A Novel Scheme For Teaching Diversity Skills To Students In The Technological Sector

It is now widely accepted that diversity has business implications, and that the proper handling of diversity is crucial in a global economy. Major U.S. corporations have supported the University of Michigan’s pro-diversity admissions policy [1]. Intel is an example of a successful company that has had a multicultural training program [2] since 1983. Intel’s program initially designed to help foreign-born technologists succeed in the American industrial environment, now includes programs that help U.S.-born workers to collaborate successfully with their non-native colleagues both here and abroad. Both the Technology Accreditation Commission (TAC) and the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) have recommended that all programs seeking ABET accreditation pay serious attention to teaching and assessing diversity skills [3,4]. Drs. Kissick and Khan have been involved in studying and developing schemes to promote diversity at the College of Technology and Aviation at Kansas State University-Salina [5-7], and believe that this can best be accomplished by teaching some simple rules that foster diversity friendliness and teach good business practices. It was important for the authors that the rules and their impact on business be easily understood. There should not be too many rules and they should have an expansive reach through logical extension. We hope to facilitate students’ ability to make rational decisions in a manner consistent with game theory, which assumes that people “act in their own self interest,” and are able to determine “at least probabilistically, the outcomes of their actions, and have preferences over these outcomes [8].” According to game theory, an optimal solution to any problem involving interdependent individuals has among its basic requirements that the individuals should be acting rationally (as defined above). The authors believe that students would be best prepared to handle diversity in industry if they were taught to apply rational decision making rules to multicultural issues in the workplace. We begin by talking about the rules of diversity (what we are interested in teaching) and will follow this up with a description of our chosen mechanism of delivery (a novel survey). Before concluding, we will discuss the survey results from two separate settings, a multicultural meeting and an ASEE regional conference presentation.