Author Archives: Caitlin Meredith

Goodbye for now!

Hi everyone,

Nancy and Caitlin here! It’s almost a year since we started our internship with the ICS project and now we are in our final week- how time flies!

Looking back, neither of us imagined that the 3 month internship we started on would turn into a yearlong project, but we are so happy it did. Through our involvement with ICS, we have been given so many opportunities to gain new skills, work as part of a brilliant team and create initiatives that we are proud of.

It seems odd to try and condense a year’s work into a short blog post, but we’re going to try! Starting with redesigning the website, we believe that we have created a blog that is more interactive and that serves as a good platform for disseminating information about the ICS scheme and bringing people together through the project’s work. We later on also developed a workshop that raises people’s awareness about cultural differences that was not only informative but also really enjoyable both for us and for the participants. In addition to this, although the task of organising a festival seemed daunting at first, we were so happy with how WOW turned out. We didn’t imagine that what started as a few ideas scribbled in our notebooks would turn out to be an event that attracted over 300 people, hosted over 40 activities and brought community members from within and outside the university together to celebrate the cultural diversity of Southampton. Following the success of the festival, we were excited to be invited to host another event ‘The Intercultural Café’. While this event was much smaller than WOW, we loved being able to bring people together to engage in intercultural exchange and we hope that the foundation that we have laid will serve as a good guide for the sessions to be run in the future. In the past couple of months, for the final stage of our internship, we have been mainly office based, but this has really helped to strengthen our skills in writing and researching and through this we have been able to create resources that we hope will prove useful for the future of the project.

We consider ourselves really lucky to have worked on a project that enabled us to gain skills in team working, marketing, recruitment, logistic, managing money, bid writing and many more. We only have Ali, Jill and the rest of the LLAS team to thank for what was such a brilliant first experience of the world of work.

Although our time with ICS is coming to a close, we are really happy to know that there will be 3 more interns joining the project team this summer to bring their skills and new ideas to the project. We’ll certainly be keeping up with their developments through the ICS blog, and we hope you will too!

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The Intercultural Café

Welcome back to the ICS Blog!

 

Since the success of WOW Festival, the ICS team have been thinking about new ways in which we can continue promoting intercultural exchange and encouraging international links across the city of Southampton.

 

On the evening of Thursday 5th May, we trialled one of these ideas at the Art House CafĂ© in the city’s Cultural Quarter. Based on the idea of a ‘Language Café’, the Intercultural CafĂ© is a gathering of people from both within and outside the University of Southampton community in an informal, sociable cafĂ© setting where participants are encouraged to engage in intercultural exchange. It will aim to provide a space for people to meet, chat and share information about different cultures. Whereas a ‘Language Café’ might tend to focus around the practice and sharing of foreign languages, the Intercultural CafĂ© will not require any previous language proficiency and will solely focus on the exchange of intercultural knowledge, experience and observations.

 

For this trial session, we used the theme of ‘Celebrations and Gatherings’ as a springboard to facilitate our discussions and ended up chatting about everything from weddings and water festivals, to carnival and Christmas. Although we were a small group of ten participants, everyone involved enjoyed the session and really felt that they not only had the opportunity to teach others about their cultural traditions, but also learnt a lot about celebrations and gatherings that take place around the world. A couple of comments we received were that it ‘was nice to meet new people and exchange stories’ and that is was great ‘to hear about diverse cultural experiences’.

 

Following the success of this session, we are hoping to run the Intercultural Café again in the coming weeks. Make sure you keep an eye on our Facebook page to check for announcements!

 

We would also like to take this opportunity to offer our thanks to the Art House Café for hosting the session in their fantastic Gallery Space.

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Interview with Jill Doubleday, CPD Developer, Intercultural Connections Southampton

Hi Jill! Canjillphoto you tell us about your role in the ICS Project? 

 

I initiated the project with Ali Dickens.  My main role has been to develop the training for academic and professional services staff. The workshops for academic staff focus on how to get the best out of multicultural student groups, looking at aspects which can be challenging, such as group work and participation.  The workshop for professional services staff explores cultural awareness and intercultural communication.  I also co-organised the conference that we held in April 2015.  As well as this, my role includes arranging the lunchtime seminars for staff.  These give colleagues across the university the chance to disseminate best practice or research more widely.  The topics covered so far have been the Business School’s Peer Support programme for PGT students; how internationalisation of the curriculum can be developed;  and a presentation on the curriculum innovation module Intercultural Communication in a Global World and its sister module Intercultural Communication.  I’m also working to try to develop the staff network

 

What kind of response have you had from around the university?

The response from staff has generally been along the lines of ‘thank goodness there is finally a way of connecting with others in our situation’.  The workshops and seminars give colleagues an opportunity to share best practice, and a sense of relieve that that they are not struggling with the challenges alone.  It’s been heartening to discover some of the wonderful intercultural events and projects around the university, and to help raise awareness of these.

 

What would you like the legacy of this project to be?

We received funding for two years, and only have a few months left.  We hope that collaborations and networking will continue, which is why we are keen to develop the staff network as a way for colleagues to contact each other. We have a dedicated page on our website for this.  I also think it’s critical that we continue to run the workshops – we have seen that demand is there, and shows no sign of decreasing yet. Ultimately I would like to see “the intercultural” embedded in everything the university does, so there is no need to have a project on the topic!

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