Room 111: Thanh Do & Thuy Vu: "Storytelling in ICC Development" - (IntC, AL)

In enhancing intercultural attitudes, storytelling and critical reflection have been used. Storytelling acts as a non-threatening, holistic and easily adaptive in different settings (Deardorff,2020). In the students’ stories, they share their experiences, compare, and analyse the cultural differences, reflect their awareness. Critical reflection is seen as a transformation in students’ growth of understanding self and relations to the world (Kuiper,2017), construction of self and others (McAllister et al,2016),taking actions based on one’s experiences (Deardorff,2013). It helps raise learners’ awareness of selfness and otherness and shift their attitudes to more ethnorelative ones. With a smartphone or a laptop, students can record their stories via different forms such as presentations, story diagrams on Padlet, short videos on Pecha Kucha/Canva, comic drawing and poster designing to show their changes of attitudes towards an event, a person, or a cultural/social assumption. The process of exploring new cultures and new people would be parts of their shared reflection to let them realize how much they have changed. The results show their changes towards cultural differences and their openness to adapt interculturally.