The final task on this blog is as follows:

Reflect on the learning outcomes for this FLC, describe your experiences that contributed to those outcomes, and analyze your mastery of those ideas. Present how you might incorporate your new insights in your teaching, your department, your office, or in designing student experiences. 

Here are the learning outcomes for the community:

• Describe strategies of learning to cope with new social/cultural expectations through immersion experiences such as BaFa BaFa and personal experience.
• Analyze experiences of dealing with diversity through personal assessment using the Intercultural Development Instrument.
• Create ways to foster of diversity in professional life/classes/student services/student groups

I think I am have some new strategies for coping with new social cultural expectations. These include finding the familiar while being open to novelty. Finding the familiar helps me to use my cultural strengths and referents to access new spaces and ideas. Being open to and embracing the unfamiliar allows me to learn about others. Having opportunities to feel like an outsider in the immersion experiences served as important reminders both of how to welcome others and how to successfully join new experiences. Participating in personal assessment through reflection and the Intercultural Development Instrument allowed me to have some insight into the distance between what I know and believe and what I do. As an advisor for a student group, course instructor and colleague I need to find ways to allow for that learning space and to be intentional about creating it.  One specific thing I can do is allow time for reflection. Without reflection and dialogue there is a danger of reinforcing stereotypes instead of recognizing the “funds of knowledge” or cultural and cognitive resources (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez, 1992) that others bring to the table.  What I can take away from this group is to not be held back by or wrapped up in what I already know and recognize how much I have to learn.

 

Reference

 

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 32(2), 132-141.