Intercultural Learning

PART 1:

• Intercultural learning is an opportunity to get over the cultural boundaries and have a global dialog leading to us to shift from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism, meaning to stop living in the bubble of our culture and to start being aware of the other cultures as well. The most important aspects to me in the intercultural learning are: education, culture and language.

PART 2:

• Soliya is the main project in the part concerning the intercultural learning. The meetings, readings and reflections helped me change my mindset about many issues concerning interacting with people who are different from me.
• We had a class activity where we were given certain identities, including these of minorities and people who are shut down from society because they are different or weird. when activity puts you in other people's shoes, even if for a short period of time, it affects you and you start getting negative feelings of oppression and thinking we are all equal, but why are not we all being treated equally. In Soliya we did an activity in which we imagined swapping countries for a couple of years. Everyone had doubts and fears about living in a different culture, mainly, not being accepted or not being able to fit in. For example, as a Muslim I thought I wouldn't be able to feel as comfortable as I am here where the majority of the population are Muslims.

PART 3:

• If I could change one thing to make a better intercultural learning experience out of the course, instead of having the virtual Soliya meetings, I would have half the class consisting of foreigners and we can have a real life session which would be more interesting without any technical problems.