The Jesuit Schools Network (JSN) was delighted to recently begin its 2023 Summer Master Class on the topic of Ignatian Intercultural Communication, facilitated by Jim DeAngelo. In collaboration with our partners at Educate Magis, this is our second offering of this innovative summer professional development opportunity for JSN educators. Each summer, JSN welcomes participants from Jesuit secondary and presecondary schools in Canada, the United States, Belize, and Micronesia, into a cohort of educators who participate in a Summer Master Class experience.
Intercultural Communication is a skill that is becoming an important part of the teaching and learning experience of contemporary JSN schools, particularly as our students become increasingly diverse. If we want to engage our students in meaningful ways, we must learn to communicate effectively within and across the variety of cultures they represent.
The cohort-based Master Class is entirely virtual, with both asynchronous sessions, where participants may work at their own pace, and synchronous sessions, where the cohort will connect across the JSN to facilitate deepened conversation, understanding and learning. This offers an opportunity to take a deep dive into this meaningful and important learning, and to further promote our collective mission of forming Ignatian Educators as Reflective Practitioners.
The first synchronous virtual session took place on June 1st, bringing together educators from across the network to begin reflecting on and discussing the topics outlined in the asynchronous modules: Introduction to Ignatian Intercultural Communication, Identity and Diversity, Cultural Backgrounds and Worldviews, Bias: Stereotypes and Prejudices, Role of Language and Translation.
When asked about his experience of facilitating the JSN Summer MasterClass on Intercultural Communication, Jim DeAngelo says the following,
“Being asked to lead this summer’s MasterClass is an honor. I have the chance to share space with an impressive group of Ignatian colleagues from across North America. Each participant comes to this experience already with models of success in intercultural communication from within the walls of their own schools as well as in the outreach they have already engaged in with other fellow partner schools.
In my role leading this MasterClass, I hope to share how a commitment to intercultural communication over the course of my career as teacher and administrator has broadened my own worldview and encouraged me to be more open, more welcoming, ultimately freer of the constraints of my institutions and culture. With that, I feel that I have been challenged to question the usual ways of approaching teaching and learning and be open to how other schools do things.
Engaging with colleagues from different cultures requires some level of vulnerability and risk that one may not have all of the answers and may have more to learn and grow as a professional and as a human being. My own experience of intercultural communication has provided me with both a mirror to reflect on my own professional practice as well as a window into how shared commitment to Ignatian education expresses itself in different cultural contexts.
My hope as leader of the MasterClass is that each participant will give as much as they get from this experience by sharing ideas with colleagues in their respective schools that will engender further connections that will emanate across the global Ignatian network of schools”.
We are excited to continue this unique learning experience over the coming weeks!
“Ideally, each human being, or each person, should feel like a part of humanity, and be aware of their own culture (enculturation), without making it absolute. They should do so critically, joyfully acknowledging the existence of other human beings with different cultures (multiculturality), and establishing relationships of equality with them, enriching themselves with a diversity of cultures that includes their own (interculturality).” (A Living Tradition, Global Identifier #7, Interculturality)
