reflection on student diversity training

On Jan 28^th, I attended an event on the campus called the Student Diversity Training and it was held in UW building. Before I went there I had no clue of what it was, so I did a little bit of research on the internet and understand that the purpose of it was to increase participants' awareness and knowledge of cultural diversity and be more generous of adopting different identity groups in order to pursue the same goal to have better teamwork. The speaker we had for the training named Eric Davis, an UW professor who has expertise include diversity management, intercultural communication, leadership development, conflict resolution, and student success strategies.

During the training, Professor Davis shows us couples of demos to illustrate his lecture. Here is one of the practices that we have -- we have to write down 4 people who we think are the most important in our life, such as mom, dad, etc. then write down 3 of our titles who represent who we are, such as son, grandson, brother, etc. last but not the least, we have to write down 3 things are crucial to us, like schools, birthplace, etc. And here it begins, Professor Davis asks us to throw away two of the elements that we have on our paper at the first time and three pieces at the second time, later on, he comes and randomly grabs two of the elements away from everyone. The whole thing is about whether you think it is harder to give away something by your decision or enforced by others, or can be called as willing and unwilling. This practice is certainly important because this is so close our real life, we can’t control everything in our life, there always things happen that we are unexpected and not prepared.

Another example that Professor Davis demonstrates in the diversity training is that he let us guess how many doctors, dentists, and athletes out of the 34 million of American Americans in the US, very surprisingly we get all the answers wrong and off quite a bit. According to his data, there are about 35,000 ~ 40,000 doctors, 15,000 ~ 20,000 dentists and only 2000 ~ 3000 of athletes. We always think that African Americans are so much involved into sports but in fact, it is not the truth. Media has definitely changed our perceptions.

To me, for the reason why we have the diversity training is because we are human, and we are “all” somewhat biased. Effective diversity training with capable speakers let us learn quickly to manage differences. I also think that as long as we are human, diversity training is necessary.