Interculturality through Experiential Learning: The Role of Food, Music, and Sport

One of the challenges in higher education is how best to engage and encourage students to learn (Schaller, 2018), and as educators are always looking for the new ways to foster student learning.  One way to engage students is to get them “actively” learning, and the use of experiential learning (Kolb, 1984) has become more and more prevalent as a learning tool.  Another challenge in higher education, with an increasingly diverse population, is how do we ensure that students are learning to engage and interact with others whom are different from themselves (Bok, 2006)?  By definition, experiential learning, as related to interculturality, seems to be a great fit within a sociology course.  “Interculturality” refers to “interaction between representatives of different cultures; in other words, communication and mutual understanding of each other’s cultures is key to intercultural learning” (Dervin, 2017, p.88).  What better way to have students engage and interact with others, than having the students attend a multicultural event outside of the classroom (Holtzman & Menning, 2015; Schaller, 2018).   This study examines the role, and influence, of food, music, and sport, on event choice and experience, as part of an interculturality assignment in a sport sociology course.