Colorado State University Diversity Symposium

A couple weeks ago my eight year old daughter came home from school with an activity
they had done at school. The prompt on the paper asked, “If you had one wish, what would it
be?” My daughter’s response was, “I would wish for world peace. I just wish that everyone
would get along.” This is something I think we all hear a lot and maybe even ourselves wish for.
Is this really just a ‘wish’ or is world peace something that we really could experience? The
diversity symposium at Colorado State University (CSU) is a step toward world peace by helping
individuals to get along through understanding.
The Diversity Symposium offered a variety of classes that helped to address the idea of
helping people to get along through understanding diversity. One of the classes that I was able
to attend at the symposium was, ​Multiple Pathways to Dialogue: Three University Panel and
Interactive Dialogue Exercise​. In this break out session we started the class with quick
introductions. Then the presenter introduced us to the activity we would be doing. We were to
read some rules to a game called Barnga. The main idea was to play this simple card game
without talking. After each round the winners would move up and the losers would move down.
Confusion seemed to ensue as there were different ideas about how to play the game. After a
few rounds of the game we ended and then had a debriefing.
The game was a fun way to introduce normative assumptions and cross-culture ideas.
We learned that each table was given slightly different rules. The discussion our group had was
very enlightening and thought provoking. In the game the people coming to a new table would
often just adapt to the tables rules even though they were different than the ones they had
learned. Someone related this to how individuals with different cultures or ideas coming into a
place where there is a set norm sometimes just adapt and blend in. This made me think about
my own grandmother. She immigrated to the United States from Germany when she was a
teenager. When she got to the U.S. she wanted to be a part of the culture there so she left her
German traditions behind. She did not teach her children the Germen language, she did not
teach them German traditions. I understand her wanting to fit in but I am also sad that she shed
a huge part of herself, her culture, to fit in. This relates to my philosophy to teaching. I think that
all individuals have something to offer, we are all different and that is what makes us beautiful. I
want other students to see this in each other and appreciate not only what makes us similar but
also what makes us different.
I plan on using the Barga game exercise in my future class. I love how the game was a
fun interactive way to get individuals to think about differences between individuals and how
they may affect the way we interact. I plan to us it at the beginning of the year as a way to help
students see that we are all different and have different ways to do things but that does not
make one person right and one person wrong or one person better. I also hope to use the game
to demonstrate that we all come to class with different ideas and backgrounds and that is why it
is important to set up class rules and expectations so that we are all “playing the same game.”
As one of the panelists said, “Dialogue is not about being right or wrong but about
understanding each other.” I hope that through implementing this activity in my class I will be
able to help students to better understand each other and be one step closer to getting along
and one step closer to world peace.