Intercultural Training for Faculty & Staff

Two half-day workshops

Join these highly interactive sessions to explore the foundations of how we can more effectively integrate the kinds of intercultural skills into our teaching that will support student workplace success internationally and in our increasingly diverse Canadian workplaces. Our learner demographic has been shifting for some time due to a number of factors related to immigration, internationalization, and indigenization and this has important implications for the curriculum and the classroom.

These workshops provide specialized intercultural skills that can form the basis of creating an inclusive and culturally responsive classroom. In these interactive foundational sessions we will explore perspectives and build skills at the core of growing intercultural fluency in our interactions with students, and BCIT colleagues.

In these sessions we will grow our effectiveness as we:

• Discuss how to work with culturally embedded assumptions and unconscious bias that influences the teaching and learning process and design
• Learn to apply the Something’s Up Method to learning, teaching and personal contexts
• Use 5 essential culture general frameworks to address personal and shared intercultural challenges
• Apply the Intercultural Development Continuum to how we as learning and teaching specialists understand and work with our students and clients
• Explore strategies for working with culturally diverse peers and students

Contact us-For more information or to book a session contact intercultural@bcit.ca.

Faculty are exposed to a wide variety of learning styles and expectations from from range of learning traditions every day in their classrooms. This session will explore some important areas of overlap across learning traditions and share useful ways to reconsider bridging and effectively integrating what we are encountering.

Group and team projects and classroom work is a central feature of what we do at BCIT. This experiential session will introduce two useful team dynamic frameworks and apply them to diverse work groups. Culture-general frameworks and the intercultural development continuum will be applied to add depth and effectiveness to how participants plan their future group work approaches.

Conflict is a natural result of teaching, learning and group dynamics. Two useful conflict models will be explored and applied to our work in the classroom. Participants will be taken through a process of identifying their own styles as well as the styles they encounter most often in their work. Discussion, analysis and potential strategies will be shared to support student skill development and the promotion of self-awareness in times of constructive conflict in teams and groups.

This session will present influential teaching and training design models and approaches that instructors can apply to ensure the methods they apply to promote cross cultural exchange and intercultural learning is effective. Instructors will integrate approaches developed by Bennett and Bennett, Kolb, Ting-Toomey and others. Discussion and peer experience sharing will support faculty who wish to exchange successful approaches and integrate new ones.

Two half-day workshops

As Education and service specialists, we work with a wide range of students and stakeholders from many cultural and linguistic backgrounds. We play a central navigating and bridging role meeting students where they are and supporting their development. To continue to continuously grow the skills that will help us effectively meet emerging challenges and grow as professionals we need access to tools and skills that make us more effective and confident. This two workshop series provides specialized intercultural skills training that was the foundational intercultural skills course of the Queen’s University International Educators Training Program. In these interactive sessions we will explore perspectives and build skills at the core of growing intercultural fluency in our workplace interactions with students, clients, stakeholders, and BCIT colleagues. In these sessions we will grow our effectiveness as we:

• Discuss how to work with culturally embedded assumptions and unconscious bias that influences our ability to give excellent service and create effective workplace interaction
• Learn to apply the Something’s Up Method to personal experiences and case studies
• Use 5 essential culture general frameworks to address personal and shared intercultural challenges
• Apply the Intercultural Development Continuum to how we understand our students and clients to improve the perception and effectiveness of our role at the Institute
• Explore strategies for working with culturally diverse peers and students

Conflict is a natural result of teaching, learning and group dynamics. Two useful conflict models will be explored and applied to our work in the classroom. Participants will be taken through a process of identifying their own styles as well as the styles they encounter most often in their work. Discussion, analysis and potential strategies will be shared to support student skill development and the promotion of self-awareness in times of constructive conflict in teams and groups.

Contact us-For more information or to book a session contact intercultural@bcit.ca.