Increasing diversity within educational institutions and societies provides wonderful learning opportunities, as well as incredible challenges. Crossing Borders Education would like to assist you in enabling your international students to feel at home on your campus and at the same time help you enhance the intercultural awareness of your domestic students.
We are dedicated to support educators with powerful tools to unlock the incredible learning potentials of international student life at your campus. Our three feature films, 30+ short videos, online toolkits and facilitator manuals are created to support, encourage and empower international students in their time abroad and can be easily adapted to specific program needs.
The key learning areas of these intercultural resources are increasingly important for undergraduate curricula and enhance skills such as critical thinking, cross-cultural openness, social awareness, welcoming diverse perspectives, intercultural empathy, enhanced civic engagement, and other.
The Crossing Borders Education toolkits are vital resources to ensure global competency, international awareness and the fundamental necessity of acceptance.Lauren Norville, Assistant Director, Office of International Services, Teachers College, Columbia University
Objectives:
Our intercultural resources are carefully crafted to support international student advisors in following efforts:
- to spark international and domestic student’s interest to increase their intercultural skills,
- to create intercultural orientations and training sessions,
- to communicate the powerful impact and urgent need of intercultural skills and cross-cultural interactions to administrators, faculty and staff,
- to support creating cross-subject, cross-cultural campus events that bring international and domestic students together.
Resource Examples:
Following resources show how CBE meets the objectives above with tools that engage students personally, emotionally and intellectually:
- Short videos such as Why explore Diversity? or On Speaking a Second Language and creative resources such as our Quotecards help students to get a glimpse of the empowering impact of intercultural experiences (even or especially when they are hard work).
- Short activities such as On Preconceptions provide students with the opportunity to grow intercultural awareness prior to traveling abroad. Programs like the Intercultural Interactions Toolkit provide the practical tools to create intercultural orientations and training sessions in which domestic and international students interact.
- Short videos such as Why Initiate Dialogues? and platforms like Curricular Resources can inspire, challenge and support your administration to include intercultural events and sessions into curricular and in doing so increase a supportive learning environment for international students.
- Our award-winning feature films like Crossing Borders can support you to create screening discussions events that can reach the entire campus and increase intercultural empathy and skills.
Program sponsors need not be expert practitioners in intercultural learning, rather, the CBE tools provide the necessary framework and resources to implement a thorough, reflective learning experience.Bethany Keller, Multicultural Center and International Student Affairs, Webster University, MO