OLTEB / Teaching / Groupwork (Staff)

Valuing Diversity

Diversity in a group is usually advantageous. (Baron, L., 2006).

  • Students of different age, gender, cultural background, discipline, work experience, skill-base, etc can provide a richness of contributions not available in homogenous groups.
  • Students can learn a lot from their peers in a class, as well as from the lecturer.  All people involved in the unit bring with them many valuable experiences and contribute different perspectives to the topic of study.
  • Students can,  in diverse groups, develop their inter-cultural competence which is important with the globalisation of business, and international markets and overseas postings. 
  • Students can learn to apprecaite and understand peers and future colleagues who think, learn and work differently.  This will be important in their future workplaces and careers in government and non-profit organisations in other countries and in the future
  • Diversity of groups in a learning environment allows students a ‘safer’ environment to learn from different backgrounds and practice communication and team-management skills.  Potential repercussions from poor communication and team skills will not be as damaging as they could be in the workplace.

 

Some tips on helping students to value diversity

  • Make explicit to students the potential advantages of diverse group membership to all students.
  • If self-selection of group membership is practiced students should be actively encouraged to form teams from diverse backgrounds.
  • If the lecturer assigns students to groups, aim to create diverse membership, and potential richness of contributions.
  • Bringing out the diversity among a student cohort can assist groups
    - to form with diverse membership of undergraduates (mobile questions)
    - to contribute from their diverse backgrounds as postgraduates (example)

Lecturer assigned groups

It may be advantageous to create heterogenous or homogenous groups (based on age, gender skills, nationality etc) for some tasks. For example, if you are wanting to develop graduate attributes such as communication across diverse cultures, then facilitating a process to achieve diverse group membership will be important. One way of preparing for diverse group formation is to use variations of mobile questions.

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