New Ideas

 

This section is a list of further ideas for intercultural learning activities which have not been developed in detail.  They are intended to provide a stimulus for further development of activities by teachers.  

We would be delighted to receive your suggestions and comments to add to this section, or to hear from you if you have developed any activities in detail which could be referenced in the "other resources" section of this website.

Please contact us at icp@lists.lancs.ac.uk

• Outgoing students write coursework essays which outline their fears, concerns and expectations about their time abroad. Analysis of these essays gives insight into students' states of mind, and can then be used to structure discussions or other activities which address the concerns that have been raised. (This activity was developed by Matthew Richards at Lancaster University in 2000. A sample list of concerns which he developed on the basis of real coursework essays can be downloaded as an RTF file, approx 7.5K)

• Students discuss times when they have not felt 'at home' in their own culture.
  This can develop a recognition of the fact that intercultural encounter need not necessarily happen in a foreign culture, relativising the experience and helping students to make connections between current and past experiences.

• Students graphically represent their previous experiences, e.g. using 'curve plotting' to track patterns of highs and lows in previous similar situations, to develop the capacity to reflect on and learn from previous experience.

• Students discuss the norms of their own culture, eg in relation to dress, food or language, to help them appreciate the relativity of cultural conventions.

• Students explore the role of language in culture.

• Students have discussions with host culture members currently in Britain, who give them feedback about their experience of British culture.

• Students use literary and fictional representations of intercultural encounter to explore affective and experiential dimensions.
  (See Parry, M. "The Renaissance Dream: Literary and Anthropological Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Capability" in Killick, D. & Parry, M. (eds) (1998) Cross-Cultural Capability: The why, the ways & the means. New theories & methodologies in language education. Proceedings of the conference at Leeds Metropolitan University, December 1997 Leeds: Leeds Metropolitan University)

• Social psychologists can lead workshops which allow people to develop an awareness of the dynamics of intercultural interaction.

• Talks, presentations or discussion workshops given by returnees to outgoing students.

• Returnees produce material for teaching outgoing students.

• Returnees who wrote diaries edit their own diaries with the benefit of hindsight.

• Debriefing and integration activities.  Some suggestions for these are contained in the final sub-project report , Integration of the Period of Residence Abroad and De-briefing, which is  downloadable, approx. 435K.