Sociology Independent Study: Intercultural Dialogues

• Previous Syllabus Fall 2006
• Fall 2007 Application

History

Intercultural Dialogues (ICD) was inspired by a UW-Student who thought something was missing from his college experience. He felt the campus did not promote for the establishment of friendships across racial boundaries nor did it teach him an understanding of cultures and ethnicities other than his own. He also felt that students have a different college experience based on their race and that the topic was not discussed positively in mainstream classroom discussions. Rather than accepting the popular notion that people “naturally stick to their own,” he set out to deconstruct this concept by writing a paper for Professor Erik Olin Wright’s Sociology 125 class. The paper, “Black Success at Predominantly White Institutions,” contained the fundamental concept that traditional classrooms do not provide a space for students to meet and form a genuine understanding of one another. The student took the idea to the Multicultural Student Coalition and created Intercultural Dialogues with a committee of MCSC members.

Description of Intercultural Dialogues:

 What has it meant to grow up in America for people in different circumstances other than our own? ICD is a class intended for students of various backgrounds to have discussions about student life in non-traditional classroom settings. “Campus Climate” and “social justice” have recently become buzz-words commonly thrown around in conversations with students and administrators. These objectives are relatively new priorities. Although SOAR is in the process of incorporating a multicultural component, this addition is meant to be a starting place for increased multicultural learning. ICD then serves as a follow-up opportunity for beginning students to continue that learning throughout their college career. ICD’s intention is to gather students from different backgrounds together and offer a fun environment and learning community where they can learn about people on an individual level and prepare them to read and discuss more difficult issues such as racial dynamics, relations, class, family, social life, and politics. These discussions are to engage the students to reflect on themselves while understanding their relationship to the students around them. ICD hopes to increase the retention of all students by offering students a chance to communicate with different races and cultures and to create a comfortable campus community. The class focus is to use each other as teachers in order to better understand unquantifiable issues in the personal experiences of our everyday lives; fhave established genuine friendships across campus through positive communication and dialogue between students in the class. ICD will empower students with a greater understanding and knowledge of racial dynamics in the world so that they may feel more comfortable navigating in communities or other settings that might feel unwelcoming. Finally, ICD is also an attempt to improve the buzz-word known as “campus climate” on the UW-Campus, by being a positive classroom for students.