Most of this week has been devoted to all things intercultural. Although we started compiling ideas back in June, Tuesday was our first official meeting to sit down and plan an student intercultural awareness activity and also get going on planning for International Education (IE) Week November, 16th to 20th. Moving forward, these processes will be standing commitments in our priority lists, so we have a rolling agenda of activities. Next week we’re hosting small in-person events across three of the campuses and I’ll be working on the event at the Courtenay campus. For IE Week we’re planning on having a virtual student panel and hoping the new International Peer Connectors will be panelists. I’ll be facilitating that event.

Wednesday we had our first Human Library Planning meeting. Luckily we still have resources from the last time we held this event and so we can build on those. That said, this time around we’re planning a completely virtual event (last time it was face-to-face) sometime in February, to coincide with February’s Thrive initiatives. The working theme is:

“Lived Experiences: What is your story, what is your experience, and how do you Thrive?”

I’m hoping this will become a yearly event that we tie in with International Education Week. I like the fact we have faculty, staff and students in our planning group – we need the diversity of perspectives. 

I managed to fit in some work for the Teach Anywhere site this week and found some more intercultural resources. I particularly like this resource,  Cultural Safety and Humility  and interestingly, the concept of humility came up at our Book Club discussion last week on Cultural Strengths, in the context of needing humility along with empathy, in order to fully recognize that everyone’s lived experience is different. Cultural humility is defined as:

a process of self-reflection to understand personal and systemic biases and to develop and maintain respectful processes and relationships based on mutual trust. Cultural humility involves humbly acknowledging oneself as a learner when it comes to understanding another’s experience.

This links to the topic this week for my Professional Development. We had to reflect on our results from taking the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), how IDI relates to leadership and identify some of the challenges and opportunities for leading with intercultural sensitivity in our own contexts. 

This video provides a brief introduction to the IDI.

 

In Hammer’s (2009) article, The intercultural development inventory. An approach for assessing and building intercultural competence. he outlines the different stages of intercultural competence along a

continuum, from denial / polarization, to minimization, to acceptance to adaptation. From an organizational standpoint, I sometimes see ‘denial’ (“emphasizing the need for newly hired ‘diverse’ members to fit in the culture of the company” [p. 207]), and ‘minimization,’ which, “functions as a strategy for getting things done within a dominant cultural context” (p. 209) in the realm of teaching. I’m not meaning in terms of where individual instructors lie on the continuum, more in terms of the structures and processes we have in place to support teaching and learning (e.g., some of our educational policies, the physical space of some classrooms etc.), how we talk about students (e.g., ‘domestic’ versus ‘international’ as though each were homogenous groups). I know we are working hard to address many of these issues, as reflected in our new college strategic and academic plans, along with the working group I’m part of, to create an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion policy. We are all part of a larger socio-cultural context (e.g., struggling with the effects of colonialism in education) and change takes time. 

And we are changing.Â