Welcome to the 2021 Intercultural Connector! 

Traveling the Inner Landscape of ICC through Leadership and Self-Reflection

As you know self-reflection is the key to deepening our intercultural competence.  We must understand the inner landscape where we grapple with values that shape us, shape policies and leadership, shape educational approaches, and ultimately shape our societal divides.  Self-reflection may come in the form of journaling, taking a walk in nature, having a conversation with a friend, or even through artistic expression. Divides in our personal landscape remain buried and with our busy lives, we push it down further and never take the time to understand how it ever got there, that thing that separates me from you.  Journey with our Intercultural Connector contributors as together we consider our own inner landscape, the geographical barriers of systems and policies, the role that we take as leaders or followers, and the nature of traditions and values that hold us back from our better intercultural selves. 

Warm regards,
Emily Brokaw and Kelly Pengelly, Co-Editors of The Intercultural Connector Newsletter and Blog

1. The Birth of a New Zone for Our Own Learning
2. Using Art to Connect People in a Time of Isolation
3. Multilogue: A Place Beyond Belief
4. Adding Depth to TEFL with Intercultural Education
5. Developing Intercultural Competence: Understand, Resist, (Re)Structure, (Un)Learn, and Negotiate Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learning Environment
6. Uncovering Epistemic Dominance and Colonial Roots in Internationalization of Higher Education
7. Interviewing Policy Leaders to Advance Intercultural Competence Across Boundaries
8. Perspectives from Relational Economics: What are the implications of a focus on commonalities?
9. Intercultural Policies and a Public Health Crisis
10. Press Release for Grant Projects
11. The Deepest Value
12. Story Circles: Highlighting Two World Council Events

Two years ago, when the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC) didn’t happen for the first time in over four decades, my staff and I searched in vain for summer professional development opportunities for interculturalists that would offer similar depth of learning and networking opportunities. Mourning the potential end of an era and with a strong desire to honor the work of the giants on whose shoulders we stand, the Center I direct–Purdue University’s Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment and Research (CILMAR)–pulled together a group of a dozen intercultural and diversity, equity and inclusion thought leaders in the fall of 2019 to guide CILMAR’s strategic planning with one major question in mind: What could we do to support the sustainability of our discipline by enabling the growth and development of its professionals in the coming decades?

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In spring of 2020 it became clear that the coronavirus pandemic would radically separate people worldwide—not only from others beyond their own cultural communities, but also from people within their communities. As the coronavirus was pulling people apart, I wondered what I could do personally to find a way to bring us together virtually. I hoped to capture and reinforce the sense of belonging and diversity I’ve found in SIETAR and to promote the mission of intercultural exchange and mediation that are at the heart of my own work and daily life.

Moving beyond cross-cultural and intercultural competences, practitioners and researchers are now investigating what transcultural competence can mean for our tribe of explorers working in diversity. Diversities of any kind, be they ethnic, racial, national, gender, generational, socio-educational, political, professional, cognitive, religious or others, are social constructs which we have created and reinforced. Researchers into transcultural competence are investigating what happens when we move beyond and through cultural boundaries and dimensions to the liminal space which appears between. No longer is it sufficient to view cultures as islands or things, we now see the liminal third culture space as a fertile field for co-creation, focusing on the relationships we build together.  These transcultural developments provide an approach which inspires the reset and redesign of what I call the un-alienated life ahead.

My career path started in English education for a variety of reasons, not least of which involved having teachers for parents and being a gold-star student myself. After completing my undergraduate teaching program and one exciting semester abroad in the UK, I pivoted my career trajectory from high school English to a more global focus. Fast forward 18 months and I have moved to Germany. I’m teaching English. And I’m stuck.

Originally from China, I came to study in the United States in 2014. I had some kind of understanding that U.S. culture was very different from Chinese culture, but I just did not know in what way. The professor asked us to provide a self-introduction for the first class. When it was my turn, I stood up and introduced myself because I needed to show respect to professors (Chinese culture). I did not realize American students’ facial expressions, but they introduced themselves from their seats. Back then, I started to realize cultural differences. Afterwards, I started to observe my fellow American students in and outside the classroom to understand and experience American culture adequately and effectively. That is part of the reason my current work focuses on Chinese students’ intercultural competence (ICC)  in various cultures and the development of ICC in Chinese context. 

Internationalization of higher education has become increasingly important to institutions in the Global North for decades, represented by the increase in international student recruitment and expanding study-abroad programs since the early 1980s (Knight, 2014; Stein, 2017). Yet, internationalization is at the risk of reproducing the white-supremacist of Western higher education through cultural, social, ethical, and political domination over international students (Hayes, 2019; Yang, 2019).

Ongoing efforts to contain COVID-19 and mitigate climate change remind us of our global interdependence and the importance of collaborating with respect, open-mindedness, empathy, and curiosity – fundamental components of intercultural competence (Deardorff, 2006, 2009). If effective communication is critical to promote peace and justice in an interconnected world, how can leaders facilitate more balanced dialogue in the organizations for which they are responsible?

On July 6, 2021 the Working Group “Transcultural Cooperation & Leadership” discussed the conceptual and practical implications of a relational approach on cultural complexity together with Professor Josef Wieland, Director of Zeppelin University’s Leadership Excellence Institute and Founder of the Transcultural Caravan. This blog post is intended to touch on a selection of thoughts from this session and to encourage further exploration of the topic.

On April 28, 2020, I was invited to attend the first Virtual Online Briefing session in a series from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) titled Covid-19: Addressing Health Disparities (Bailey, C., 2019, April 5).  Shortly after the pandemic hit the United States, evidence surfaced regarding seriously devastating infection and death rates among this country’s most vulnerable populations. At first, municipalities and states neglected to capture data based on race when health officials began reporting Coronavirus cases.  There was such an outcry for legislators to demand officials collect U.S. Covid-19 data, to tell the truth about how this public health crisis was impacting communities of color.  As the numbers continued to soar at alarming rates, showing the impact on underrepresented populations and the elderly, one thing was clear: The U.S. had a public health crisis that existed long before the first Covid-19 case appeared in the state of Washington.  

The World Council on Intercultural and Global Competence wants to share the good news regarding two grant awards we received.  First we partnered up with the University of North Carolina (UNC) – Chapel Hill’s World View program and Longview Foundation to provide intercultural competence professional development activities to educators across North Carolina.  Additionally, North Carolina Humanities generously approved a grant-funded project to bring UNESCO Story Circles to a diverse cohort of partners in various North Carolina Communities to help bridge divides within local communities. 

People sometimes ask me how to identify the deepest value in another culture. I suppose there are many ways, but one approach I have found quite helpful is to try to identify what behaviors upset people the most in a particular culture. What is it, when someone does that thing, that really annoys people?

Are you interested in writing for the Intercultural Connector? 

Submissions Accepted Any Time!

• Submit your Peer Review article
• Submit your article
• Submit Enhancements (Art, Poetry, and Resources)

Read our Submission Guidelines for more information.

Contact Emily Brokaw (emilyrbrokaw@gmail.com) or Nadine Binder (nadine@nadinebinder.com), 2022 Co-editors for the Intercultural Connector, if you want to pitch an idea for or ask questions about the series or general blog.