Session III a: July 26-30, 2010

35. The Undercover Interculturalist: Exploring Cultural Complexity in Everyday Experience John Condon and Richard Harris Diversity is all around us, even in apparently monocultural environments. Appreciating and working creatively with these “hidden” differences can enhance social relationships and energize workplaces and classrooms, reducing misunderstanding and underachievement. By means of the acute observation of the familiar, this course will offer a range of approaches for increasing sensitivity to cultural difference and suggest unobtrusive strategies for expanding teaching and training opportunities. Participants should bring one or more items (tangible or otherwise) of personal significance they would be willing to discuss with the other participants. The following suggestions may give you some ideas: a postcard of a meaningful place, a recipe for a family meal, a piece of music, a piece of writing, a memory from childhood, a parental maxim (or admonition!), a map, an article of clothing.

Designed for Objectives Learning Activities John Condon Richard Harris Teachers, trainers, student advisors, consultants, human resource professionals, and others who wish to find new methods for introducing and discussing intercultural communication concepts by using everyday experience. To appreciate the cultural complexity and depth of everyday life and objects and to recognize the potential in such familiar situations for exploring and communicating intercultural concepts in nonacademic language To make creative use of these opportunities even in apparently monocultural environments To generate new ideas for exploring the significance of the “ordinary” in personal and professional settings To learn to recognize “teachable moments” for encouraging intercultural understanding To review the contributions of social scientists and others (Edward T. Hall, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, et al.) who offer new insights into the cultural importance of the familiar The course will be highly interactive, and participants will have the opportunity to: Develop and practice a range of approaches for exploring what E.T. Hall called “the unstated rules of everyday life” Learn how to translate intercultural concepts into familiar situations and language Engage in dialogue across generations (with guests), sharing concerns and respect in a cultural continuity Explore the many meanings, implicit and explicit, adhering to items that participants will be invited to bring for discussion (On registration, participants will be e-mailed a detailed list of suggestions for this activity.) Add to the bank of resources presented in the workshop Generate ways of applying workshop content to individual participants’ situations   Dr. John (Jack) Condon is a founding faculty member of the Summer Institute and is regarded as one of the founders of the intercultural field. Educated in the U.S. and abroad, Jack has conducted research and taught for 20 years outside of the U.S. He is the author of 18 books and serves on the International Advisory Board for Asia Pacific World.  A new edition of With Respect to the Japanese (revised and expanded, with Tomoko Masumoto) will be published this year.  For the past two decades Jack has conducted site-specific field seminars on intercultural communication in New Mexico.  An award-winning author and teacher, Jack was named Regents’ Professor at the University of New Mexico, the institution’s highest honor, where he is also Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication and Journalism. Dr. Richard Harris, born in London, U.K., is a tenured professor in the faculty of management at Chukyo University, Japan, where he has lived for over 25 years. He teaches intercultural communication in Japanese at undergraduate and graduate levels and travels extensively out of personal and professional curiosity. Richard’s eclectic research interests range from the influence of physical and psychological space on intercultural encounters to the representation of ourselves and the other in media, museums, tourism, and interpersonal interaction. He has written several papers on the cultural impact of space, on the representation of cultures in Southeast Asian museums, and is the author of Paradise: A Cultural Guide, a study of cross-cultural concepts of the ideal.