ZFH workshop: "This is foreign to me!" - Intercultural competence for lecturers

We encounter "culture" always and everywhere - including in our professional lives, of course. Both in contact with colleagues and with students, people from different backgrounds interact with each other in many different ways. As a teacher at the University of Siegen, you also support, advise and accompany people with a history of migration. You are directly confronted with culturally different attitudes, approaches and values. These are not always clearly visible, not always conscious and not always easy to connect with what you have experienced. Whether it is a different learning style, unexpected dealings with superiors, a different understanding of time or unfamiliar communication: it always remains a challenge to understand that people "tick" differently and why. In this intercultural training course, you will experience a sensitization to your own and other people's ways of working, learn about helpful tools and develop ways of dealing with people with a different cultural background in a more confident and enriched way. You will receive concrete impulses to improve your professional interaction with people from different cultural backgrounds.

Learning objectives:

• Raise awareness of your own cultural roots, sensitization, better understanding of cultural differences.
• Getting to know helpful tools and methods for working in intercultural contexts.
• Expand knowledge and skills in intercultural communication.
• Having communication tools at hand to deal professionally with "strange" situations.

Contents:

• Intercultural competence
• What is culture?
• Culturally different ways of dealing with time, hierarchy and communication
• Error management in different cultures
• Intercultural communication - is a "yes" always a "yes"?
• Critical incident: how cultural aspects can cause critical situations. Developing alternative courses of action / solution strategies.
• Self-perception/perception of others - recognizing intercultural misunderstandings
• Stereotype/prejudice - searching for traces of origin, effect and deconstruction of collectively generated images in the mind.