webinar, we will review high-context and low-context communication styles used in different cultures and countries and provide you with an opportunity to reflect on your own communication style. You will also experience a teaching activity that you can do with your students on cultural communication styles.
This 30-minute webinar will introduce you to the Cultural Values Collage activity, which can be implemented in a single class session or woven throughout the semester. In this activity, students reflect on how their own culture shaped their values and beliefs and deepen their intercultural learning. You will learn about the original activity and its adaptations to different class sizes and teaching formats.
Learn one approach for establishing class or group agreements and expectations. Establishing class or group agreements and expectations sets a tone for the course that reinforces intentionality and collaborative decision-making processes, and the idea that the classroom learning environment is something we all contribute to, are responsible for, and can influence. Making these explicit and clear for yourself and for students is important for all members of the class, and even more so for students who may be new to U.S. classrooms and educational practices in higher education.
Experience an activity that is especially valuable for fostering rapport among students from diverse cultural backgrounds. During this 30-minute webinar, we will model and discuss effective facilitation strategies for how you can help your students "find common ground."
Come experience a fun, interactive review activity. Give one, get one (GOGO) is a great way to get students up and moving and talking to each other while assessing their understanding. Through this activity students can share key takeaways from a lesson, and based on what they come up with and share, you can learn what students are gaining from the lesson and if there are any underrepresented areas of content that you can address in a future class or exam review session. We will demonstrate the GOGO activity’s versatility, as well.
In this session, you will learn about and experience an activity called Describe, Analyze, Evaluate (DAE). The DAE is a framework for practicing one’s ability to ‘frame-shift," or to understand a situation from another’s point of view. This involves cultivating a critical skill-set and attitudes for interacting effectively across differences. Nam and Condon (2010) explain, this “exercise is intended to foster self-awareness of personal and cultural assumptions, promote the appreciation of cognitive complexity, and the importance of frame-shifting when encountering the unfamiliar” (p. 81). The DAE can be used daily in a variety of ways by students and faculty alike—join us to learn how! This webinar references the following article: Kyoung-Ah Nam, John Condon. The DIE is cast: The continuing evolution of intercultural communication’s favorite classroom exercise. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 34 (2010), 81–87.
Join a conversation on class participation to learn and share ideas, resources, and tools for establishing broader and deeper student engagement and interaction. We will facilitate this discussion using an activity that invites all voices, the Whip Around.
Learning and using students’ names, and encouraging students to do the same with each other, is essential for building community in your class. There are many creative ways to encourage students to learn and use names. In this 30-minute session, we will experience two simple activities and discuss others.