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Dear colleagues,

A few weeks ago, I requested for resources to design an awareness / training session for administrative and academic staff at my university to help them become better managers of cultural diversity of our international students.

I received some responses and was directed to quite a few resources. I am summarizing the responses below as promised. Once again I thank those who very kindly responded to my email request.

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BJ Punnett has been writing books on cross-cultural awareness/diversity exercises that I have implemented successfully in my classes. I am sure you can look them up on Amazon.com or write directly to her (eureka@caribsurf.com). 

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May be, look at www.diversityicebreaker.com

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Here's a book chapter.

Littrell, Romie F. (2005) Teaching Tertiary Students from Confucian Cultures, in Alon, Ilan and John R. McIntyre, Eds. Business and Management Education in China: Transition, Pedagogy, Training and Collaboration, Armonk, NY, USA: ME Sharpe. (Available as a working paper at http://www.romielittrellpubs.homestead.com/)

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Equality Challenge Unit has sector specific reports and tools for universities. You can also use the case studies from my CIPD reports. They had some useful insights. You can also use the diversity questionnaire in the text Global Diversity Management (by Mustafa Ozbilgin) to discuss a range of issues.

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.... one should advocate positive beliefs about diversity in general (not really about specific minority groups, or enhancing awareness about stereotypes).

Homan, A.C. and van Knippenberg, D. 2007. Bridging Faultlines by Valuing Diversity: Diversity Beliefs, Information Elaboration, and Performance in Diverse Work Groups.

Journal of Applied Psychology. 92(5): 1189–1199.

Homan, A. C. et al. 2008. Facing differences with an open mind: openness to experience, salience of intragroup differences, and performance of diverse work groups. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Academy</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Management</st1:placename></st1:place> Journal, 51(6): 1204–1222.

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Of particular value might be the SIETAR materials available through www.SIETAR.org.  and their Europa activity center at http://www.sietar-europa.org/events.htm.   We also are particularly reliant on an exercise using a short appreciative inquiry into participants' most successful interactions across cultural differences.  Other approaches include using Hofstede and similar cultural categorization models to help them work with models of the differences they experience.  Finally, you might find the recent work of Robert Fuller on dignity and rank/status interesting for the novel view of equitable treatment of others in all settings of social dominance. I particularly like "Dignity for All". 

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?WRD=%22robert+w%2E+fuller%22&box=%22robert%20w.%20fuller%22&pos=-1

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A couple of things come to mind. When I work on an issue like this with people, one of the things that I am trying to do is to get across to them how it must feel when you are a stranger in a strange land. What does it feel like to be someplace and not know all the rules or the idioms or the unspoken jokes, etc. When I taught diversity, I'd have my students do an "experience of being other." They had to go someplace where they were different from everyone else. They had to go alone. And then they had to write about it, analyzing it using course concepts. Very interesting (and some of the places that they chose to go were really revealing---one young Asian women was really scared of older people--she had this thing--so she decided she wanted to go someplace where she thought there would be old people and no young people. She decided to go to a bingo hall. Once she got there, her perceptions of who plays bingo and how they play it were all challenged). When I am teaching in more of an exec ed or professional development setting, where I can't expect that they are going to do that assignment if I give it in advance (I tried), I will ask people to think back to a time when they were different from everyone around them along some dimension--and to jot it down and ask themselves a series of questions (along what dimension were they different, did their behavior change as a result of being different, what did they think the cost was to them, to the organization). Even with people remembering a time when they were different (as opposed to doing the "being other" exercise and having a fresh experience of being different), we still have a pretty powerful conversation about how hard it is to be "other"--and that there are costs to the individual and to the organization. Then I share a funny story about a time I was different from everyone around me and how I felt.

Another way that I can see what you are trying to get at being done is through this card game. I have never done it--one of my colleagues does it and seems to really be another engaging experience. People are in different groups at tables and they have some directions about how to play the game. You are not allowed to talk, and I think people have different rules at the same table. So it is around communication, unspoken rules and norms. I wish that I could tell you more about this one--I wonder if there are directions I can get?

And finally, I like using film to illustrate different points that I want to make. Can you think of a good movie that shows what you want the staff to understand? Might be helpful to use

 the card game. here is where you get it:

http://www.interculturalpress.com/store/pc/home.asp

The name of the game is Barnga

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Regards,

Jawad