Cross-Cultural Understanding
Exercises and activities specifically designed to help students understand cultural differences will enhance respect and tolerance between and among students of different ethnic backgrounds.
- A Fundamental of Culture—Cultural Context
- Students will examine how the unwritten rules of culture depend upon the context in which an event or behavior takes place.
- A Single Lucid Moment Lesson
- Students will wrestle with resolving contrasting values between cultures.
- A South African Storm
- The writer confronts issues of racial prejudice that she encounters in South Africa, years after the abolition there of the official policy of apartheid.
- Americans
- Students will examine what it means to be "American" in the eyes of people from other cultures.
- Beauty
- Students will practice evaluating things of importance or beauty from different perspectives.
- Becoming Part of the Community
- Students will examine how individual Peace Corps Volunteers succeeded in adapting to their new cultural environments.
- Breaching the Gulf Between Cultures
- Students delve further into the dynamics, the challenges, and the rewards of adjusting to a new culture, as illustrated by the author's account of his father's coming to terms with Sri Lankan customs.
- Brief Encounters (Building Bridges)
- Through a simulation game, students will experience what it is like to confront and deal with a culture highly different from their own.
- Brief Encounters (Looking at Ourselves and Others)
- Through a simulation game, students will experience what it is like to confront and deal with a culture highly different from their own.
- Capturing the Reader With Vivid Images
- Students will examine how the author tries to capture the reader's imagination immediately, through imagery--and hold on to it.
- Chatter
- Students will discover that cultural norms heavily influence how we communicate.
- Coming to Terms With Cultural Differences
- Students will discover that it is possible to be challenged and "culture-shocked" by the norms of one's own culture when returning home from having been away and living in another culture. They will also examine and compare the customs of modern marriages with the customes of traditional, arranged marriages.
- Confronting Two Challenges—One Physical, One Intellectual
- Students will examine how the author confronted the challenges of a new language and a new culture.
- Cross-Cultural Dialogue Lesson
- Students will strive to view situations from more than their own point of view.
- Cuisine and Etiquette
- Students will examine mealtime etiquette in different countries and make inferences about other cultures from the rules governing table manners.
- Culture Is Like an Iceberg
- Students will examine features of culture to determine which are visible and which are invisible, and how the invisible affect the visible.
- Day-to-Day Life in a Small African Village
- Students will learn about and experience just a bit of what it's like living in a village in Tanzania—from language to geography to health and hygiene issues.
- Defining Culture
- Students will define culture and examine how it affects them.
- Discovering New Perspectives on Life
- Students examine how the author's worldview expanded by living in another culture.
- Discussion Questions for Amber Bechtel’s Essay on AIDS in South Africa
- How can traditional healers help alleviate South Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis? Peace Corps Volunteer Amber Bechtel takes a look at traditional medicine’s role alongside new treatments for HIV/AIDS.
- Do You Really Know What Wealth Is?
- Students will examine what it means to have wealth—a concept that turns out to be philosophical as well as economic—and examine the importance of music.
- Encountering Very Different Ways of Life
- In a captivating and amusing account, the author shows just how challenging it is for someone to move from a familiar to an unfamiliar culture and then deal with adjusting to the new environment.
- Enough to Make Your Head Spin
- Students will learn to appreciate the value of nonverbal communication, focusing on the shaking or nodding of one's head, and the meanings attached to each activity in Bulgaria and in the United States.
- Everyone Has a Culture—Everyone Is Different
- Students will distinguish between what constitutes culture and what makes up personal individuality.
- Examining What Sharing Really Means
- Students examine the remarkable degree of sharing that the author encounters upon arrival in Africa.
- Features of Culture
- Students will enumerate features of their own culture and evaluate how those features have influenced their lives.
- First Impressions
- Students will experience the risks of making assumptions from first impressions.
- Generalizations: How Accurate Are They?
- Students will examine how generalizations can be hurtful and unfair, and they will devise ways to qualify statements so they avoid stereotyping other people.
- Good News/Bad News/Who Cares?
- Students will practice evaluating facts, bringing to bear their own experience, preferences, and international contexts.
- How Accurate Is It?
- Students will examine how generalizations can easily be invalid, and they will learn how to qualify generalizations to make them accurate.
- How Cultures Differ—Two Different Perspectives on the Same Event
- Students will examine the author's running race from two different cultural perspectives to see just how different the effects of culture can be.
- How a Writer Conveys Descriptions With a Wallop
- Students will identify strategies the author used to vividly convey qualitative and quantitative aspects of life in China, then use those strategies in writing of their own.
- Identifying Structured Patterns in Folk Tales
- Students will learn that folk tales follow a pattern, and they will attempt to analyze a story to discover its pattern.
- Ilunga's Harvest Lesson
- Students examine the culturally based impulse to share with others versus the impulse to watch out for oneself or one's immediate family.
- International Curiosity and National Pride
- Students will look at their own culture and at Bulgarian culture to identify national, local, or ethnic traits, while at the same time attempting not to over-generalize about any particular group of people.
- Interpreting Behavior: Expanding Our Point of View
- Students will be led to grasp the importance of understanding behavior from the perspective of the culture in which that behavior is the norm.
- Introducing Culture
- Students will begin to analyze what it is that constitutes culture.
- Is That a Fact?
- Students will practice distinguishing between facts and opinions, in order to better understand their own observations.
- Ivan the Fool Lesson 1
- Students will read a classic folk tale for comprehension and enjoyment.
- Ivan the Fool Lesson 2
- Students will learn that different cultures respect or fear certain numbers, numbers that can appear in folklore in several ways.
- Just Like the Old Days
- Students will examine and experience roles and customs of rural Mongolians through role-playing, and they will compare unfamiliar roles from Mongolia with everyday roles in the United States.
- Looking Back
- Students will weigh the advantages and disadvantages of a state-controlled social system and look into the strains that occur in the transition of a state-controlled system to a democracy, such as that occurring in Macedonia.
- 'Magic' Pablo Lesson
- Students examine what goes into hero worship and establishing unlikely friendships.
- Modeling Our Writing After Another Author's Style
- Students will emulate the author's descriptive phrases in their own writing.
- Nomadic Life Lesson
- Students will examine the imagery in a rich, spare poem about an interlude between two women of different cultures in rural Niger.
- On Being Seen as Different
- Students will discover that while other cultures may seem strange or odd in some ways, their own culture can seem similarly strange or odd to those in other cultures.
- On Sunday There Might Be Americans Lesson
- Students will gain insight into the mindset of a rural boy in Niger, specifically regarding his relations with both indigenous and foreign people in the local market.
- One Step at a Time
- Students will see that it is crucial to understand the perspectives of another culture if one is trying to work within that other culture to effect change.
- Opposites
- Students will see how personal tastes and experiences—in addition to culture—influence our perspectives.
- Out With the Old, In With the New
- Students learn about China's cultural and economic complexities through a slide show that is written, read, and photographed by a Peace Corps Volunteer.
- Perspectives on Paraguay
- Students examine cultural differences between Paraguay and the United States.
- Recognizing How Another Culture Differs From One's Own
- Students will discover how the concepts of time and punctuality can differ markedly in the United States and another country.
- Resolving a Cross-Cultural Misunderstanding
- Students will try to resolve a cross-cultural misunderstanding in a constructive manner.
- Respect for Authority
- Students will examine just how a Peace Corps Volunteer working in a culture steeped in subordination encourages local young people to challenge authority and participate in their governance.
- Searching for Meanings Beneath the Surface of the Poem
- Students will examine the poem and compare perspectives of the author and the subjects of his poem.
- Seeing Both Sides of an Issue
- Each student will develop arguments on both sides of an issue to see how it feels to understand opposing views.
- Seeing Things From the Someone Else's Point of View
- Students will examine the cultural trait of sharing, trying to view it from the point of view of someone in another culture.
- Seeing the World in New Ways
- Students will probe their own histories to record how they have had to expand their worldviews.
- Serious Doodling
- Students examine cartoons drawn by a Volunteer serving in the country of Jordan.
- Sleuthing a Writer's Skills
- Students will closely examine the author's lively text to determine how she achieved her many literary effects.
- Soneka's Village
- Students will focus on aspects of the Maasai pastoralist culture and compare it with their own.
- Starting Off the Day (and School Year) in Ukraine
- Students will compare the first day of school in Ukraine with the first day of school in the United States, including the challenges students and teachers both face in each country.
- The Blind Men and the Elephant
- Students will examine the importance of perspective in how people perceive things.
- The Iceberg
- Students will identify features that all cultures share and decide which are visible and which are invisible.
- The Importance of Being Flexible and Open-minded as a Visitor to Another Culture
- Students will identify the advantages of being flexible when visiting or living in a culture different from one's own.
- The Importance of Speaking Another Language
- Students will evaluate how important it can be to speak a language other than their own.
- The Multicultural Person
- Students will learn that they belong to many groups, depending on the criteria they choose to determine the groupings.
- The Rigors of Learning a New Language
- Students will consider the immensity of the the task the author undertook to learn Chinese.
- The Talking Goat Lesson
- Students will analyze the meanings and patterns of a folk tale.
- This Is Tanzania
- Students will come away with an introductory knowledge of the volcanic history and wildlife of Tanzania, and of the subsistence agricultural economy with which most Tanzanians live.
- To Your Health
- Students will focus on how storks and other cultural icons, in both Bulgarian and American customs, are believed to encourage and bring good health.
- Two Very Different Concepts of Time
- Students will delve further into the differences between a time-bound culture and a culture in which time seems almost unimportant.
- Using Effective, Amusing Writing As a Model
- Students will use the author's writing as a model to achieve vivid description and engaging humor in compositions of their own.
- Using Effective, Evocative Writing as a Model
- Students will analzye the author's style to learn techniques for strengthening their own writing.
- Using a Mentor Text to Develop a New Style of Writing
- Students will examine some of the author's writing traits and then make an effort to incorporate his style into their own writing.
- Using an Author's Clever Strategies in One's Own Writing
- Students will examine specific clever strategies of the author and incorporate them in their own writings.
- Waking Up, Stepping Out
- Students will focus on a rich and colorful description of a culture unfamiliar to most of them, and then compare the similarities and differences they find between Nepali culture and their own.
- What Is Good Use of Time?
- Students delve into questions about how best to use one's time—in one culture or another.
- What Sharing Really Means
- Students will examine closely the meaning of generosity and how sharing can be a cultural trait.
- What's Integrity?
- What constitutes a "good" job? And what defines integrity? Students will explore both questions in relation to Steve Iams's writings about the subjects.
- What's Mongolia Really Like?
- Students will look at rural Mongolian nomadic culture through the eyes of a Peace Corps Volunteer and examine the dynamics of a people in transition.
- Where I Come From
- Students will examine family traditions as a microcosm of larger cultures.
- Windmills and Blogs: The Impact of Technology in Rural Peru
- This lesson encourages students to explore the role of technology in society, specifically its benefits and consequences. They will do this by reflecting on the role of technology in their own community and by viewing a Peace Corps Volunteer's slide show and discussing the uses of technology—windmills and computers—in a Peruvian village.
- Window Into Another Culture
- Students will examine a real-life confrontation of cultural values through the experience of a Peace Corps Volunteer in Papua New Guinea.