Teaching to Prepare Global-Ready Graduates: Theory Meets Practice

How can we design a course that will deepen international, intercultural, and global learning for our students? Join us for this interactive online workshop where you will have the opportunity to expand your teaching strategies to prepare global-ready students. We suggest you focus on a semester-long course of your choosing to explore learning goals, assessment techniques, and teaching strategies that can help your students develop the skills, knowledge, and perspectives necessary to understand the world and work effectively to improve it.

 

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.

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.

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.