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effect of accents +++ Brexit +++ Absolutely Intercultural 246

Well I hope that you have recovered from hearing about all those gory details about life on the farm in the last show! This is the first show of 2020 so Happy New Year! In this show we go to the UK because there, finally three and a half years after the referendum on whether to leave the EU, the UK government has managed to pass legislation that takes the UK to the next stage. Anyway all our contributors today are migrants to the UK. But you will probably learn almost nothing about Brexit from this show. So if you are concerned that this will be about arcane constitutional corners of Britain or obscure trade rules then please don’t worry!

So what will we be hearing about? Would our contributors recommend migrating to the UK from the EU right now, for example?

And how is the transition from freedom of movement to getting permission to stay making migrants feel?

Although we talked long and hard about being a migrant in the UK, our third contributor, Konrad, did not even mention Brexit. Instead, he gave what I think is the best description I have heard so far of what an intercultural coach does.

remote surveys +++ formal language +++ intercultural training +++ Absolutely Intercultural 244 +++

Electricity pylon — How to get information about African electrification from Denmark?

From a university internship to a career as an intercultural trainer we’ll be talking to people at both ends of their career in show 244 of absolutely Intercultural. My name’s Anne Fox and this show is coming to you from Denmark.

First, Gabrielle Lachance, a French Canadian Masters student interning with a consultancy company in Denmark, tasked with getting a good response rate to a survey about electrification in southern African countries. But what are the chances of getting a good response when you send an email asking for complicated technical information to people that you have no connection with?

And then I talked to Iris Schneider who I met at the SIETAR congress in Belgium in June who is an intercultural trainer based in Bonn Germany. How did she get her first intercultural trainer job? She applied as a relocation expert and then this happened!

Hands Up project +++ Palestine +++ Bilbrough +++ Absolutely Intercultural 242 +++

I am hoping that by the end of this show you will want to buy a book called ‘Toothbrush and other plays’, as this will help the wonderful Hands Up project which we are going to hear about. You will find the link to buy the book here.

So what is this show about? It’s about the difficulties of getting to and from Gaza in Palestine. It’s about the power of storytelling as a way of learning language and it’s about ingenious ways of getting classes in Palestine to create and perform plays to audiences all over the world. Nick Bilbrough is the man behind the project, and I caught up with him at the IATEFL conference in Liverpool in April where teachers of English from all over the world gather to exchange ideas.

SIETAR +++ Syria +++ Pilbeam +++ diversophy +++ Absolutely Intercultural 239 +++

Last week I was in Belgium in the beautiful city of Leuven for the SIETAR Congress.

SIETAR stands for the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research and their biennial congress is a very friendly affair. Of course a Congress is always very diverse, forgive the pun, and in addition diversity was one of the main themes of the Congress this year so todays show is also very diverse.

If you are listening to this from our website then you will see a beautiful image of the gothic town hall of Leuven. This is where we had the opening reception to the Congress and this is also where we heard the mayor of Leuven, Mohamed Ridouani, give a very inspirational talk about what you can do at local level to make people feel valued and included. Unfortunately I did not ask him to be on the podcast but we do have an interesting variety of people for you in the next 25 minutes or so.

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gender issues +++ Palestine +++ IATEFL +++ Absolutely Intercultural 238 +++

I’m sitting here in Denmark after having attended the annual IATEFL conference in Liverpool in the UK. There are always people from all over the world at this conference, which is one of the biggest gatherings of teachers of English as a foreign language in the world and this year was no exception.
One really nice surprise for me was to meet up with We’am Hamdan who I had recently worked with virtually. I love working online but it’s always nice to meet people face to face and We’am had travelled a long way from Palestine to be in Liverpool where she was leading a session for the IATEFL Global Issues special interest group. We’am was talking about a really interesting and universal topic so we have decided to devote this whole show to it.

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cosmetics +++ Mara D’Louca +++ Instagram +++ China +++ Absolutely Intercultural 236 +++

Thanks to Katie Stewart who contacted us about an interesting initiative she had heard of and which means that for the first time on Absolutely Intercultural we’ll be hearing about make-up and how that differs across cultures.

And we’ll also be going to China to find out more about the universal social monitoring that you read so much about.

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100%forthe children +++ Signe Møller +++ Kenya +++ Ghana +++ SDGs +++ Absolutely Intercultural 234

Happy New Year! In this show, we are going to go back to shows 70 and 74 in 2008 and 2009 when I talked to Signe Møller here in Denmark about a new charity she had just set up.

This show, 234, is ten years later, so why am I re-visiting Signe’s charity 100% to the children? Because I bumped into a stall for her charity at a local Christmas market last November and I was curious to find out how this one-woman organisation was doing.

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Soliya +++ Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange +++ African Science +++ Absolutely intercultural 232 +++

What is a virtual exchange? Maybe not what you think. We’ll be digging deeper into that in this special edition of Absolutely Intercultural coming to you from Denmark. My name’s Anne Fox and this is show 232. Today’s show is mainly about promoting dialogue between different groups of people. So what is dialogue? And can you tell the difference between dialogue and, for example, debate?

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Zanzibar +++ Chako +++ African football +++ sustainability +++ absolutely intercultural 230 +++

In this show we will be mainly in Africa; Zanzibar to be more exact. We’ll be hearing about people’s relationships with animals in Zanzibar. And about how football is played differently in the UK, US and Africa. Mostly we’ll be hearing from Christine Atkinson who now lives in Zanzibar and how she ended up getting a job with social enterprise, Chako.

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Intercultural trainers +++ CultureBuff Games +++ Brett Parry +++ Lisa La Valle Finan +++ absolutely intercultural 225

In the show today I decided to contact three people who would describe themselves as intercultural trainers in order to find out more about what that entails and how they came to do this work. Predictably we ended up talking about much more than this so we will start with Lucy Fogarty, an Irish trainer based in London who has developed training that is based on cartoons. Why images I asked her?

Then I talked to Lisa La Valle Finan in the US who had a word of warning for the young.

And finally I talked to Brett Parry, an Aussie based in the US who was able to answer the question, what do you do on a Monday morning and much else besides.

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