During a country-wide workshop of all teachers involved in the Global Teenager Project which was held at CEPAC in Yapacaní in September, we presented the prototype of a web-based chat software aimed at intercultural class room teaching: cubicles, developed by hirnstrom.
Common sense tells us that challenges in intercultural communication aren’t limited to language barriers. Collaboration in intercultural teams, for example, involves establishing a hierarchy and some dynamics of knowledge transfer and mutually agreed-upon approaches in the specific area of work – all aspects which are, to my opion, more than likely culture-specific.
Continue reading »
In a country where most people earn their money to survive rather than to live, where roadblocks appear one day and are gone the next, where political protest culminates in the setting on fire of government buildings, where winter holidays are prolonged by two weeks to make children stay in their warm beds rather than go to school buildings with no heating, where “luego” (later) might mean in an hour, but just as well tomorrow or never, also the long-planned inauguration of the translated version of the new constitution in the province of Oruro hasn’t taken place as of yet.
Profesor Walter.
Ronald, the workshop facilitator, explaining Jclic
a Jclic Puzzle
a HotPotatoes crossword puzzle
a HotPotaotes fill-the-gap exercise
the final product
during the workshop
the paper protoype
lunch
presentation of ideas
presentation of ideas
Today, I had a brief encounter with a very interesting person. Xavier is working in a project that has started translating the newly-established (January 2009) constitution of Bolivia into Quechua and Aymara, the two local languages. He called it an “intercultural project”. When I first heard the word “intercultural” I was thinking of some kind of cross-border/international exchange of experiences with new constitution or something similar. Of course, here, “intercultual” refers to the various, at times very different, cultures that live door to door in this region.
Continue reading »
my feed