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Crossing Cultures: Online course syllabus

Syllabus for Crossing Cultures, a course to help teachers gain a greater awareness of their own cultural background, as well as acquire tools to interact appropriately and effectively with people from a variety of cultures.

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NOTE: Please read ALL of this information carefully and thoroughly – you are encouraged to print it off.

Course goals

Although there will be a variety of activities and readings designed to teach you the specifics of crossing cultures, there are three overarching goals we hope you’ll achieve in crossing cultures. The goals of this course are:

  • To increase learners’ awareness of their own cultural backgrounds and cultural conditioning
  • To expand learners’ awareness of others’ world views and cultural behaviors so as to interact more effectively with those from different cultural backgrounds
  • To provide a framework of underlying cultural values and communication styles with which to analyze individuals’ behaviors and communication

Learner objectives

Within the larger course goals, there are six specific learner objectives that you’ll achieve through your participation in this course:

  1. Explore own cultural identity and ethnic background
  2. Explore own “personal lens” (world view)
  3. Demonstrate knowledge of definitions and concepts found in cultural theories, including framework of cultural values with which to analyze individuals’ behavior
  4. Identify cultural similarities and differences between several different cultures.
  5. Demonstrate skills acquired in course through on-line activities and real-world experiences.
  6. Synthesize knowledge, skills, and attitudes through a culture-specific presentation, cultural exploration, and an on-line journal.

Course content

  • Week one: Orientation, building the learning community, introduction to culture, and exploring personal identity
  • Week two: Exploring cultural identity, assumptions, and projects set-up
  • Week three: Cultural values framework, projects continue
  • Week four: Cross-cultural communication styles, projects continue
  • Week five: Intercultural interaction, projects due
  • Week six: Culture-specific presentations and course wrap-up

Course schedule

The weekly schedule helps to accommodate vacation schedules (for instance, if you travel away from your computer for a normal calendar week—Monday to Sunday—you won’t miss a whole week of class).

Plus, there’s the added bonus of weekends falling midweek. We suspect many of you with very full work lives may enjoy the luxury of a bit of catching up time over the weekend. (But, please note: you simply can’t save all your work for one day of the week, participation is required throughout the week.)

Due dates

Lessons are grouped under weeks in the main course area. All of a week’s lessons are due by the end of Tuesday night, the last day of the week. However, please read carefully because many assignments will be due before the end of the week.

While you have the entire week to complete the activities according to your own schedule, you’ll be expected to post comments or written work in the discussions on three different days throughout the week, every week.

NOTE: Many of your major assignments are due in week five, so please plan to spend even more than 10 hours that week on completing and submitting your assignments!

Stay current

Don’t allow yourself to get behind (especially with the holidays upon us!)! For those of you who’ve had online courses before, you know how crucial this is to stay up with the assignments each week and complete them in a timely fashion within that week. It’s best to get started very early on in each week. With each new week, we’ll be assigning new tasks, each building on lessons from the previous week.

If you suspect you may not have access for more than a day or two, or if you do indeed get behind, please notify us immediately, and we’ll help you catch up.

Course materials

The materials you will need for this course will be available on-line. However, if you’d like to have a textbook to supplement what you’re learning on-line, you are encouraged to purchase Figuring Foreigners Out: A Practical Guide by Craig Storti, Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, Inc., 1999. A resource list is also available under “Additional resources” in the Resources section of this course.

Some important caveats about this course

This course is designed from a Western culture perspective and the readings are based largely on Peace Corps materials. In this course, we will primarily discuss cultures and how individuals are culturally-conditioned within those cultures. This is a culture-general course (meaning that we will not be able to go into the details of specific cultures that much) and will give you tools to work with persons from many different cultures. Culture-specific information will primarily be given through your culture-specific presentations. As we go through this course, it may sound like at times that stereotypes are being made about various cultures. However, what is said about a culture should be “loosely-held,” flexible and able to change, so that it becomes a generalization based on central tendencies in that culture. It is important to realize that there are, of course, large variances within cultures (with many influences including geographical, rural vs urban, etc.) and you may meet an individual that does not fit at all with the central tendencies (generalizations) of that culture.

In this course, it is very important that you share with your colleagues experiences that you’ve had with those from different cultural backgrounds and the insights you’ve gained. One does not necessarily have to travel overseas to have have intercultural encounters (as you will see as you undertake some of the activities in this course!). As you share your insights and experiences, we can all learn from each other.

Cultures are indeed complex phenomena, ever changing and always evolving; thus, it becomes very challenging to even begin to try to understand all the intricacies of cultures. Nonetheless, this course attempts to begin to provide some insights into cultures and in understanding those from different cultural backgrounds. Consider this course merely an introduction to this complex topic, the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. And while the materials we will be using discuss cultures in other countries, the concepts we will be discussing apply to all cultures, whether they are in other parts of the world or whether they are right here within in the United States. So, this course addresses key concepts in working with anyone from a different background, regardless of nationality.

It is important to enter this course with an open mind, a great curiosity about other cultures, and a willingness to explore. Ready for adventure? Here we go.…!