NetVUE Encuentra Conversation Cards

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Our cultural roots—family, community, food, geography, language, rituals, faith, and more—powerfully shape who we are, how we engage the world, and what is possible for each of us. In turn, the cultures from which we come and within which we move influence our discernment of purpose and calling and our sense of belonging.

The Encuentra deck of NetVUE Conversation Cards seeks to do two things: to foreground and celebrate the experiences of Hispanic/Latine students, and to invite all students—whatever their background—into an exploration of how their cultures shape them. The questions in this deck equip students to consider how their backgrounds shape their identity, commitments, relationships, desires, and aspirations. The deck offers students the opportunity to tap into the gifts of their cultures and to identify what they can uniquely offer the world. It also invites them into richer, more inclusive forms of intercultural encounter.

Conceptual Commitments Informing the Deck

The team who conceived and designed this deck took great care in determining its framework as a tool for cultural and intercultural reflection.

• This deck dances between particularity and universalism, showing how questions channeled through a specific cultural lens provide a rich way of awakening wonder and discovery common to the human experience.
• The deck names, honors, and celebrates a cluster of cultures that flow from Hispanic, Latine, Latin American, and U.S. Latine cultures. However, it does not assume that all Spanish-speaking or Latine students share the same life experiences.
• At the same time, the questions are likely to speak to others who are interested in or share experiences of, for example:
  • migration, voluntary or forced;
  • navigating life across more than one language;
  • being socially designated in some way as “other”; and
  • identifying as bicultural or transnational.
• The Encuentra deck also challenges students whom society has elevated as culturally normative to ask questions of their own cultural formation and to grow their awareness of that shaping. In doing so, it introduces those students to questions they might not previously have been asked to consider.

Ideas for Use

The Encuentra cards have been designed for multiple uses and settings, from curricular to co-curricular spaces. The creators of the deck encourage users to think broadly and beyond the obvious.

The humanities and the social sciences are a natural home for Encuentra cards, including world languages and literatures, global and ethnic studies, and sociology and psychology, to name a few. Intercultural competency is also important for future STEM professionals, primary and secondary educators, health care professionals, business leaders, attorneys, and public policy makers, among a range of other professions.

Beyond the classroom, the Encuentra cards fit easily into programs for study abroad and multiculturalism, inclusion, and belonging. Other venues that might host Encuentra reflection are community-engaged learning, religious and spiritual life, residence life, student leadership initiatives, athletic teams, and (of course!) offices dedicated to purpose, calling, and vocation.

The mission statements of many NetVUE member institutions speak of forming students as global citizens—an acknowledgment that intercultural encounters occur every single day in many spaces of life and work. The Encuentra deck supports that formation.

All of the NetVUE Conversation Cards have proven to be a rich resource, not only for student formation, but also for staff and faculty development. Faculty members and staff who use the cards among themselves find that they are better equipped to use them with students. Moreover, they are often pleasantly surprised to discover how enriching the cards can be for their own sense of vocational growth.

The creators of the Encuentra deck invite you to lean into this discovery, using the Encuentra cards to investigate the contours of your own sense of meaning and purpose as it intersects with your cultural roots and formation. Excavating your own stories of family, community, faith, and geography—as a means of exploring both culture and calling—can be an enriching experience in its own right, while also helping prepare you for conversations with students that often require care, vulnerability, compassion, and courage.

Special Considerations

The Encuentra cards, like the other NetVUE Conversation Cards, should be used with attention and care. Conversation facilitators should keep in mind that, when exposed to some of these questions, students may require time to reflect and think of an answer before speaking, or they may need to reflect internally and not speak at all.

Even more than the other NetVUE Conversation Cards, the Encuentra deck may call for pauses for students to process. Facilitators might consider inviting students to journal briefly before they share or to discuss the question in pairs or trios rather than in a large group.

Some students speak Spanish. Among them, some might speak the language but do not write it. Other students understand the language but do not speak it. And some students are fluent in the language but deliberately choose the circumstances in which they speak it. Most students engage in some form of code-switching but do so in different ways and might have different attitudes or feelings about code-switching.

No student should ever be pressured to share publicly or be asked to speak on behalf of their community or those who share—or may appear to share—their cultural heritage.

There is wide diversity among students who identify as Latine and/or Hispanic.

• There are those who might be designated as such by demographers but who claim a differently articulated identity, such as Chicana or Panamanian American or no specific label at all.
• Some students speak Spanish; others understand it but do not speak it or speak it but do not write it; while yet others are fluent in the language but choose the circumstances in which they speak it. Most students engage in some form of codeswitching but do so in different ways and might have different attitudes or feelings about code-switching.
• Attention should also be given to the matter of intersectionality. Students experience their Hispanic/Latine identities differently depending on a wide range of factors and intersections with other identities and experiences, for example: racial and ethnic identity, legal status, gender identity, sexual identity, religion, family, geographic origin, and more.

Finally, the Encuentra deck seeks to balance a celebration of cultures with an acknowledgment of the challenges that emerge from cultural difference in an inequitable world. The creators of the deck not only affirm that these poles can be held in fruitful tension with one another; they also see the personal and interpersonal navigation of this tension as a key to cultivating life-giving intercultural relationships.

Additional Resources

The creators of the Encuentra deck used the following resources as they developed the concept for the deck and crafted the questions. You, too, may find them helpful:

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Creators of the Encuentra Conversation Cards

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