Faculty and Staff Development Seminars
Facilitator: Linda Huskes, MA, Haddington International Education
Summary: This workshop presents creative resources, designed to prepare students, faculty and staff for open intercultural and interracial dialogues by focusing on the learning areas of communication skills, critical thinking, self awareness, and empathy building. The workshop will provide practical models on how to initiate student dialogue through intercultural film fragments. Additionally, the workshop will discuss strategies how to use intercultural resources and toolkits for implementing intercultural sessions into general curricula, such as first year seminars.
International educational exchange offers amazing opportunities for learning, as well as incredible challenges. Admitting international students to your institution of higher education increases the diversity on campus and provides an opportunity for learning and growth for the entire community. However, research and experience has demonstrated that people do not necessarily develop their intercultural competence simply by virtue of being exposed to, coming into contact with, or even being immersed in another culture. Intercultural learning through international educational exchange is highly enhanced when actively supported with reflective resources and by trained facilitators.
In collaboration with CBE, Haddington International Education offers train-the-trainer workshops designed to enhance educators’ capacities to effectively facilitate intercultural learning. These workshops focus on helping participants reach the following learning outcomes:
- create awareness about participant’s own intercultural competences;
- increase effective interaction in a variety of cultural contexts;
- enhance curiosity, critical thinking, open mindedness, empathy and active listening;
- work with the hands-on tools so they can independently facilitate sessions with their own students;
- gather ideas on how to implement the videos and hands-on tools in (extra) curricular activities.
Through these highly-interactive workshops, participants learn basic intercultural concepts and theory and learn several debriefing practices to help them transform challenging discussions into learning opportunities. By doing so, they become better able to use CBE’s films and educational resources to appropriately and effectively facilitate inspirational and transformational intercultural learning.
To learn more about how to empower faculty and staff on your campus to make the most of the CBE resources through a train-the-trainer workshop, please contact us.
About the Facilitator
Linda was born in the Netherlands and she was interested in everything but teaching. In her final year of secondary school though, she found herself visiting teacher training colleges, encouraged by her English teacher who saw a future teacher in her. She finished her BA in education (English) and with 21 was the youngest teacher at a secondary school in the Netherlands. Linda has worked for various educational institutions since 2000 and has been active in Higher Education since 2006. She holds an MA and an M.Ed. and has been teaching in the field of English (and later Intercultural Skills) for over 15 years. She then had the opportunity to set up and run an International Office at Fontys International Business School, The Netherlands. This gave her the experience she needed to move on to a new challenge: setting up a Training & Development branch at HIE, an educational consultancy, in Dublin. Here she can combine her passion for education, her teaching experience and her networking skills.
