Facilitating a
Multicultural/Diverse Group
Dianne Hofner
Saphiere
Dayton ASTD Chapter
Newsletter, March 2002
Kansas City ASTD
Chapter Newsletter, April 2002
Today pretty much any group of training participants
is multicultural: cross-functional, male and female,
including people of different ages, ethnicities, race,
spiritual traditions, and sexual orientations. When a
group of participants includes people who do not share a
fluent language and who have differing thought patterns,
the challenge of creating a learning environment for all
can seem nearly impossible.
What are some tips for effectively facilitating a
diverse group of participants? Having facilitated people
from over 45 different national groups since 1978, one of
my best practices is to design according to the STADI
Approach™: Sensing, Thinking, Applying, Doing,
Integrating:
- Whatever your topic, ensure that participants are
able to SENSE what is in it for them, to connect
with the need, to feel the difficulty, or to
share excitement about the possibilities.
- Tips: Participants from different cultures
will need to connect with the topic and feel
affirmed in their own often-unique requirements.
Encouraging participants to reflect on and share
their experiences, then summarizing the common
themes of the group, can be a much more effective
approach than starting with lectures based on one
culture's or home office's experience.
- The THINKING aspect of the design is one most
trainers usually include and so don't have to
worry about as much: making sure participants
have models, frameworks or theories to
conceptualize and analyze the topic.
- Tips: Key points for multicultural groups
include accessing all learning styles. For
example, use pictures, drawings and models for
the visual learner, stories and perhaps some
music for the auditory learner, and give the
kinesthetic learners opportunity to walk and move
through the model.
- The design must allow participants to APPLY the
learning to their actual situations. A
US-designed leadership course may have some
concepts that will apply as-is to a Mexican
manager, for example, and others that will either
need to be adapted or won't apply.
- Tips: Discussions/social learning in small
groups will help the participants learn to learn
from each other as well as from you, the
facilitator. It will also help you refine your
teaching content and methods for more global and
multicultural applicability. Be sure to distill
your learning points down to their core essence,
their pure fundamentals, peeling off the cultural
trappings of how something is done and preserving
the why you want them to do something; the
desired outcome or value. In this manner, your
organization can be sure that participants will
apply not the surface but the meaningful part of
the learning, in ways that will be accepted and
culturally appropriate.
- DOING is also key, though often not given enough
time in workshop designs: participants need the
chance to practice their new skills. Thinking
about something is much different than doing it.
- Tips: Public skills practice is very
stressful and potentially embarrassing for most
people, especially if the participant is not a
fluent speaker of the classroom language, or not
comfortable with the dominant communication style
of the group. Keys here are to divide
participants into small groups so that they are
not subjected to a "fish bowl"-type
experience, to consciously create a learning
environment in which participants can feel it's
safe to make mistakes, and to encourage
participants to see you, the facilitator, as
approachable and non-judgmental.
- The final component of this approach, though
these five steps are not necessarily sequential
but can occur in any order or simultaneously, is
INTEGRATION. This means encouraging the
participants to personalize their learning, to
"try on" the new clothes (learning),
for example, and to discover where those clothes
fit well, where they are too tight, too loose, or
too scratchy. By allowing time for participants
to integrate their learning, you and other
workshop participants can help them preserve the
key points and "wear" their skills in
ways that are comfortable for them. Without
effective integration, the best learning will not
be used on-the-job.
Tips: Trust and time are key here. Guiding
questions and time for personal reflection, as well as
discussion in pairs or in groups of cultural affiliation,
can often assist integration. It's also important if you
have several language groups in class that you allow
members to discuss and understand in their native
language. This is particularly important for cultures
that are more consensus- or group-oriented, because
learning may be based on shared not individual
understanding.
Once your multicultural design is in place, you will
want to give some thought to how you establish your
credibility and approachability as a facilitator with the
different cultural norms of the participants. You'll want
to encourage participants to learn from each other as
well as from you, to explain that all participants have a
piece of the answer, and that most of us have different
learning styles. If you have non-fluent English speakers
in your group, I highly recommend spending thirty minutes
or so on an activity such as Redundancía: A Foreign
Language Simulation. It will raise awareness and
skill for speaking across language differences, no matter
the topic you are training.
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