#8: Refining Intercultural Communication: How can we provide the new kid experience to students in Vermont schools?
1. I want every school in Vermont to work on and eventually improve on providing intercultural communication experiences for their students in and outside of schools.
2. I will be targeting teachers, superintendents of school districts in Vermont and parents.
3. At this point in my work, I feel like I am at a 5 because I truly do enjoy the concept of intercultural communication and the incredible conversations that do come out of talking about it, but I also feel like this topic would be hard to create a film about. Intercultural communication is really something you have to experience for yourself to understand it fully, and having someone describe it to you in my mind seems not as interesting and very boring. Intercultural communication is so much more than just communication, it’s the friendship that comes along with it. It’s almost like the first day of school when you come back from summer and you know that you have those friends from last year that you probably saw over the summer, yet you are intrigued in meeting the new kid. You want to find out your similarities and differences with that new kid and here about their different opinions on life as well. Intercultural communication can provide that first day of school/meeting someone new experience to anyone who wants to be a part of it, and personally, yet this is a truly amazing experience that should be a part of every school around the globe, I don’t think it is worthy of a film, because every person experiences this type of communication differently, and I don’t want to create a single story about intercultural communication.
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Well, I see your conundrum. It’s not that I think your idea is “not worthy of a film,” but the issue in my mind is how would you create a film that would represent experiences so individual and diverse.
This may not make sense, but what if you were to make a film about you and your quest to help students communicate, using available technologies? (I’m new at this, Erin, so forgive me if I’m off base here.)
I mean, something really interesting to me would be how you would build in structures that would help students avoid the common pitfalls associated with typical pen-pal exchanges. How would you help participants avoid just chatting about this and that, so they could get down to the business of substantive conversations? And would these substantive conversations all be geared toward social injustice, or could they be more diverse?
Putting your own experience at the center may make you squirmy (it would me; I’m a little shy about stuff like that), but it may serve as a roadmap for others who would like to undertake something similar but don’t know where to start.