Teaching DEIB in a polarized world

When it comes to business education, teaching and learning the topic of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) has never been easy. But recent political pushback—particularly in the United States, where some universities are reducing, rebranding, or even eliminating DEIB programs—is making the job even more difficult. And as debates intensify, many educators find themselves asking: How can I teach DEIB effectively when its value is explicitly under scrutiny?

Seeking answers and advice, leading faculty from around the globe gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark, last July for the 4th Annual Teaching Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Professional Development Workshop at the Academy of Management conference. The workshop was organized by Sa-kiera Tiarra Jolynn Hudson, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley Haas, Sora Jun, Assistant Professor at Rice University, and Alexandra Figueroa, Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley Haas. The team was supported by Modupe Akinola, Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, Michael I. Norton, Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Zoe Kinias, John F. Wood Chaired Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Ivey Business School. The workshop continues a tradition started by the late Dr. Katherine Phillips with Akinola, Norton, and Kinias in 2019 to build community and exchange ideas with DEIB faculty worldwide.

As with past gatherings, the workshop included teaching demos, an expert panel, and a roundtable discussion with seasoned DEIB instructors and practitioners. The sessions focused on strategies for introducing sensitive topics, handling difficult questions, and engaging students, especially those who might hesitate to engage with DEIB issues. The workshop also reinforced the importance of supporting the DEIB teaching community.

“It has been such an important community for not only [exchanging] great ideas, but also for the social support that is needed in times like this,” said Akinola. “It was needed before … and it’s needed even more so now.”

Here are key takeaways from the workshop.

TEACHING DEMO: Managing diverse (and difficult) teams

During the first teaching demo, Akinola guided attendees through an exercise she began using in 2024 with her MBA students on day four of a six-day leadership course. “This is the day when we want to give them clarity on what it’s like to be on a learning team where you’re trying to get the best out of everyone,” she explained.

After discussing IDEO’s unique approach to teamwork and fostering a culture of innovation, Akinola has students watch a video created by Shannon Rawski, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Ivey Business School, Kinias, and a large team of experts, where actors enact a learning team situation. In the video, scripted as a perfect storm of interpersonal conflict based on some of the worst behaviours the design team has seen within real business school student teams, a group of five people—representing diverse backgrounds, identities, and personalities—discuss their roles on a team project. Several of the characters display poor behaviour, including making insensitive comments and resisting collaborative work.

Akinola also divides her students into groups, with each group assigned to examine a different character in the video. She asks students to think about how their character helped or hindered the group dynamic, what their character was thinking, and what feedback they’d offer to the character.

Then, she introduces a twist—showing students a series of additional videos where several characters provide context for their behaviour. Akinola asks: “How might your feedback change, knowing what you know now?”

Finally, to help students understand the larger points of the exercise, Akinola challenges them to think about how to:  

• Create a learning team culture of openness and perspective taking
• Course-correct during intense moments
• Manage the diversity of backgrounds, identities, and knowledge on a team
• Apply structures, processes, and norms to get the learning-team outcome you desire

“It’s such an animated discussion,” said Akinola. “Each time we do it, we learn something new.”

TEACHING DEMO: Warming up to DEIB conversations

When second-year MBA students return to school after summer break, they need to reconnect with each other and set a foundation for having meaningful conversations that can include DEIB-related topics, said Rebecca Ponce de Leon, Assistant Professor of Business at Columbia Business School.

As explained during the second teaching demo, Ponce de Leon solves this problem using HOLSTEE Reflection Cards as an icebreaker. Designed to spark conversation, the reflection cards have different themes and questions related to those themes. Each card has one surface-level question and one deeper question. For example, a surface-level question might be, “What is one dish your parents or grandparents made that you wish you could?” while a deeper question might be, “If you were to go back in time 10 years and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?” or “If there is an afterlife or reincarnation, what one memory from this life would you bring with you?” 

After dividing students into pairs, Ponce de Leon asks them to take turns answering a question of their choice. “It gets them talking to one another before we start having some of these more intense conversations around identity and inclusion,” she explained.

Once students have completed a few rounds of questions and answers, Ponce de Leon asks them for their reactions to the experience. She also offers prompts such as:

• Did you share something that allowed you to connect in a way that you hadn’t before?
• Did you learn something that surprised you?
• Did you find any new points of connection? Were any unexpected?
• Did you unlock any personal insights or rediscover any old memories?

“What students see is, ‘Oh, I’m connecting with this person that maybe seems very different from me or that I didn’t know very well before,’” said Ponce de Leon. “So, I think it’s really helpful in building that common ground.”

TEACHING DEMO: Navigating power dynamics

When teaching topics of identity, power, and influence, Harvard Business School Professor Lakshmi Ramarajan leverages her case study, “Carla Ann Harris at Morgan Stanley.” Ramarajan shared the case as part of the third teaching demo of the day.

The case focuses on Wall Street executive Carla Harris and her 20-plus year career at Morgan Stanley. It explores her diverse identities as a finance leader, Black woman, gospel singer, philanthropist, Catholic, writer, and public speaker, and how those identities intersect with the finance industry’s culture.

While the case can be taught several ways, Ramarajan likes to frame the class as one that explores how different demographic differences—race, class, gender—filter into how we navigate our workplaces and careers. 

Ramarajan begins the case discussion by posing questions such as:

• Who is Carla and what motivates her?
• Is she a fit or misfit at Morgan Stanley?
• Where does she experience friction between herself and her environment?
• Why does she stumble and how does she manage it? 

Through the case discussion, Ramarajan helps her students think about strategies Harris uses to create greater alignment between aspects of who she is and her context. For example, earlier in her career she uses the “compartmentalizing/concealing strategy” to hide her passion for singing because it doesn’t fit the Morgan Stanley stereotype. Later, she uses an “integrating/revealing strategy” and is public about her singing. Throughout the discussion, she encourages students to think about their own identities and how they communicate who they are in a particular context.

“What’s amazing about Carla is that she’s so multifaceted and fluid and aware of herself and her context,” said Ramarajan. “Most of us have a default strategy; we show one particular identity in a given context. And what Carla shows us is this flexibility.”

Ramarajan typically ends the session by raising an important question: “How do we think about redefining what ‘fit the role’ means in terms of all these different facets of who we are?”

PANEL DISCUSSION: Expert advice for challenging times

The final event of the day, prior to roundtable discussions, was a panel discussion moderated by Hudson and featuring Giselle Antoine, Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, James Carter, Assistant Professor at Cornell University, and Monica Gavino, Professor at San Jose State University. When asked about their teaching approaches, strategies for engaging students, and making space for non-US frameworks, the panelists offered the following suggestions. 

• Be transparent about what you know and don’t know. “As many aspects of what I was prepared to teach was changing, I just had to be honest with my students,” said Gavino. “I said, ‘We’re going to learn together, and I’m not going to have all the answers.’” At the same time, she emphasized the importance of teaching students about fundamental concepts, such as affirmative action, and the history. “We want students to understand what it was, what it is, where we think we’re going, and be informed,” she said.
• Point out the ways in which DEIB is personally relevant to students. “I find that students are most resistant to the content or the course if they think it does not apply to them,” said Carter. “At the outset of my class, I try to tell them how what we’re going to talk about relates to you individually or to other groups you belong to.”
• Ease into controversial topics. Recognizing that some students believe diversity is a “bad word out in the wild,” said Antoine, “I baby-step them into diversity.” After explaining what diversity means in a research context, she has her students complete a personality diversity exercise that uses relatable concepts like introverts vs. extroverts to demonstrate what diversity can mean. “Then we can work our way into other layers of diversity that are more controversial,” she said.
• Teach students empathetic listening skills. In one unit, Gavino challenges her students to sit across from each other and share their personal story about their journey.  “I’m amazed by how much they lean into this exercise … and it equips them with the skills to be vulnerable, to communicate difficult topics, and truly hear what the other person is saying.”
• Address myths and misconceptions head-on. Carter finds that many students come to his class with misunderstandings about DEIB. “They don’t know why they’re being asked to take this class,” he said. “A lot of them don’t think they have privilege or that discrimination happens anymore.” To help correct those misconceptions, he has his students read a short piece he wrote about the current state of DEI early in the course.
• Use “boundary pushers” to safely surface controversial topics. In her class, Hudson assigns students to serve as “boundary pushers” who have the freedom to bring up controversial issues without being judged by their peers. Importantly, everyone knows there are boundary pushers assigned but not who they are. This encourages students to separate the controversial idea from the person saying it, as well as to courageously take risks that they would be hesitant to take in a real social setting. “They’re not devil’s advocates, hellbent on arguing for the sake of controversy; the devil does not need any more advocates,” said Hudson. “They are boundary pushers, meant to push the boundaries of our discussion to foster learning. I make that distinction very clear.”
• Leverage online platforms to keep conversations going. Gavino uses the tool Packback to encourage students to discuss and research their position on a particular issue, such as the benefits of working in diverse teams. “That keeps them engaged and they’re always learning,” she said. “By the time they come into class, they’ve already started to get a fundamental understanding of why this is such a cool topic and ready to engage in a conversation about it.”
• Bring global perspectives into the conversation. Antoine likes to teach the “Opening Week at Darden” case for this reason. “It integrates experiences of diversity in the US and international diversity through five profiles of students in their first week at Darden,” she said. “Every student finds little things in the student profiles that they can identify with.” The case also encourages her international students to talk more openly about the different ways racism, colorism, classism, and sexism appear and are dealt with in their home countries.
• Have students complete the HBR Culture Profile exercise. This Culture Profile “gives students a map of their cultural values relative to people in their country,” said Antoine, which helps them “anticipate conflicts or value misalignments and set norms to mitigate misunderstandings.”
• Lean on your community. When asked how the panelists recharge in these times, Gavino noted, “I think you surround yourself with people you can talk to about what’s happening. Have compassion. Try to get your students to open up and know they’re going through it with us. This is a challenging time for everybody.”