Harking back to my days of studying French literature, the weather is exemplifying the term pathetic fallacy – one storm after another, seemingly mirroring the darkness of both our current physical and existential existence.
Last week the turn out for International Education Week was minimal. This week, book club was cancelled, and it is becoming harder and harder to get engagement from colleagues. I get it, I do. And yet, we must persevere.
I used the extra time I had on Tuesday to curate more resources on Teaching Across Cultural Strengths, the book being discussed at book club. With ideas for different teaching techniques, I’m hoping faculty will be inspired to try one to two new approaches as a starting point.
I also did some more work for my part of the College Conversation presentation coming up in a couple of weeks. We only have five minutes each and there’s a lot to talk about. I confess I’m a little nervous about this. I’m not a fan of public speaking, even though I’ve lost count of how many conference presentations I’ve done. I’ve drafted a script and will revise it next week.
I’ve started researching what other institutions have in terms of intercultural strategies. Mostly the ‘hit’ comes back as ‘international.’ I’ll keep refining the search. On initial exploration, any mention of intercultural learning seems to be focused more on students. Yet how can students be supported in developing intercultural fluency if their instructors do not have a level of intercultural fluency and knowledge of what that translates to in the realm of teaching and learning? One of the best articles and presentations I’ve come across about this is, Intercultural Teaching Competence in the Disciplines: Teaching Strategies for Intercultural Learning. I also found this 4-minute video on Deardorff’s Four Attitudes of Intercultural Competence: respect, openness, curiosity, and discovery / tolerance of ambiguity as a positive experience – four foundation stones as the basis for an intercultural strategy. House building is a common metaphor with our strategic plans and strong houses need good foundations. As instructors, we cannot help students to build their ‘foundation’ if we don’t have a strong one ourselves.
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