Expanding Your Cultural Prisms: Approaches to Improve Cross-Cultural Competence and Communication
Our personal, national, and professional cultures affect how we communicate and interpret behavior. Especially now, cross-cultural communication affects our daily conversations as we navigate a more diverse, polarized world. Join this workshop to build awareness of your own cultural prisms that affect behaviors and expectations of others, such as the way you approach rules and authority, uncertainty, and word choice. Through a self assessment across different “value frameworks,” identify signs of cross-cultural gaps in order to be better prepared to respond when miscommunications or barriers arise. Using group discussions and examination of experiences, we will apply learnings from these frameworks to identify, name, and reappraise our responses to better navigate and communicate across cross-cultural barriers.
About Shannon
Shannon Lee, Tide Risers Intensive 2020
Shannon H. Lee is an experienced international operations and education leader, passionate about building and scaling intersectional global programs to expand learning opportunities for all. For over 12 years, Shannon has focused on strategic partnership building, business development, program/project management, and operational expansion to increase and leverage global mobility, ensure educational opportunities for vulnerable and marginalized groups, and support inclusive environments for cross-cultural exchange.
Shannon started her career living and teaching abroad in Japan and South Korea. She believes that community building and establishing mutual trust through cross-cultural communication are at the core of impactful partnerships and programming. Most recently, she served as Senior Manager of International Expansion with Girls Who Code, a non-profit dedicated to closing the gender gap in tech, to establish the organization’s first-ever international operations and programming across India, Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. She’s launched robust educational partnerships across France, Spain, Thailand, Norway, Portugal, China, Germany and beyond. Shannon currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and holds a Masters in International Education Development from Columbia University, Teachers College and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.