Workshop—Intercultural Dynamics in International Education: Supporting Students through an Intercultural Lens
As international education professionals navigate the changing and challenging tides of post-secondary education in 2025, supporting students through their academic journey in culturally relevant and appropriate ways is more important than ever.
How effective our support will be depends on a lot of factors, including our knowledge of how cultural behaviours, attitudes, and beliefs can play out in different ways and across different circumstances. However, while it’s important to recognize these aspects in our students, it’s just as, if not more important to map out the ways in which WE show up in the world through a cultural lens.
This session asks new international education practitioners to notice how our own thoughts, behaviours, and attitudes are culturally coded. With this understanding of self, we can start to see how we perceive and respond to certain situations in our support of international students, especially as we help them navigate their way through a new and complex cultural and academic experience.
In this session, participants will begin to:
- understand culture, cultural awareness, and intercultural competence
- reflect on their own cultural framework and social positionality in relation to the students they serve
- recognize how cultural norms impact our relationship with others and our responses to situations
Join us as we examine some of the basics of effective intercultural communication. This session will be similar to Intercultural Workshop offered in January 2025, but with different experiential activities throughout that will reinforce our learning.
*This session is a taste of what is offered in some of the courses in BCIT’s International Education Practitioner (IEP) Microcredential, which is uniquely targeted to support the demand for competent personnel in the field of international education.