Dr. Michel Gueldry will teach SP&M S 3235: Intercultural Communication this spring from 4 to 4:50 pm Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The course will be taught in English and offer opportunities for customized and/or supplemental readings in French and Spanish for students who speak those languages.
This very practical class is both theoretical and experiential. It helps you develop your intercultural competence with yourself and others in social and professional settings. We clarify the foundational concepts of “cultures”, “intercultural” and “competences” for social relations and consider theories and practices of self-development and self-integration.
The first stranger you always deal with is yourself. Each one of us contains “multitudes” (Walt Whitman), so this class borrows from various disciplines and approaches (brain- and body-based) to help you observe, regulate, and manage your personal and social self. For the outer-directed action, we compare the cultures, values, self-evident truths, taboos, and collective psychology of the United States, France, and several Spanish-speaking countries. Our emphasis is on emotional and relational intelligence and on more skillful communication with self and others.
Intercultural communication is key to being a well-rounded individual and a global professional because, in our globalized age, most professional work teams are multicultural and multilingual. Expect to develop observation and understanding of self, to explore a repertoire of communicative and coping skills for social and professional situations, and to develop new insights into some age-old questions like “Who am I?” and “How can we be social in a fluid world?” and “How can I cope with my many inner voices and the external social kaleidoscope?”. Please contact Dr. Gueldry at michelgueldry@mst.edu if you have questions.