Kim Helps Build Positive Multicultural Environments at Orientation

Imagine not making eye contact with the person to whom you are speaking or not being able to smile or nod during a conversation, or not being allowed to show your neck. The 688 students attending orientation at Harvard Graduate School of Education last week were asked to go even further by practicing some of these cultural norms at the "Building Positive Multicultural Environments" session led by Lecturer Josephine Kim.

In an exercise, Kim provided students with different cultural norms and asked them to interact with each other. Any time a student offended someone else's culture, they were given a dot sticker.

Although there were many nervous smiles and laughs throughout the exercise, by its conclusion there were dozens of green, black, blue, and orange stickers apparent, demonstrating how easily one can offend someone of another culture and also how little we know about the multicultural world in which we live.

"Culture is such a strong factor in our lives," Kim said pointing out that it molds our values, attitudes, and also impacts how we perceive ourselves and other people. "It means that everyone's experience is very unique."

This is the first year HGSE offered "Building Positive Multicultural Environments" to the community. The idea for a workshop focused on diversity grew out of feedback from HGSE students. As part of a recommendation made by the HGSE Student Coalition, and with the support of the Dean's Advisory Committee on Equity and Diversity (DACED), HGSE incorporated the workshop on diversity at orientation.

"It's a priority for everyone at the school from the dean on down to strengthen the capacity of both faculty and students [and] to work on increasing diversity in education settings whether you are talking about our classrooms, schools, or districts where grads will be working or even classrooms at HGSE," said Professor Hiro Yoshikawa, who chairs the DACED. "Ultimately, we hope this impacts things like the curriculum [and] how issues of diversity are integrated and talked about in the classroom. We want to start with the first day -- orientation."

Addressing issues of diversity in the classroom can often be challenging because, as Kim noted, as a society we are conditioned from a young age to make assumptions about things by association and categorization. This is parlayed into our views about objects and how we perceive human beings. Hence, when encountering people whom we have never met before, we rely on stereotypes or other forms of judgment. If we are unable to categorize a person, it makes us feel uncomfortable, Kim said.

The very act of judging someone based on their looks perpetuates stereotypes. According to Kim, in an egocentric and ethnocentric world where people spend an estimated 80 percent of their time thinking about themselves, this leaves little opportunity to understand someone from another culture. "The fact is that we don't have meaningful relationships with people of other cultures," Kim said.

This isn't to say that we can't have meaningful multicultural relationships, but, like many things, it requires thought and effort. "The first step is admitting that we have biases," Kim said, that act barriers to building relationships in a multicultural environment. Other barriers, Kim said, include attempts, mostly by white people, to empathize with people of color by offering their own experience with discrimination rather than just listening. On the other hand, people of color, Kim said, can feel compelled to speak for their entire group, or to shut down and check out.

Kim reminded students that tolerance doesn't mean "apathy." By consciously filtering our words and actions, and building rapport with people of other cultures, and listening, we can provide foundations for creating a multicultural environment. "What will you do to create a positive, multicultural environment for this school year?" Kim asked.

Many students shared their plans to embrace the diversity amongst them by learning more about the developing world, committing to reaching out to other students, approaching students with open minds, and giving colleagues a chance to tell their cultural stories.