TARMAC
A 10-Week Guide to Making Sense
of Your Multicultural Story
Where have you come from, where are you now, and where are you going?
For individuals who have experienced multiple cultures growing up, navigating the complex roads of past, present, and future can be challenging. Questions arise, like: “Where’s home?” “How do I connect with others?” “Who am I?” “Where do I belong?”
Exploring these questions has the potential to become overwhelming and confusing when done alone, due to the complex nature of themes such as identity, belonging, relationships, and loss. When done in the presence of supportive others, however, this reflection can blossom into deeper understanding and growth.
Tarmac: A 10-Week Guide to Making Sense of Your Multicultural Story is the roadmap for this shared reflection and processing.
ABOUT
Tarmac: A 10-Week Guide to Making Sense of Your Multicultural Story is a curriculum for a ten-week small group experience for those from cross-cultural childhoods. With an emphasis on storytelling and connecting with others from similar backgrounds, it offers individuals the opportunity to consider their life story in a purposeful way.
Topics Include:
Cross-Cultural Transition
Relationships & Belonging
Cultural Identity
Transition Responses
Grief
Experience of Home
Making Choices for the Future
What’s Inside?
The Facilitator Guide provides step-by-step instructions for facilitating the small group experience each week
The Participant Guide offers space for participants to interact with each week’s theme through writing, drawing, and other activites
What People Are Saying:
“Tarmac is a group study whose time has definitely come. Through media, questions, and sharing of their own stories, participants who grew up cross-culturally for any reason will better understand—and hopefully normalize—common responses such an upbringing has created for them. Even more, its unique approach to include those from widely disparate backgrounds offers the opportunity for each person to discover how much they have in common in the deep places of the heart, even when their external circumstances may differ.”
— Ruth E. Van Reken, co-author Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, 3rd ed., co-founder, Families in Global Transition
“Hearing others’ stories, which have similarities with my own, put things into perspective and filled me with hope. You are pushed toward necessary reflection and you get to grow with other wonderful people that you may not encounter otherwise.”
— Tarmac Participant