Intercultural Learning

Hands picking up one of many books at the Mills Center

How is intercultural learning woven into the Mills Center?

At the heart of everything we do is our aim to approach our differences (and similarities) with curiosity, openness, and respect. This facilitates belonging and cross-cultural learning. We aim to bring these values to everyone and to everything we do. 

This means that in Mills events, or by hanging out at Mills and chatting with people, cross-cultural learning can happen while you’re doing something else! In Language Circles this happens a lot, because languages themselves carry these differing perspectives. Or let’s say you’re at Chill in the Mills making crafts: you might get to chatting with another participant about an experience or a viewpoint that differs from yours and that broadens your understanding. This can happen even when we are talking to people who are from the same perceived culture. Culture is deep and we all have many sub-cultures and life experiences that inform how we see and experience the world.

In Learning Café, on the other hand, we put cross-cultural learning front and center. We learn about it, we share stories, we gain skills—heart-set, mindset, and skill sets that make us more able to skillfully navigate the differences around us. 

More resources for those who want to dig deeper along with us! Some of our favorites:

  • True North Intercultural: Tara Harvey is one of our main mentors and influences. Her "Facilitating Intercultural Learning" twelve-week course is superb; her blog posts are terrifically useful. Look for her book (working title, “Intercultural Education from the Inside Out: Learning and Teaching in a World of Difference”) to come out hopefully sometime in 2026.
  • David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle is a foundation of our approach, both in designing our Learning Café curriculum and also in facilitating sessions. (His Learning Cycle, not the learning styles.) In brief: experience alone does not lead to learning. We need to do something to transform the experience into learning.
  • How about cross-cultural topics and learning from a Danish expert? Sonja enjoys this blog from C3 Consulting in Denmark. It’s interesting to see what the work looks like from another perspective! (There we are again, enjoying other perspectives.) You can sign up for the newsletter.
  • Our dear colleague Sara Clark (who was intercultural education coordinator for thirteen years here at the Mills Center) can be found offering her superb services on LinkedIn:
  • UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, headed up by john a. powell states that we must stop creating belonging by creating out-groups (othering) and instead do the radical work of expanding belonging to all, human and more-than-human. “The root of all inequality is the process of othering – and its solution is the practice of belonging.” Solving one form of othering will not by default address other forms of othering. Their website is a goldmine of tools and information.
    • Books by powell include “Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World” and “The Power of Bridging: How To Build a World Where We All Belong.”
  • UNESCO Story Circles: An interesting, simple, effective approach to developing and practicing intercultural competence in diverse groups, for peace-building. A tool developed for UNESCO by Dr. Darla Deardorff, for use with any group of people, anywhere in the world, using little to no resources, that can be facilitated by anyone: sharing personal stories according to a structured protocol available online.
  • CILMAR: At Purdue University, CILMAR is the Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment and Research. They offer webinars, self-learning modules, and more, including:
    • HubICL: This is the Intercultural Learning Hub (hence, HubICL) hosted by Purdue University’s CILMAR. It’s a vast toolbox of 800+ intercultural learning resources.
  • Aperian Global is a company whose work we appreciate. They “help people and organizations bridge boundaries through cultural awareness and inclusion.” Their assessments are very well-researched and are directly useful in making change (Inclusive Behaviors Inventory) and in team collaboration (GlobeSmart Profile). They also have a free blog.
  • Kozai Group offers two useful and well-researched instruments, the Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES) and the Inclusion Competencies Inventory (ICI) that are built to help indicate next steps in building competencies.

Models. Yes, we nerd out sometimes over models.

  • Just remember—as my physical therapist said—“All models are wrong. Some of them are useful.” In other words, they’re models, not the real, complex world. But they can be very useful in helping us make sense of that complex world. Here are some favorites.
  • Coming soon!