Associate Professor Ryland White: Social Justice and Intercultural Work

Ryland White is Co-chair of the Social Justice for Intercultural Relations degree area, and an alumna of the School for International Training (now known as SIT Graduate Institute).

Welcome to the SIT PIM Admissions blog.

My name is Ryland White and I have been asked by Admissions to share a few thoughts about myself as both a PIM alum and as a current member of the PIM faculty. I am happy to do so.

I serve as the Co-Chair of the MA in Social Justice in Intercultural Relations and currently teach a variety of training related courses including Training Design for Experiential Learning, Training for Social Action, Ethics in Intercultural Training, and an advanced ‘Training of Trainers’ course in intercultural communication and social justice based training design.

 Associate Professor Ryland White, continued

I myself was a PIM 31, meaning I was a student in 1982 when the PIM program consisted of a 6-month on-campus residency with a 6-month off campus practitioner focused phase. My degree, offered at that particular time, was an MA in International Administration and my focus was in the field of training.

After finishing the SIT on-campus residency portion of the program I began my training journey working with an organization training Peace Corps volunteers in Kingston Jamaica. Since then I have been lucky to have worked as an intercultural trainer in a number of countries and diverse contexts around the world. Some of these have included working with refugee populations in Indonesia and Thailand and training Peace Corps volunteers and/or trainers in the Caribbean, Europe, the South Pacific and Africa. As well, I feel that SIT was instrumental in helping prepare me to work over the years as a training consultant, upon occasion, for such organizations as EarthRights International, Partners for Public Lands, GeekCorps, NOAA (the National Ocean Atmospheric Administration); Earthwatch Institute, Heifer International and the United Nations.

As you can see most of my practitioner related work is in the field of intercultural and social justice based training and within a diverse range of organizations who see the importance of  putting resources toward building effective multicultural skills within their organizations.

I consider myself to have been particularly lucky in that I began my ‘formal’ intercultural work in the early 70’s as a high school teacher at a deaf residential school in the south. In many ways my early work with this particular population has come full circle and 35 years later I am co-teaching, along with a Deaf Culture identified colleague, an Intercultural Communication course at SIT focused on intercultural communication and social justice issues between Deaf Culture and hearing identified people. Through this current work my own understanding of the complexities of intercultural communication within the framework of social justice has greatly expanded and deepened affecting me both personally and professionally as an intercultural trainer working for social justice.

That’s an awful lot about me, probably much more than you needed or wanted to hear. I am most interested in you… your reasons for thinking about being a member of the SIT PIM community… the experiences you are bringing with you to the program… and of course any particular interests in the field of training. As a PIM alum and as a member of the faculty I hope you make decisions and choose a graduate education that challenges you to think beyond where you currently ‘rest’ with your thinking and a program, wherever it may be, that best serves your needs and the needs of today’s world.

All my best to you, Ryland White

A member of the SIT Graduate Institute faculty since 1993, Ryland White has a Masters of International Administration degree from the School for International Training (1984) and a Bachelor in Education of the Deaf and Hearing Impaired from Converse College (1973).  

Raised a “global nomad,” Ryland has continued to spend the majority of the last 25 years of her professional life working with cultures different than her own. Ryland began her professional intercultural career teaching high school at the South Carolina for the School for the Deaf and Blind.  Since the mid 1970s, she has been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil, a staff member in Peace Corps’ Washington headquarters, and a Cross Cultural Trainer for Peace Corps in Jamaica and the islands of the Eastern Caribbean. During the mid and late 1980s, Ryland lived and worked as a Cross Cultural Teacher Trainer and Supervisor in a Vietnamese Refugee camp in Indonesia, as a Staff Development Specialist in the Phanat Nikhom Refugee program in Thailand and as a consultant in the Bataan Refugee program in the Philippines.

Since 1988, Ryland has been living and working in Vermont. Ryland’s professional interests continue to lie in the areas of community building, participatory development and training, and social action and diversity work, particularly in the area of gay and lesbian issues of justice. Her latest consultancies have been with the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Capital Development Fund in the field of participatory training and management and with Peace Corps, where she facilitated cross cultural training conferences for in country Peace Corps staff and volunteers in Benin, Malawi, and Western Samoa.

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