Intercultural Understanding
Intercultural Understanding
Students explore the significance of cultural identity and diversity as the ability to understand and appreciate multiple cultural perspectives leads to highly effective and empathetic people within personal and professional situations. From this introduction you will be able to move on to explore topics that explore curiosity, cultural sensitivity and navigating difficult conversations as well as pay explicit attention to pathways and life skills.
Intercultural Understanding in 2020
Let's try not to read about intercultural understanding - let's actively discuss it. The following exercises are an excellent way of establishing Intercultural Understanding in context. This introduction follows three steps: What do I understand about myself and my own culture? What do I understand about the global culture? What role can empathy play in creating intercultural understanding?
What is culture? And what is intercultural understanding?
Who am I and what is my culture?
The most meaningful way to introduce the concept of intercultural understanding in PPS is to start with what the students understand about themselves. The following presentation takes students through a series of questions with access to well known personality and emotional intelligence tests. They may choose to record their response in a visual form as part of their portfolio. Allowing students to work individually and then come together to compare their results will also start them on the road to understanding the role empathy plays.
Presentation - Who am I and what is my culture?
Teachers' notes: Helping students access culture
Translating the global into the local: Imagine the world as a village of 100 people
'Before we change our world for the better, we need to understand what our world is like today'
What does this video tell us about our perception of the world? This is an excellent exercise for students and teachers alike for a fruitful discussion.
Before playing the video, ask your participants to consider the world as 100 people and the elements that make up their life: eg nationality, religion, gender, education, age, language... Who would be the main players and what percentages would they allocate?
Now play the video - Which parts surprised or did not surprise them? What did they anticipate or not anticipate as an influencing factor?
What makes us who we are?
Establishing a definition of Culture
a) Having completed and discussed the results of the presentation in 'Intercultural Understanding in Context' above, respond to the following words in a visual way finding images to illustrate your subjective understanding. It helps to make initial notes by asking 'What is my ... personality?' or ' What is my ... culture?' and so on...
Personality Culture Environment Values and Norms Empathy Commonalities Cultural change
b) Share ideas with each other. Who has a different response to you? Where are the commonalities? In terms of culture, environment and values and norms, who might have a different perception to you?
c) Consider who might share your experience across the world.
d) Now use the following presentation and explore different dynamics of culture.
What is Culture?
Teacher's notes: consolidating understanding of culture
INTERCULTURAL UNDERSTANDING ... EMPATHY FOR WORK, LIFE AND FUTURE
Aim: Establish ways for students to understand intercultural understanding by developing their ability to show empathy
Step 1. Developing our understanding of Empathy
What is Empathy? Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference; that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Developing empathetic skills enables us to understand different cultures.
Establish a definition of empathy with Mark Ruffalo on Sesame Street and the exercise that follows.
What is Empathy?
How do we show empathy?
E - Eye gaze. Do we seek or avoid eye contact?
M - Muscles of facial expression. Are we conscious of the facial expressions we use or how we respond to the facial expressions we use or how we respond to the facial expressions we are faced with?
P - Posture. Notice the other person's posture - is it open or closed? How do you respond to that?
A - Affect - expressed emotion. Try labeling the other person's expressed emotions - are they upset, happy, sad...?
T - Tone of voice. Listen to their tone of voice... what does this tell you?
H - Hearing the whole person; understanding the context in which others live. Do not judge and take things at face value.
Y - Your response - what you express is likely to reciprocated. How can we express empathy by reflecting their E.M.P.A.T.H...?

Further notes on exercise
Step 2. Empathy and international-mindedness
'Conversations with People who hate me' is a podcast by Dylan Marron where he explores how by having real conversations with some of the people who leave hateful comments for him on social media because of his sexuality and liberalism, a commonality of experience and sense of empathy can be established; in short, conversations have the ability to humanize. His TedTalk below 'Empathy is not Endorsement' is an interesting reminder about the most powerful message of international mindedness; it is not about changing minds and opinions but accepting that interculturally we vary hugely and we can live alongside each other accepting those differences.
Watch the video below and then discuss the passage given from the talk.
What do you make of Dylan's approach? Have you had experience of this yourself? Could you do the same? What lessons are there to be learnt here?