Intercultural Communication Institute

SIIC 2009 Description

34 \| The Undercover Interculturalist:
	Exploring Cultural Complexity in Everyday Experience

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
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.

Objectives

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 non-academic 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

Learning Activities
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

Faculty: John Condon and Richard Harris

Dr. John (Jack) Condon is a founding faculty member of the Summer Institute and an award-winning educator. Jack has resided and taught at colleges in the U.S., Latin America, Africa, and Asia. With publications in seven languages, he is author of more than 20 books in the field of intercultural communication, including the first authored textbook. Scheduled for publication is The Goose in the Bottle: Things Which Seem to Exist But Don’t and Things Which Don’t Seem to Exist But Do. In 2009, on the silver anniversary of The Silent Language, written by E.T. Hall, friend and former colleague at Northwestern University, Jack is presenting lectures and seminars in the U.S. and Japan. Valuing learning outside of the classroom and library, Jack conducts intercultural field trip seminars in New Mexico, where he resides. He is the founder and editor of the Cultural Confluence Press and a professor emeritus of communication and Regents’ Professor, the school’s highest honor, at the University of New Mexico.

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.