Ideas For Intercultural Education

Mel Brooks' Oscar-nominated horror spoof, the follow-up to 'Blazing Saddles' and the highest grossing black-and-white film of all time. Gene Wilder plays Frederick Frankenstein, a teacher who inherits his grandfather's Transylvanian estate; Marty Feldman plays Igor, his hunchback assistant; and Peter Boyle, the tap-dancing monster he brings to life in his laboratory.

Takes a critical look at present approaches to international education, focusing on the intercultural potential that it offers but mostly fails to deliver. The underlying premise of this profound, engaging book is that international education can be a transforming intercultural experience for hosts as well as visitors.

The need for new approaches, methods, and techniques in cross-cultural training and intercultural education are virtually insatiable, especially for experiential activities. The emphasis in this book is on activities that foster the development of intercultural awareness and cross-cultural sensitivity, helping learners understand some of the principal dimensions of intercultural communication, cross-cultural human relations, and cultural diversity. The selections include simulations, case studies, role plays, critical incidents, and individual and group exercises. A number address relatively complex workplace issues; others focus on intercultural dynamics in educational contexts. Some are printed here for the first time; others are culled from less accessible sources. They range from basic introductory activities to those that facilitate the exploration of intercultural issues in significant depth. In an introductory essay, Sheila Ramsey, an experienced scholar and trainer, examines the nature of intercultural training and lays out a conceptual framework for assessing its effectiveness. The rest of the book is made up of activities organized around six facets of intercultural contact: cultural differences for beginners, understanding oneself as a cultural person, the intercultural perspective, working across cultures, cross-cultural "foul-ups," and returning home. Each section opens with an introduction, followed by activities. Each activity includes, at a minimum, objectives, audience, materials required, setting, time required, and procedure for facilitation. Many of the activities include handouts or illustrations. This book will be especially valuable for trainers and educators who want to further ground their work in a solid theoretical base and at he same time augment their resources to expand heir repertoire.

The ability to recognise and understand your own cultural context is a prerequisite to understanding and interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds. An intercultural learning approach encourages us to develop an understanding of culture and cultural difference, through reflecting on our own context and experience.

This publication updates the 1995 edition as an educational resource for the European youth campaign against racism, anti-semitism, xenophobia and intolerance. It provides a reference source for those involved in intercultural education and training with young people in Europe and beyond. The pack itself offers a series of different methodologies, including role plays, simulation exercises, case studies and cooperative group work, which can be adapted by trainers, teachers and youth workers in their educational programmes.

Many different words are used to deal with diversity in education, such as cross-cultural, meta-cultural, polycultural, multicultural and intercultural, as well as terms like global and international. Some are trendier than others, some more political. Some of these words are used in certain parts of the world, while others are rejected. This volume concentrates on the notion of the ‘intercultural’ and makes sense of its polysemy in education. As such, in research and practice, my intercultural may not mean the same as your intercultural. My intercultural might have different values and ideologies than your intercultural. The contributors also propose considerations on how to make the most of ‘renewed’, critical and reflexive approaches to intercultural education in a breadth of contexts and countries, including Argentina, Australia, France, Iceland, Tunisia and the UK. The book will appeal to students and teachers, as well as to confirmed researchers who will gain inspiration and new insights into the increasingly contested notion of the ‘intercultural’ in education.

Exercises to facilitate effective communication across a wide range of cultural differences Communication styles and patterns differ vastly among people from different cultures. Every culture has a "communication style norm" and when that style mixes with another, stereotypes and misperceptions arise. 52 Activities for Improving Cross-Cultural Communication explores cross-cultural communication issues with an eye toward increasing understanding and effectiveness. 52 Activities for Improving Cross-Cultural Communication is a practical trainer's manual that includes applications from many sectors, such as business, diversity, cross-cultural fields, and from many trainers in the U.S., Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Exercises are organized according to audience, time required to perform and the risk level for participants, a unique feature created by the authors, and are easily adaptable to the user's particular need and situation. Many of the exercises are written with instructions that address requirements for a specific audience (e.g., gender or generation). There is something for everyone: those who like hands-on, practical activities; those who prefer experiential exercises; and those who learn best through reflection.

This volume features a collection of papers from the first annual Intercultural Horizons conference held in May 2011 in Siena, Italy. The 2011 conference was entitled “Best Practices in Intercultural Competence Development” and featured speakers and participants from over 15 countries, including leaders in the field such as Janet Bennett of the Intercultural Communication Institute, Alvino Fantini of the School for International Training, Andrew Furco of the University of Minnesota, and Carol Ma of the Center for Service-Learning at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. The authors of these papers provide perspectives on intercultural communication and related issues from viewpoints as varied as the traditional researcher, the teacher in fields as diverse as second-language acquisition, music and the culinary arts, and the administrator of a specific program or at the senior level of a college or university. Together they form a representative sample of the themes discussed during the 2011 conference. The editors consider this first meeting to be the dawn, so to speak, of Intercultural Horizons, which aspires to become a respected venue for scholars and practitioners to exchange ideas, techniques and pedagogies on intercultural communication in years to come.

This publication is part of a series linked to the Council of Europe's project "Responses to violence in everyday life in democratic society" which considers various aspects of policy making and law enforcement to combat crime and violence in society. This book discusses practical aspects of interculturality, a concept defined as a set of processes through which relations between different cultures are constructed on a basis of equality and mutual respect. Issues discussed include: confronting differences to combat discrimination; communication in the context of linguistic and media pluralism; and its relevance to innovative classroom practices and the teaching of history.