Community Connections
Intercultural Competence: A Strategy for Negotiating Differences to Engage Diverse Youth, Families, and Communities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fe Moncloa
The development of intercultural competence, defined as the ability to work with people from different cultures, is critical to bridge across difference. In the setting of a public university in California, U.S. a team of professionals coalesced to begin to change the organizational culture of a 100 year old youth program that had not adapted well to the demographic change in Californian communities, where 53% of youth are Latino. The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI©) was used to define baseline data and progress. The team prototyped two educational interventions to sustain the dialogue on topics of diversity, privilege, inclusion, belonging and intercultural relations with 100 personnel. Both interventions included individual coaching using the IDI and a 2-day conference to learn how to apply these concepts to practice. In Cohort 1, participants engaged in six-monthly communities of practice where discussion topics were generated by participants and grounded in intercultural relations by a facilitator. Cohort 2 learned content via recorded webinars followed by structured facilitated conversations in learning circles. Pre-post IDI evaluations of Cohort # 1 revealed that in average participants improved their intercultural competence by one orientation along the continuum. The evaluation of Cohort 2 will be concluded in April 2019. In this presentation, participants will learn the content of these interventions, and why one was most effective and why. These interventions, along with other initiatives, resulted in a 34% increase in Latino youth enrollment in the program between July 2014 and June 2017.
Diversifying the University of California 4-H Youth Development Program: Evaluation and Impacts of a Seven-County Latino Initiative
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lynn Schmitt-McQuitty, Steven Worker, John Borba, Lupita Fabregas, Russell D Hill, Mary Bonaparte Saller, Claudia Diaz Carrasco
The University of California Cooperative Extension’s 4-H Youth Development programs are at the cutting edge of positive youth development knowledge and practice. The 4-H program has a proven record of developing youth. 4-H members make contributions to their communities, are civically active, participate in science programs, make healthy choices, increase their opportunities to attend college, and contribute to improving youth and family quality of life (Lerner, Lerner et al., 2016). In 2015, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) understood and accepted the challenge of examining how the 4-H Youth Development Program could better serve diverse audiences by investing $2,000,000 over a period of three years to pilot an intentionally focused effort to develop culturally relevant and responsive programs to welcome Latino youth, families, and volunteers to 4-H. Seven counties (Kern, Merced, Monterey, Orange, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and Sonoma) were selected representing rural, suburban, and urban communities and because they were either a 2013 US Department of Agriculture (USDA) review site or had ongoing successful efforts reaching Latino youth. The UC ANR 4-H Latino Initiative is aligned with the UC ANR Strategic Vision 2025 in providing for healthy families and communities, the Healthy Families & Communities Strategic Plan, the UC ANR 2016-2020 Strategic Plan, particularly with increasing the reach of UC ANR (Goal 2), and the UC ANR public values of ensuring safe and healthy California for all people and communities and contributing to reduced racial and ethnic inequality. This paper reviews the project and its impacts.
Climate Change Border Crossing: The Story of the Republic of Marshall Islands
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deborah K. Zuercher, Gregg Nakano, Jelton Anjain
This study shares the little known narrative of intercultural learning in the wake of the Republic of Marshall Islands’ sea-level rising migration and refugee crisis. Kwajalein Atoll is the largest low lying coral atoll in the world. Man-made climate change is accelerating sea level rise, which will destroy Kwajalein’s freshwater lens between 2035 – 2065, force migration from the islands and erase these nations’ sovereignty. Presenters share the tragic story of United States’ nuclear bomb-testing and colonization in the Republic of the Marshall Islands as context to an emerging climate change and sea-level rising crisis of sustainability. Border crossing of the Marshallese to Hawai`i and the U.S. mainland has been unsuccessful. However, this story is prompting a call to empower local Pacific leaders with place-based STEM education so that they might have the sovereignty to solve unique Pacific problems and retain citizenship in their threatened island homes. This narrative is important to influence United States’ policy decisions and create a local culturally-responsive education program. The varied backgrounds and attributes of Marshallese teachers and learners has profoundly impacted their engagement with hegemonic United States educational standards and curriculum. Marshallese graduate candidates in the University of Hawai`i STEM PACMED Master of Education degree program are piloting action research studies on the effects of place-based and culturally-responsive instructional interventions and localized curriculum on experiential learning and intercultural understanding. Researchers will share the story of this multicultural, international, exploratory, qualitative case study and model interactive Pacific instructional strategies aimed at respectfully addressing diversity.
Visual Art From a Kids' Point of View: I is for Immigration
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Torre Veltri
Michael Polanyi’s (1967) research on tacit knowledge, “the belief that creative acts (especially acts of discovery) are shot-through or charged with strong personal feelings and commitments,” is employed as the conceptual framework in this study, on how kids view the terms, “refugee” “migration” and “immigration” through their original visual art. Polanyi (1967) termed the pre-logical phase of knowing as “tacit knowledge” and theorized that, “we can know more than we can tell.” Movements of people, goods, and capital across borders is the new normal – not only on the European continent, but across the globe (M. Lawn, Keynote Address, ECER Conference 2017). But how do students, in increasingly diverse classrooms process unfiltered messages from media and public discourse that bombard impressionable youth with pejorative terms: illegal, alien, refugees, migrants, border security, walls, and deportation? Do they exclude or include? This study includes a collaboration with the author, U.S. teachers in a 'border state" in the Southwest, a middle school teacher in Italy and a teacher educators in Turkey. This an original project considers student thinking on immigration. Evidence in the form of classroom teacher’s action research data, gathered from students in grades 4-8, over a five-year period (2014-2019), representing three countries, suggests that students “know more than they can tell,” and their images speak volumes.
