Content area
Full Text
Several years ago, Ella Bell (1988-1989) provided a strong argument that few opportunities exist in typical organizational behavior (OB) classes for learning about diversity. Clearly, since the publication of that article, diversity has become a more common feature in both management and OB courses and textbooks. Diversity has been the theme of both the Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference and Academy of Management meetings and has been the focus of many articles and exercises in the Journal of Management Education and other academic outlets. However, one aspect of Bell's call for improved opportunities for cross-cultural learning has not received much attention. Bell notes that students must come to an understanding of their own cultural roots as a necessary preparatory step to learning about others' cultures. Although many minority students may have a grounding in their ethnic identities, many, if not most, majority students lack an equivalent level of self-awareness about their culture. As Bell states,
Since whites are members of the dominant group, their awareness of what it means to be white is often low or nonexistent. White people aren't forced to think about themselves as a racial group because of the power inherent in also being members of the dominant group. Thus, white students find it difficult to get in touch with their own racial identity. When they do discuss race, it is usually framed as a problem experienced by blacks and nonwhites. It is easy for white students to become bystanders vicariously experiencing someone else's race, rather than exploring their own racial and cultural experience. (p. 61) In attempting to teach such students about diversity, Bell proposes the need for "enabling structures" that allow students to safely explore their own racial and ethnic identities, and she suggests an experiential exercise that has proved successful in her teaching and consulting practice. We would like to add to the repertoire of such enabling structures with an exercise we developed to facilitate discussion of race and ethnicity; we have found this exercise to be especially useful in classes that are predominantly made up of White students. The Culture Circles Exercise
Because a full version of the exercise is contained in the appendix, only a brief overview will be provided here. The exercise is divided into two sets...