Some ideas:
1. Have an international food festival. Encourage extensive parent and community involvement (e.g. contact retaurants and groceries in the neighborhood).
2. Organize a fieldtrip to special exhibitions to various art galleries and museums that feature interesting information about different countries.
3. Have the students take part in Socratic discussions tackling different issues (e.g. environmental, social, political) confronting our global community.
4. Organize a schoolwide town meeting. Designate student leaders to consider different discussion topics of interest to the student body.
5. Have an international dance festival. Invite students and parents to participate in showcasing their dance talents and gather everyone in the school and the community to attend the event.
6. Ask your students to bring a special symbol from their homes that their family members consider important to their lives. Emphasize the definition of culture in terms of the way it is defined in the home setting.
Come to think of it…..
Culture is not entirely what we perceive externally, but what we practice and live by. Living in a multicultural global environment implies that in order to understand one another and live in harmony, we must keep not just our eyes and ears open to all other cultures…What we need to keep open are our hearts and minds as well.
The arts will pave the way to meaningful, multisensorial and multimodal learning! With that in mind, I am all set to learn along with my students!
