One of the aims of the intercultural classroom is that students learn from each other’s perspective. Therefore, making diverse groups is key. But what is a good way to approach this? This activity focuses on the creation of a highly diverse project team, with students in charge instead of the educator.

Learning goals

The learning goal is to raise awareness of and open up discussion on the many ways the class/group is diverse, and how diversity can contribute to effective group work.

Target group

This activity is mainly aimed at undergraduate students, but can be used for any target audience.

Materials

A room: students need space to walk around and mix & mingle; a smartboard or whiteboard.

Time

This is a pre-group work activity and can take as long or as short as the educator (or students) deem necessary to create diverse project teams.  Estimated minimum time needed:  30 minutes.

Organization of the activity

As an educator, first consider the following aspects:

• Diversity is far more than solely the nationalities you find behind students’ names on your class list. Even in a fully Dutch classroom, there are still a lot of possibilities to make highly diverse teams.
• Being open and learning from each other’s perspective is not self-evident and not always considered to be an efficient way of working. It takes time and effort and includes far more than just ‘dividing tasks’. Therefore, do not expect that if you have diverse project teams, these groups will automatically include various perspectives of their group members. Often dynamics of ‘the majority rules’ are at work. Therefore, always challenge the students to make this collaboration process explicit, e.g. by keeping a dairy and reflecting in what way they included various perspectives.
• Do you always form groups based on nationality (e.g. making sure there’s at least one international student in the group). Be careful not to ‘use’ international students as the token foreigner in every group.  Bear in mind that it requires a lot from this one international student to be part of a Dutch dominated group. So, instead, place -for instance- 2 international students in one group and 3 international students in the other group.
• Are there other ways of forming groups: based on personality or behavioral profiles such as DISC or preferred team roles, learning styles, “more confident” and “less confident” students with regard to the subject matter, etc.? Randomly by a draw of cards? Randomly based on the first letter of their first name?  However, my advice would be to just talk with your students about it. Most of the time, they know better in what ways they differ than I do as a teacher.

In class 

1. Explain to your students why it is important to have diverse project teams. Relate this to the assignment/ learning goals of your class/module/project etc.
2. Brainstorm with the class: “In what ways are you diverse?” Keep track of the list on a white board/smartboard. Students can come with all kinds of different answers, e.g.

• place where they were born (rural/ urban, countries, north/south etc.)
• family (only a mom/ two dads, entrepreneurial / working class family, many siblings/ only child, multicultural, etc.),
• leisure activities (creative, gamer, sports fanatic, etc.),
• previous education
• international experience
• skills (e.g. planner, video editor, book worm)
• (side)jobs etc.

3. Once the list is dried up, challenge them to make their own teams as diverse as possible. Once they have made the teams, they need to justify in what way the teams are diverse and how this could contribute to the success of the project team. If you as an educator feel they were not successful in creating diverse teams or do not have a solid justification, they all have to go back to the drawing board.

Author and affiliation

Nicoline de Heus
Breda University of Applied Sciences