Hidden Cultures +++ Cultures in Management +++ Empathetic Leadership +++ Absolutely Intercultural 251 +++

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is IMG_81492-684x1024.jpgHello and welcome to show 251 of Absolutely Intercultural, Cultures in Management, coming to you from the beautiful Rheinland in Germany. Today’s show is about the culture of management, where we listen to three managers and how they handle some of the more hidden cultures in their workplace to be effective leaders. Culture can be more than just national or geographical identity, it can be about direct/indirect, female/male, formal/informal, old/young or it can unite people who have the same profession but who all grew up in the same country. You will have certainly encountered some of these yourself throughout life.

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Angélique Kidjo +++ UNICEF +++ Covid19 +++ Le Province +++ wedding rituals +++ Absolutely Intercultural 250

Do not hug

This show is coming to you from a partially locked down Denmark. Yes, this show is coming to you right in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic with schools and businesses shut down and people advised to keep a good distance from each other. Fortunately, all the contributors to the show could be reached digitally. I talked to Elizabeth Anne, a former teacher based in the south of France who told me how the country is divided.

Then, I talked to Luis from Colombia, who recently moved to Denmark. In Colombia Luis was a wedding photographer but in Denmark, he discovered that wedding ceremonies were not so predictable.

Now, do you want to dance? Angelique Kidjo has recorded a special version of a song that was popular during the apartheid years in South Africa in the 1950s. The song Pata Pata means lightly touch but in these Covid 19 times the advice is no touching! So UNICEF, in collaboration with one of their goodwill ambassadors, Angelique Kidjo, has slightly changed the song so that it is about NOT touching and you can be in the video which comes out later this month if you film yourself dancing to it!

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

Image: Pixabay

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.

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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.

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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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Intercultural trainers +++ SIETAR +++ Ethiopia +++ Ghana +++ absolutely intercultural 227

Coffee Pixabay
Creative Commons CCO

I have been curious about how you come to work in the intercultural field and have continued my conversations with people who are doing it.  One thing I realise now after talking to several people is that there are many ways into an intercultural career.

Here for example is Dawn who was based in Ethiopia and formed Broads Abroad, a support group for expatriate women, based on the conversations that used to happen after the Zumba lessons she started giving.

And Franklin Yartey, a professor of intercultural communication at Dubuque University, Iowa, worked as PR manager of a dance school in his native Ghana before ending up in the US to continue his education.

And once you are doing it, it seems that intercultural work is its own reward as Joe Kearns describes!

So this show is the second in our series on how to get into the Intercultural field. Thanks to everyone who agreed to participate.

Another thing I noticed about today’s contributors is that they all had a connection with Africa, two with Ethiopia and one with Ghana. Listen to find out which is which.

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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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Learning Outcomes +++ New Project +++ Skills to Learn and Apply +++ Semester Abroad +++ Absolutely Intercultural 224 +++

Have you ever thought about outcomes of your learning process? Well, in today’s show, we are going to focus on intercultural learning outcomes in lectures and seminars at university but also in study abroad experiences. First, we will listen to Mariana Silva, an Erasmus exchange student from Portugal. Mariana studied at RheinAhrCampus in Germany and did an intercultural internship at the same time. She will talk about the research she has done into the theory of learning outcomes or graduate attributes and quote examples from her own observations in classes and her intercultural development during the internship. Then, our main editor Zarnura Hajiyeva will take the microphone and will turn Dr. Borgmann into a guest in this show – as a lecturer who has some experience in formulating learning outcomes for his own classes. As he noticed considerable effects on both the style of his teaching and the effectiveness of his classes, he will share his experiences of the process. His next project will be to apply the idea of intercultural learning outcomes to the study abroad experience of his students. Finally, we will listen to Husniyya Huseynova, an exchange student from Azerbaijan, who will share her impressions of the courses and the lasting impact on her personal intercultural growth. Continue reading “Learning Outcomes +++ New Project +++ Skills to Learn and Apply +++ Semester Abroad +++ Absolutely Intercultural 224 +++”

Mindsets +++ Myanmar +++ Shamans +++ Finland +++ Zambia +++ Absolutely Intercultural 223 +++

Myanmar
Sunset in Mandalay, Myanmar

In this show we are going to find out how a shaman does his work, as well as first impressions of Finland when you come from Zambia. Strangely enough, it was also my first time in Finland and we did discuss in the project team whether it was a good idea to visit in January but we are planning to go again in June when there will be 24 hour daylight and mosquitos out in full force so we will get the whole range. The occasion was a small-scale conference in which the Prof E Sus project was wrestling with the idea of defining, measuring and creating a sustainable mindset in the teachers of home economics. One of the participants was Dr Hosea Lupambo Chishala a teacher trainer from Rockview University in Lusaka and he shared with us that in Zambia you can mark your status by how much you are able to waste. This means that he is faced with a really big challenge. And we’ll also be talking to Mia Fox about how she stumbled across a shaman unexpectedly in Myanmar

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