Marcella LaFever – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

ICD Exercise #1 Intercultural Meetups

In response to the call for intercultural dialogue exercises, Marcella LaFever submitted one immediately. We’ve worked together on the template, and now have the first exercise ready to present. After thinking about it, it seems obvious that, rather than just publishing quick notes in multiple formats, these should be consistently presented and formatted, and so Intercultural Dialogue Exercises becomes the next publication series for CID.

The goal is to share best practices for how to facilitate intercultural dialogues. The most likely context will be as part of a course, or a workshop, but these may come from a wide variety of occasions and for a variety of audiences. This particular exercise was designed for a a first-year Intercultural Communication course based in Canada, as one response to having to move the course into a fully online format as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was also designed to occur over a semester, rather than in a single class meeting.

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

LaFever, M. (2020). Intercultural meetups. Intercultural Dialogue Exercises, 1. Available from:
https://centerforinterculturaldialogue.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/icd-exercise-1-lafever.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.

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Director Center for Intercultural Dialogue

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Marcella LaFever Profile

Marcella LaFever, Ph.D. (University of New Mexico, 2005) is an Associate Professor in Communications at the University of the Fraser Valley.

Marcella LaFever

Marcella, in examining the implications for herself to decolonize her communication practices, has focused her ongoing research program on listening to indigenous voices that have been saying for a long time what colonizers need to do to change their attitudes and practices. Marcella’s main program of research focuses on the social exclusion that results in public dialogue and decision-making where cultural ways of speaking are outside the norms expected in dominate North American culture. Her 9P Planning model posits a process that builds intercultural relationships to increase social inclusion in public dialogue. Dr. LaFever’s other current work is in two areas of intercultural communication: use of First Nation storytelling as a form of dialogic participation; and indigenization of classroom instructional practices.

Relevant Publications:

LaFever, M. (2017). Using the medicine wheel for curriculum design in intercultural communication: Rethinking learning outcomes. In G. Garcia-Perez & C. Rojas-Primus (Eds.), Promoting intercultural communication competencies in higher education (pp. 168-199). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

LaFever, M. (2016). Switching from Bloom to the Medicine Wheel: Creating learning outcomes that support Indigenous ways of knowing in post-secondary education. Intercultural Education, 27(5), 409-424.

LaFever, M. (2011). Empowering Native Americans: Communication, planning and dialogue for eco-tourism in Gallup, New Mexico. Journal of International & Intercultural Communication, 4(2), 127-145.

LaFever, M. (2008). Communication for public decision-making in a negative historical context: Building intercultural relationships in the British Columbia treaty process. Journal of International & Intercultural Communication, 1(2), 158-180.

Work for CID: Marcella LaFever prepared ICD Exercise #1: Intercultural Meetups.