ICD Exercise #9: Cross-Cultural Adaptation Across Migrant Pathways

ICD Exercises

The next ICD Exercise is now available. Su-Ann Tan describes an exercise she has successfully used with students, Cross-cultural adaptation across migration pathways: Understanding different starting points and experiences.

The primary goal of this activity is to demonstrate that not all migrant groups experience adaptation in the same way; their starting position is not always equal, with success influenced by numerous internal and external factors.

To achieve this, the concept of cross-cultural adaption is introduced, followed by a scenario-based activity where participants are assigned a migrant profile (e.g., skilled professional, refugee, international student, or family reunification migrant) and given a scenario to reflect aspects of their profile as helpful or challenging to their adaptation.

As with prior publications, ICD Exercises are available as free PDFs; just click on the thumbnail to download.

ICD Exercise 9 by Su-Ann Tan

Tan, S.-A. (2026). Cross-cultural adaptation across migration pathways: Understanding different starting points and experiences. Intercultural Dialogue Exercises, 9. Available from: https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/icd-ex-9-tan.pdf

If you have an exercise you’ve used that works, and you would like to share it, please submit it. All authors will be asked to answer the same set of questions, and to make the exercises available for others to use, thus these are being published with a Creative Commons license (as is the case for all CID publications). If you are new to CID, please provide a brief resume. This opportunity is open to masters students and above, on the assumption that some familiarity with academic conventions generally, and discussion of intercultural dialogue specifically, are useful.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz Director Center for Intercultural Dialogue