Faculty and Staff Development Workshops
Facilitator: Tara Harvey, PhD, True North Intercultural
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, True North Intercultural offers train-the-trainer workshops designed to enhance educators’ capacities to effectively facilitate intercultural learning. These workshops focus on helping participants develop four core intercultural competencies (Vande Berg, 2016):
- Increase awareness of our own characteristic ways of making meaning in familiar and unfamiliar cultural contexts;
- Increase awareness of others’ ways of making meaning in familiar and unfamiliar cultural contexts;
- Manage emotions and thoughts in the face of ambiguity, change, and challenging circumstances and people; and
- Bridge cultural gaps between ourselves and others:—shift frames, attune our emotions, and adapt our behavior in effective and appropriate ways.
By developing these four core competencies, educators will not only become more comfortable and adept at facilitating others’ intercultural learning, they will also increase their own intercultural competence, which is a fundamental part of facilitating such learning in others.
Through these highly-interactive workshops, participants learn basic intercultural concepts and theory, come to better understand intercultural and experiential pedagogical “best practices,” 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
Tara Harvey, PhD, possesses a unique combination of breadth of experience in international education and depth of knowledge and understanding of the process of facilitating intercultural learning. She has worked in international/intercultural education for over fifteen years—teaching English abroad, advising international students, researching international education, facilitating intercultural training, teaching intercultural courses, designing curriculum, and training fellow educators. As an advisor to F and J student visa holders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tara developed an intercultural training program to help faculty and staff work more effectively with international students. At the University of Minnesota—where she also earned a PhD in Comparative and International Development Education—Tara taught two innovative courses designed to help students learn from and through their own intercultural experiences. As the Academic Director of Intercultural Learning at CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange), she developed the signature course, ‘Intercultural Communication and Leadership’ (offered at more than 20 study centers around the world) and integrated intercultural learning frameworks into CIEE’s wide array of study abroad programs. The Founder of True North Intercultural, Tara is a consultant, trainer, and coach focused on helping educators and institutions of higher education increase students’ intercultural learning. She is also Adjunct Faculty in Intercultural Competence at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and Associate Faculty at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication.
