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Experiential Learning

• "Festivals of Light": A Multicultural Celebration in Brooklyn
  Describes a celebration developed by children, staff, and parents at Morris L. Eisenstein Learning Center (Brooklyn, New York) to share the customs of Diwali, Hannukah, Loi Krathong, Kwanzaa, Nacimiento, and Christmas with the diverse student population.
• "I've Really Learned a Lot, But...": Cross-cultural Understanding and Teacher Education in a Racist Society
  Describes a cross-cultural course offered by the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina (Saskatchewan, Canada) to develop preservice teachers' understanding of aboriginal cultures, taking data from instructors' experiences and student narratives. The paper discusses the lack of understanding in white preservice teachers' views of self and others and the implications for teacher education in a racist society.
• Breaking Down the Walls: Camp/School Program Brings Diverse Communities Together
  The Discovery Center (Ashford, Connecticut) is a camp/university/school program that provides a positive diversity experience to preadolescents through experiential education in an outdoor, residential setting. Students from at least four cultural groups are mixed for all cabin and lab groups, and all camp activities are retooled to pursue the goal of comprehensive diversity education.
• Bright Lights: Stories of Success and Excellence from BC Secondary Schools.
  This document highlights the exciting and creative learning opportunities offered in 16 British Columbia secondary schools.
• Developing Intercultural Communication and Understanding through Social Studies in Israel
  Discusses the problems related to cultural pluralism, differences among the groups living in Israel, and social studies education within Israel. Focuses on the sociology curriculum, offering a rationale, description, and information about intercultural education.
• Developing Multicultural Counseling Competencies through Experiential Learning
  This article focuses on experiential learning as a teaching and learning methodology to increase students' multicultural counseling competencies. Outlines ethical and practical suggestions for using experiential learning in multicultural counseling curriculum.
• Experiential Exercises for Increasing Self-Awareness and an Appreciation of Racially and Ethnically Diverse Populations
  Describes experiential exercises used by the author to facilitate both self-awareness and an appreciation of the impact of race and culture in the United States in a group of students consisting mainly of undergraduate social work majors. These exercises generate deep reflection and personal insights on race and ethnicity.
• Exploring Multiple Serendipitous Experiences in a First Nations Setting as the Impetus for Meaningful Literacy Development
  An Aboriginal teacher engaged her non-Native students in the historical study of a Secwepemc child's experiences of residential schooling. Pedagogical practices included reading a novel based on remembrances of residential schooling, journal writing to stimulate critical thinking and engagement with the text, author interview, and a field trip by students and parents to the former residential school.
• Getting from the Outside In: Teaching Mexican Americans When You Are an "Anglo."
  A midwestern university provides cross-cultural student teaching experiences in a southwestern city with a large Mexican-American population. Features include two classroom placements, a course in multicultural education, and bicultural mentors.
• Interactive Drama: A Method for Experiential Multicultural Training
  The authors present interactive drama as a medium to create learning about multicultural and diversity issues in the basis of cognitive-experiential self-theory. Results of exploratory qualitative research suggest 2 interactive dramas had an impact on awareness, understanding, and skills.
• It's about People: A Successful School/University Partnership
  Utah State University and a rural elementary school attended by Navajos cooperated on a science education program for grades 4-6. The program used take-home science kits; field trips; parental input; and Navajo staff, language, and culture to make the program culturally relevant.
• Maurice R. Robinson National Mini-Grant Program for K-12 Service Learning
  Briefly describes a service-learning grant program and provides examples of elementary, middle, and high school projects awarded grants in 1996. Projects included efforts to educate the community about river pollution, multicultural murals, and a school activities news show.
• Models of Multiculturalism: Enhancing Immediacy and Relevance When Teaching Cultural Diversity
  Considers today's students the "postguilt generation." Proposes that teachers reconsider the way that students are exposed to issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality, creating class activities that allow students to experience the boundaries and definitions of identity. Presents three models of classroom activities.
• Multicultural Leadership Development through Experiential Learning
  The Multicultural Leadership Development Program provided for the exploration into the culture of the individual and others for undergraduates from two different universities. Students reported changes in their perspectives on diversity, leadership, and citizenship and felt these changes could potentially influence awareness and sensitivity in others.
• Overcoming Resistance to Multicultural Discourse through the Use of Classroom Simulations
  Describes how simulations, role plays, and other experiential exercises can be used in educational settings to reduce resistance and encourage discourse on equity issues. These techniques can bring new insights into professional development in multicultural education, raising awareness of hidden biases so teachers feel more comfortable in the classroom and do not reinforce stereotypes and negative patterns.
• Service Learning for a Diverse Society: Research on Children, Youth, and Prejudice
  Reviews psychological and educational research on prejudice and intergroup relations to produce suggestions and guidelines for improving the combined educational goals of service learning and multicultural education. Recommends starting early, emphasizing critical thinking, connecting activities to appropriate stages of cognitive development, and employing role playing and cooperative learning.
• Shifting the Ground of the Familiar: Using Autobiography and Intercultural Learning in a Time of Transition
  Explores the challenges of living in an unfamiliar physical and cultural environment through the concepts of complexity, self-organization, and chaos. Discusses creative resilience, composed of risk taking, reflection, and relationships, and its role in adult learning for sustainability.
• Steps in the Plantain Project: The Ideas, Activities, and Experiences of the Plantain Project, a Scheme To Safeguard Children and their Environment
  The Plantain Project focuses on the vulnerable aspects of children's local environments. The project is designed to safeguard children in their own communities in Kristiansand, Norway through the participation of local elementary schools.
• Talking Circles: A Native American Approach to Experiential Learning
  Talking circles, as a unique instructional approach, can be used to stimulate multicultural awareness while fostering respect for individual differences and facilitating group cohesion. A brief history of the talking circle is followed by detailed instructions, talking circle process questions, ideas for classroom discussion after the activity, and teaching strategies.
• Teaching and Learning with the Seventh Generation: The "Inward Bound" Experience
  Pre-health freshmen from a New York university worked at a traditional Mohawk community in return for lessons in Iroquois spirituality, healing, and ecology. Reciprocity between community members and students alleviated problems related to appropriation of Native American traditions and "great white hope" philanthropy, and deepened students' recognition of compassion and understanding of healing.
• The Chula/Fish Creek Connection
  Describes a social studies cultural exchange program between a public school and a Canadian native school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Outlines how the students became mutual inquirers into one another's cultures.
• The Contemporary World History Project for Culturally Diverse Students
  Describes the Contemporary World History Project (CWHP), a year-long, two-part program that integrates the study of world problems within a traditional world history curriculum. Outlines the two parts, historical background and a simulation, and the objectives fulfilled by CWHP.
• The Model United Nations: 50+ and Growing Strong
  The Model U.N. is a popular experiential learning program that engages students through cooperative-learning techniques and multicultural education.
• The Road to Multicultural Education: Potholes of Resistance
  Presents data on the extent to which preservice and inservice teachers and preservice school counselors approached acceptance of the tenets reflected in the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education's statement endorsing multiculturalism, multilingualism, multidialectism, empowerment, equity, and cultural and individual uniqueness. Survey data illuminate tensions teacher educators experience as they conduct multicultural training activities.
• Using Media To Create Experiential Learning in Multicultural and Diversity Issues
  Presents a framework for using media to create experiential learning in multicultural and diversity issues based on cognitive-experiential self-theory. Offers several lessons and a media resource list aimed at training counseling students in multicultural and diversity issues.