Key concepts
What is culture?
Culture can be defined as the sum of beliefs, values, languages, expected behaviours, and ways of doing things that are shared by its members.
What is intercultural competence?
Intercultural competence is the ability to use knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable the successful management of cross-cultural interaction.
What is social learning?
Social learning happens through interaction with others. In my programmes, participants learn through conversation, shared activities and exchanging experiences. This creates opportunities to learn from one another while developing language, cultural understanding and confidence in social interaction.
Why is social connection important?
Socialising can help people build relationships, exchange information, support one another and develop a sense of belonging. For people adapting to a new environment, these connections can also provide practical knowledge, encouragement and links to the wider community. The UK Home Office's Indicators of Integration framework, 3rd ed. (2019) recognises both social bonds - connections with people from similar backgrounds - and social bridges - connections across different backgrounds - as important to integration.
Why bring people from different backgrounds together?
Meaningful interaction between people from different backgrounds can encourage mutual understanding and help challenge assumptions and prejudice. Creating opportunities for migrants and local people to meet, interact and learn from one another can help build stronger relationships within communities.
What helps people develop a sense of belonging?
Belonging can develop through feeling accepted, participating in everyday life and building meaningful relationships with others. As communities change over time, both newcomers and longer-established residents can learn from one another through everyday interaction and shared experiences. Creating opportunities for people to meet, participate and contribute can help strengthen connections and a shared sense of community.
What is applied drama?
Applied drama is the use of methods from theatre for training and creative play.
What is cultural self-awareness?
Cultural self-awareness refers to the ability to articulate how one’s own culture has shaped one’s identity and world view. (Adapted from: Deardorff, Identification and Assessment of Intercultural Competence, 2006)
What are cultural skills?
Cultural skills refers to the ability to use comparative techniques for understanding cultural behaviour and how behaviour may be similar or different across cultures. Cultural skills are abilities to observe, listen to and view others from the perspective of their cultures. They help with developing a culturally informed point of view and with minimising ethnocentrism.
(Adapted from: Deardorff, Identification and Assessment of Intercultural Competence, 2006)
How I work
Where do you train?
I deliver bespoke training in education settings in Greater London (UK).
What training do you provide?
I provide cultural learning and intercultural competency training, social engagement for creative play, and ESOL - English for Speakers of Other Languages.
How do you adapt programmes to different groups?
There is no single “one-size-fits-all” approach. Methods are selected and combined to suit the needs, backgrounds and goals of each group. Initial needs assessments inform planning and ongoing feedback allows pacing and content to be adjusted as the programme develops.
How are participants involved in shaping the learning?
Programmes are shaped around participants' lived experiences and priorities. Participants help identify relevant themes and situations, ensuring content addresses real social, cultural and communicative challenges. This supports agency, relevance and sustained engagement.
How do you use drama and creative activities?
Drama and arts-based methods engage participants through experience, discussion and creative exploration. Techniques include role-play, improvisation, storytelling, skits and dialogues, as well as short films or video clips to prompt reflection on social norms and communication. Activities build peer learning, confidence, and cultural awareness in a low-pressure environment, suitable for diverse language and cultural backgrounds.
How do you integrate English language learning?
Where language development is a focus, structured approaches support incremental learning and practical communication. Presentation, Practice and Performance (PPP) introduces, practices, and applies language step-by-step, while Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) emphasises interaction in real-life contexts such as workplaces, services, or community settings. Feedback is integrated throughout to reinforce learning and confidence.
How do you design and evaluate programmes?
Learning aims, activity design and reflective evaluation underpin all programmes. Participants' needs and feedback inform both ongoing delivery and future programme development.
Concepts in public debate
What do we mean by 'integration'?
There is no universally accepted definition of integration. It can refer to different processes including participation in work and education, social relationships, cultural change, civic participation and developing a sense of belonging. These different aspects of life do not necessarily develop together. Someone living in the UK for 20 years who is economically active may have strong relationships and feel at home in a community while speaking little or no English, for example, while another person may speak fluent English and participate economically but feel little sense of belonging. Integration is also not necessarily something people consciously set out to do. Adaptation can happen gradually through everyday life – through relationships, work, language, routines and experiences. People's experiences of migration may also involve competing pressures: finding work, supporting a family, learning a language, maintaining relationships and dealing with emotional or practical difficulties. Concepts such as ‘integration’ can help us think about these processes, but they inevitably simplify lives that are considerably more complex. This makes apparently simple statements about whether someone is ‘integrated’ more complicated than they first appear. Which aspects of a person's life are we considering, what counts as integration and who decides?
Is integration only about what migrants do?
No. One useful distinction is between how individuals adapt and how the society around them responds to cultural diversity.
Psychologist John Berry's influential acculturation model made this distinction explicitly. Although the model has limitations, it distinguished integration as an individual orientation from multiculturalism as a corresponding societal approach in which cultural difference can be maintained alongside participation in the wider society. Berry also distinguished this from societal orientations towards assimilation, segregation and exclusion. The important point is that receiving societies are not passive environments in which migrants simply ‘integrate’ or fail to do so. Policies, institutions and social attitudes can enable, constrain or prevent participation and cultural inclusion. This distinction matters because discussions about whether migrants are ‘integrating’ can place attention almost entirely on migrants themselves. Opportunities for participation also depend on the communities, institutions and wider society in which people, including migrants, are trying to participate.
Who decides whether someone is 'integrated'?
There is no single measure of whether someone is ‘integrated’. Judgements may be based on language, employment, social relationships, cultural practices, participation or sense of belonging, but these do not necessarily develop together. This raises important questions about which criteria are being used, who chooses them and why the judgement matters.
What is the difference between lived experience and public discourse about migration?
For an individual, migration is lived through everyday experiences: family and friendships, work, language, encounters with other people, giving and receiving support, practical difficulties, emotional attachments and developing – or not developing – a sense of belonging. People make sense of these experiences within their own lives and relationships.
Public discourse operates differently. Politicians, journalists, researchers, campaigners, organisations and other actors select particular aspects of migration to talk about and frame them in particular ways. Their purposes may include informing, explaining research, persuading, mobilising support or influencing policy. Some actors may also deliberately seek to provoke fear, hostility or unrest. These arguments can also promote very different ideas about how society should respond to migration – from supporting cultural diversity and participation to demanding assimilation, separation or exclusion. Public debate about migrants therefore does not necessarily tell us very much about what migrants themselves are experiencing. The two can sometimes become strikingly disconnected. This makes it particularly important that migrants have opportunities to communicate their own experiences, perspectives and concerns, rather than simply being spoken about by others.
Why should we look carefully at how migration terms are being used?
Terms such as integration, shared values or social cohesion can appear to have simple, common-sense meanings, but they often describe complex processes and contain assumptions about what is desirable, who should adapt and who gets to set the standard. When these terms are used in public or political debate, it is useful to ask who is using them, what they mean by them, what is being emphasised or left out and what argument the language is supporting. Not all participants in public debate are simply trying to describe migration accurately. Language and claims can also be used strategically to shift debate, mobilise support or legitimise particular policies or actions. This makes it important to examine an argument and its evidence rather than assuming that the terms being used are neutral descriptions. A useful response is to slow the language down: ask what exactly is being claimed, how a term is being defined, what evidence would support it and what complexities or alternative explanations disappear when an issue is framed in a particular way. This helps distinguish description from judgement and makes it easier to see when apparently neutral language is also doing political work.
How can ideas about ‘us’ and ‘them’ shape migration debates?
Social psychology uses the terms ingroup and outgroup to describe how people categorise themselves and others into groups. Such distinctions are common in social life, but political language can strengthen them by presenting migrants as either people who can belong or as a single, fundamentally different ‘other’. How these boundaries are drawn matters. Seeing migrants as potential members of a shared society can support participation and inclusion, while increasingly rigid distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ can support arguments for assimilation, segregation or exclusion. Migrants may then be described as foreigners, invaders, illegal, a burden, a threat or people who ‘do not integrate’. Very different people, circumstances and migration histories become compressed into a single category. Terms such as ‘illegal immigrants’ or ‘illegals’ can also blur important distinctions between people with different immigration statuses, including asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants. In public debate, these labels may be applied loosely or understood as referring to migrants generally, regardless of their actual circumstances or legal status. This raises questions about who is being described, what distinctions are being obscured and how such language may influence public attitudes towards people perceived as outsiders. Questions about who belongs also connect these distinctions to different forms of nationalism. Civic nationalism generally defines national membership through citizenship and participation in a political community and can therefore include people of different ethnic or racial backgrounds. Ethnic or racial nationalism, by contrast, connects national belonging more strongly to ancestry, ethnicity or descent. More extreme ethnonationalist ideas can therefore raise a very different question from whether someone participates in society: who is considered capable of belonging at all? As definitions of national belonging become more restrictive, they can also provide arguments for increasingly exclusionary policies towards people defined as outsiders.
What role do human rights play in how societies respond to migration?
Human rights provide an international framework for protecting people's fundamental rights and dignity, regardless of their nationality or background. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol establish specific obligations towards refugees, including protection against being returned to countries where they face persecution and standards for their treatment and support. These commitments provide an important point of reference when evaluating migration policies. Rather than judging people solely through distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, they establish rights and responsibilities that governments have agreed to uphold. This raises an important question: How do proposed migration policies measure up against these commitments?
How can we unpack the language used in migration debates?
One approach is to slow the language down. Ask what exactly is being claimed, how key terms are being defined, what evidence would support the claim and what complexities or alternative explanations disappear when the issue is framed in this way. It can also help to distinguish description from judgement. For example, evidence might show that "English proficiency among this group is low". If this is then presented as evidence that "this group has failed to integrate", an observable finding has been turned into a broader judgement. This assumes among other things that English proficiency is a measure of integration and that low proficiency represents a failure to integrate. Making that step explicit allows the underlying assumptions to be questioned rather than accepted as fact. It is also worth asking about the evidence itself: What data is being used? How was it collected? Who was included and excluded? And does the evidence justify the generalisation being made?
What happens when migration is described as an 'invasion'?
Calling migration an invasion does more than describe people crossing borders. The word normally refers to a hostile force entering a territory and therefore frames migrants as a collective threat and the receiving population as something under attack. A useful way to slow down the language is to ask what is actually happening. Who is arriving, in what numbers and circumstances, and what evidence supports the idea of a hostile collective purpose? It is also worth asking what becomes less visible when very different people and reasons for migration are compressed into a single image of invasion. We can then ask who is using this framing, for what purpose and what political arguments or actions it might help to support or justify. The question is therefore not only whether a claim about migration is factually accurate, but what interpretation the chosen language encourages us to make of those facts. Such framing can also have consequences beyond the debate itself. How a society describes and understands migration can influence how people respond to migrants, which policies appear acceptable and the relationships between different groups within civil society.
Do people adapt to a new cultural environment at the same rate?
Cultural adaptation does not happen at the same rate or in the same areas of life for everyone. Where people live and work, the languages they use, their friendships and relationships, personal interests and opportunities for interaction can all influence how quickly particular ways of speaking, behaving or understanding the world change. Someone may adapt rapidly in one area of life, for example at work, while remaining closely connected to a heritage-language community. Adaptation may also be less visible: people can develop different emotional responses, attitudes, expectations, humour or ways of interpreting situations without obvious changes in language or behaviour. Living within an ethnic or heritage-language community can also provide relationships, practical support, information and a sense of belonging. Such connections do not in themselves tell us how much contact someone has with people or institutions outside that community. Some people may also be perceived as culturally or physically similar to the majority population and therefore not be recognised as migrants at all. If people change in different ways and at different speeds – and differences within groups can sometimes be greater than those between them – how useful is it to treat ‘migrants’ and the ‘host population’ as two stable and culturally distinct groups? And how useful is it to assume that the ‘host population’ itself is culturally homogeneous?