Intercultural Communication ONLINE

Aims

Creating mutual meaning through communication is always a challenge. Doing so in a culturally diverse setting, even more so. In this course, you learn to tone and improve your verbal, para- and nonverbal communication skills so you can adapt your communication to the audience at hand and achieve maximum impact.

Content

Block 1:
The role of culture in collaboration with a focus on the NPO context (Definitions and Relevance):
- Understanding how culture frameworks help to make sense of communication and collaboration issues in culturally diverse settings.

Understanding intercultural competence (IQ)
- Identifying 4 key aspects of intercultural competence and assessing individual strengths and weaknesses based on the theory of David Livermore.

Culture and Language
- How culture changes and frames how we think and how we make sense of the world around us.

Block 2:
Intercultural Communication strategies
- How culture shapes the way we communicate in terms of accuracy, specificity, directness / indirectness, politeness, repetitions etc.
Is what we say what counts or what we don’t explicitly say?
We will look at formal vs informal; contextual vs linear communication, direct vs indirect communication strategies.

Method: Examples from my work in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Brazil, Tanzania, Lesotho, Thailand and other places where I worked with local teams and experienced these differences and how to overcome challenging communication and collaboration issues.

Verbal Communication in intercultural contexts
- Words and their many meanings.
- Cultural concepts of small talk.
- Tips and tricks how to ensure we create mutual understanding.

Block 3:
Para- and Nonverbal Communication in intercultural contexts.
- The influence culture (both national culture but also organizational and small cultures) has on our non- and para-verbal communication.
- How to minimize the danger of significant misunderstandings.
- How culture influences how we use space (distance in communication) and symbols/gestures.

Block 4:
Assessing and adapting my personal communication for multi-cultural settings.
- In the last session I would like to focus on pulling the covered content together and helping participants apply the learnings and insights in their personal communication. We do this by creating a fictive, culturally diverse setting (if it isn’t already a given) and the participants are given a specific objective which they have to accomplish in a simulation, role-play or presentation.

Methods

• Short inputs and examples
• Videos
• Personal reflection and application
• Simulation / practical exercises – application
• Discussion

Many personal examples and illustrations are used, helping participants put theory into a practical context and thus accelerating the learning process.

Target Group

All Doctoral Candidates & Postdocs

About the Trainer

Mark Moser founded his company in 2012. He was the Secretary General of an international health promotion organisation working on substance abuse. He is privileged to have worked as an international leadership and development consultant for more than 15 years with experience in Europe, Asia and Africa. He teaches «Intercultural Management» and «Intercultural Communication Competence» at FHNW University of Applied Sciences & Arts Northwestern Switzerland and is Director of Up! International.
He has been awarded a post-graduate degree in conflict analysis and resolution from the sociology faculty of Basel University in Switzerland and trained as an executive and business coach at the Ashridge Business School in the UK.

Workload

Total of 30h

Course attendance: 3 x 6h
Personal reading prior to the course: 3h
Reflection and preparatory assignment: 4h
Short essay as post-course assignment: 5h

Feature

Once registration is open, applications will be collected for 24 hours and course places allocated by lot. All registrations received after the initial 24h period will be put on a waiting list and assigned on a first come, first served basis.

Course places/places on the waiting list will be confirmed by e-mail. Course registrations can only be canceled before the registration period ends (send an e-mail to grace@unibas.ch). Full course attendance is mandatory. Participants who fail to attend a course without prior notification or withdraw after the registration deadline are subject to a fee of CHF 30. In addition, participants who cancel their course registration at a later point in time, are absent without an excuse or do not attend the entire course will, for reasons of fairness, not be considered for course registration in the following semester and will be removed from other courses offered in the same semester. Please find the detailed regulations on the Transferable Skills Homepage.