A game about cultural integration

In my English III sections we just finished watching the independent film Smoke Signals, which I love. Our discussion of the US and Argentina's treatment of their first peoples segued nicely into a discussion about our shared immigration history. We discussed terms like assimilation, pluralism, multiculturalism, interculturalism, melting pot, salad bowl, etc. Ooh! Also if anyone has Fievel: An American Tail or Fievel Goes West DVDs on hand send it over, we'd love to watch it! Haha!

Anyway, here's the game:

FOR ALL LEVELS OF ENGLISH (I used it in English III)
Time: Between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on how complicated you want to make the rules.

You divide the class into two different groups. Each group represents a "culture." Each culture has rules that you make up. Here are some we used today:

Group 1. You can say anything but before speaking you must hug the person to whom you are directing your comment. One person is chosen as the leader. Everyone else has to copy this person's gestures.
Group 2. Affirmations are not allowed in this culture - you can only speak in questions. You can not speak unless you are sitting first.
Group 3. No touching people is allowed. You can only speak by asking questions and saying "yes" or "no."
etc. etc. The rules can get pretty creative. They'll do a good job coming up with their own if you repeat the game.

Once each group is clear on the rules, they will each send a visitor to see the other group. This visitor can stay until they break some rule of the culture they are visiting, at which point they will be sent back. A new visitor will be sent about every 2 to 3 minutes or whenever the visitors are eliminated, whichever comes first. After each cycle of visitors, the groups can confer with the visitors they sent to the other group to try to figure out the rules of the other culture. The game ends either when they figure out the rules of the other culture or when the time runs out, whichever comes first.

The best part of this activity was wrapping it up as we discussed the fears, anger, frustration, confusion, etc. that they felt trying to figure out the rules of the culture they were visiting. After hearing the stories of visitors from their own cultures, many of them who went later had developed preconceived notions about what the other culture's rules were like. This metaphor was really powerful as we started talking about more abstract concepts like inter-cultural contact, cultural relativism vs. universality, models of cultural integration, immigration, etc...

Hope you have as much fun with it as we did!
Charly