Intercultural Dialogue Concepts and Practice

Catalog description

SOC 269 is an immersive experience in small group cross-cultural communication for students who have "international student" status at Penn State. In this class you will study the concepts of facilitated dialogue and how to apply these concepts to think together across borders. In this course, you will learn the nature and value of "activated" participation in a facilitated dialogue, and you will learn the crucial framework of "conflict and collaboration" to add to your mindset as an "activated" participant, which we will refer to as a participator. You will study discourse and rhetoric by examining the stories you hear from others and you will learn to develop your own story-telling abilities. You will engage in this process through participating in cross-cultural conversations twice weekly with your international and domestic peers at Penn State. All dialogues, both through in-class training and practicum, will revolve around both U.S. and international themes, which will often invite conflict and disagreement, as well as political divides and historical legacies. In class, you will learn a set of practices that will allow you to directly engage with these divergent perspectives, and you will practice applying them directly to your dialogues. This course includes 1.5 hours of weekly class time and 3 hours in a weekly course practicum, in which you will use your position as dialogue "participator" (an activated participant) along with your foundational communication skills (introduced in class) to develop and test hypotheses about people, culture, and social conflict according to a Grounded Theory approach. Some of the specific skills you will learn during the will be: designing and delivering open-ended questions, listening actively reflectively, as well as techniques for collaborating with facilitators to co-construct a conversational environment for "thinking together."