Inclusion gives everyone a seat at the table.
Today, we’re continuing our new series Foundations. Our foundational values are at the heart of all that we do, but it isn’t enough to share what they are. In this series, we’ll explore why we chose these five pillars and how we teach them to students. You can read the whole series here.
Our students, teacher leaders and staff come from all walks of life, and we believe that diversity is our greatest strength. At the summits, students are encouraged to be open-minded and respectful to all. Teacher leaders and staff model inclusion in their interactions with students and with each other.
At Ambassador Leaders, diversity is the natural outcome of bringing students from all over the country and around the world to participate in our Summits. In and of itself, that diversity—the very act of bringing so many different people together—is bound to yield many positive results.
However, we feel diversity is merely the starting point. By thoughtfully designing teams, events and interactions where every student feels valued for their contributions and celebrated for who they are, we intentionally create an environment in which students can be heard, both individually and collectively. As author Vernā Myers quips, “Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.”
“Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.”
That students walk away from their Summit experience feeling valued and empowered is reason enough to have inclusion be one of our core values, but it isn’t the only benefit students enjoy in inclusive learning environments. Inclusion also yields deeper team bonds, greater academic outcomes and gives students real-world experience collaborating in a diverse setting.
Lifelong Bonds
Students are grouped into teams based on their age, but that’s typically where the commonalities end—at least on paper. We take care to create teams where students, excepting for their age, are likely to be different from one another.
As a result, students arrive to their teams as strangers and often feel out of place during their first team meeting. That’s a fair reaction given that their teammates don’t attend their school, don’t come from their state (or country!), don’t dress the same and may not be of the same religion or cultural background. Students may think they have nothing in common.
Yet, as they get to know one another through icebreakers, curriculum activities and team building, students quickly realize an important truth: we are all more alike than we are different. Our students are all experiencing the unique challenges, both academic and social, brought on by being teenagers. They’re all figuring out who they are, who they want to become and what matters most to them.
Inclusion encourages students to look beyond surface differences and grants them the freedom to figure out who they are together. In this way, students forge deeper connections based on shared passions, values and interests rather than a shared fashion sense or zip code.
Greater Academic Outcomes
The adage goes that two heads are better than one, and at Ambassador Leadership Summits, student teams bring twelve heads together to create a capstone project. That’s a lot of know-how and lived experience students access just by being grouped with people who are not the same as them.
In fact, inclusive spaces make students smarter. A report by three researchers from Teachers College Columbia recently found that “students’ exposure to other students who are different from themselves and the novel ideas and challenges that such exposure brings leads to improved cognitive skills, including critical thinking and problem solving.”
One simple way we cultivate inclusion is by asking students to identify both the strengths they can contribute and the areas where they’ll need team support. In so doing, students realize they all bring something to the table, and they can all help someone else progress. They learn to focus on what they can do, listen to one another and offer support when a teammate struggles. Win-win!
Real-world Practice in Diverse Environments
Workplaces across the United States and the world are becoming increasingly pluralized. Some 75% of people polled said their work is the main place they encounter people who are different from them, while 96% of major employers say it is important that employees are “comfortable working with colleagues, customers, and/or clients from diverse cultural backgrounds” (more on that here).
As these trends are likely to continue, it makes good sense for students to practice working on diverse teams as early as possible and build skills like empathy and communication.
One of the Leadership Summits’ most popular events is the Global Youth Panel. Before this panel, students explore their ideas surrounding culture, both their own and others. At the panel, students hear from their international counterparts about the food, music, religion, culture, traditions and everyday life of the countries they hail from. Our panelists dispel stereotypes and instill curiosity, and audience members are encouraged to ask questions. After the panel ends, students reconvene in teams to talk through what they learned and how their notions about particular cultures or cultural norms changed.
With this event, students learn to respect cultural differences and remain open to learning more. Inclusion doesn’t insist that you know everything about someone else’s culture, religion, home state or country, race or ethnicity. It merely insists that these differences matter, that they make people special and that they are compelling reasons to invite everyone to sit at the table.
By Corie Bales
Corie is the Academic Affairs Manager of Ambassador Leaders. As a lifelong educator and avid traveler, she believes in empowering students and teachers to learn and lead through experiential education.