Voices from Abroad:
Cornell's new blog journalism program

Listen to an interview with Corinna Lewis, the Information Services Coordinator at Cornell Abroad. Lewis discusses her interest in cross-cultural learning, Cornell’s blog journalism program, and using new social networking tools, such as IM and Facebook, for more effective outreach among study abroad students.

Cornell Blog Journalist Writing Workshop

1. Ice Breaker—Cultural Artifact Activity

Various sources.  Adapted by Darla K. Deardorff, 2006.

Purpose:
To raise cultural self-awareness as well as to broaden participants’ perspectives on other cultures (if group members are from a variety of cultural backgrounds).

Target Audience:
This activity is for participants at the beginning of a cross-cultural training/course. This quick activity can be done in various size groups, from 2 to 8 or more.

Time:
1-2 minutes to set up and introduce the activity, 10-25 seconds per individual to share and a few minutes for debriefing.

Procedure:
Group persons in pairs to larger groups of up to 7-8 people.  Ask them to choose one item/object that they currently have with them (or are wearing) that tells something about their cultural background – this can be an item in a pocket, purse, backpack, etc – whatever they have with them.  Example:  A person may say “my watch – because my life is governed by schedules.”

Debrief:
This activity is aimed at raising cultural self-awareness:  Questions to discuss in the debriefing include how participants chose the objects they did, insights they gained into their own culture or others’ cultures represented in the group.   You can discuss the important of cultural self-awareness as one interacts interculturally and ask if they can think of other objects/artifacts (not necessarily with them) that would be representative of their cultures.  You can then discuss what one can learn about other cultures from objects/artifacts from that culture.

2. Examples of Good Blogs

• Reflective
• Comparative
• Succinct
• Personal
• Visual/Auditory/Tactile/Olfactory
• Feelings: humor, fear, pain, surprise, dismay, excitement…
• Exploring different cultural values

3. Examples of Bad Blogs

• Blow-by-blow/sports cast
• Derogatory/disrespectful/rant
• Too long saying too little
• Disconnected, no sense of personal involvement or caring
• Inappropriate: personal drunkeness/drugs, invasive tabloid-style reporting…

4. Writing Tips and Suggested Topics

If you get stuck for ideas, here are some guidelines for topics to write about:

• Describe a ritual that you observed.

• Discuss an object that has become meaningful to you abroad.

• Discuss a place has become meaningful to you abroad.

• Discuss a surprising interaction that you had with a local person.

• Discuss an article/book/movie related to your host country and why it is relevant.

• Think about issues such as money, housing/home, health/medical, women, family/children—ow does one of these things differ in your host country from your understanding of the issue at home?

• Discuss a time when you felt “foreign,” or a time when you felt like a “local,” or a time when you felt both.

• Discuss a time/place/experience that made you think of home and explore the similarities and differences, and why they might exist.

• • Describe a gesture or phrase common in your host country, but foreign to your home.

As a Blog Journalist, you have the unique opportunity to discover and demonstrate the depth of your experience by exploring the minutiae of your everyday life abroad.  Meaning will be found by paying attention to details and nuances—you want to show the reader what your experiences abroad were like rather than “preaching” about them. For example, if you want to explain how you felt uncomfortable with your host family when you first moved in but then came to feel like part of the family by the end, you don’t want to just say this—you want to show it by writing in depth about one or two of the experiences that you had with the family that demonstrate distance and then closeness.

So…focus on the details of the experiences you write about. Try to describe how people, places, or things looked, smelled, sounded, etc. When applicable, try to incorporate dialogue to make scenes come alive on the page; think back to conversations and try to reconstruct them.

5.         Discussion of some examples

6.         Questions and Review Handouts

Political Rants v. Political Commentary

There is a very pronounced difference between political rants and political commentary; rants can be offensive. Encourage your students to discuss the political scene of their host country, but remind them to take caution in their approach. Here are some examples as a guideline of what to do and what not to do.

An Example of a Political Rant

                  And I thought Bush made some stupid comments!  It turns out that the French, too, have their fair share of village idiots vying for control of the country. France’s elections are on the horizon and each of the top candidates has made their fair share of blunders, which I’d like to share with you now, in hopes that you will realize that there is worse than George Bush out there (or at least politicians just as awful…):

                  The conservative candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that pedophilia is a genetic flaw. Yes, that’s right—he thinks there’s a gene that can make you like little boys. 

                  Then there’s Ségolène Royal, the female Socialist candidate who thinks the Taliban is the reigning regime in Afghanistan. Perhaps she could use a conversation with Mr. George Bush to get that straightened out…

                  And, finally, we have Jean-Marie Le Pen on the far right advocating masturbation for French teens over condom use as the best way to meet their sexual needs. I don’t even know what this guy’s thinking.

                  So there you have it folks—it could be worse. You could be French.

An Example of a Political Commentary 

With the first round of elections right around the corner, the French are in “voting mode.” On Monday, candidates were officially allowed to open their campaigns and now posters are being plastered everywhere. It’s a unique experience to be living here during an election year; the issues are so different in France than they are back home in the U.S.

More specifically, there doesn’t seem to be one major issue at the heart of this election. I keep thinking back to the last election in the States, and how the situation in Iraq was such a crucial factor in determining votes. Most people, at least those that I know, seemed to be very firmly aligned with one candidate or the other. For their own personal reasons, people were either very strongly supportive of George Bush or very strongly against him and, thus, supportive of John Kerry.

In France’s election this year, though, there don’t seem to be such firm alliances with the major candidates. Rather, many people seem to be shifting back and forth in their support, perhaps because the candidates keep making mishaps that alienate voters. For example, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a candidate on the far right, pronounced that the best way to promote safe sexual practices among French youth is to encourage masturbation, rather than condom use. Then there’s the opposite extreme: conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy’s comment that pedophilia is the result of a genetic flaw. With issues like these entered into the race, as of now, it certainly looks like anybody’s game!

—Corinna Lewis