Schools & Charity version of BaFa’ BaFa’
Boarding High School for International and Domestic students.
Uses BaFa’ BaFa’ two ways. 1. As part of a international community weekend event to explore and create awareness of different cultures and ways of life in order to help students live and study together. 2. For staff to have a common experience around culture to create a awareness and talking points for teaching students from over 37 countries.
Schools & Charity version of BaFa’ BaFa’
I got it Monday, used it yesterday in a workshop training pediatric residents who will be going to volunteer in various countries doing medical work for about a month at a time. It was a hit! I only had a day to prepare, and did my best, but fumbled through a bit my first time doing this. Our time was a bit short too, and the discussion after was lively and could have gone on longer. Next time, I will leave more time for an extended discussion, as I feel culture issues are very important. It got rave reviews by the participants!
I plan to do this cultural simulation annually for the residents, and maybe more often for other groups, such as medical students interested in global health. I am the Global Child Health program director for the pediatrics residency, and organize their lectures, courses, trips abroad – my goals are to provide them with a well rounded education in global health so they can be effective workers and advocates for children (and families).
Denise Bothe, MD
Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics – Director Global Child Health Program – Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital – Cleveland Medical Center
School & Charity version of BaFa’ BaFa’
The class is an Ethnographies (Ethnographic Research) class at the high school level. I also made the purchase for future use with our Professional Development team and for other classes I intend to teach on cross-cultural communication and leadership.
For the current Ethnography Class, we intend to use Bafa’ Bafa’ as a simulation of using observation while participating in a ‘foreign’ culture through an ethnographic lens. We also intend for our students to become facilitators with other groups in our school and other schools in our community.
Josán Perales | World Languages Instructional Specialist | Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center | 2750 Notaiah Rd | Estes Park, CO 80517
Professional version of BaFa’ BaFa’
We will use the materials for our annual regional senior training event where our seniors from 9 different offices and countries come together. We hope that people learn more about their own culture and how they perceive the world and other cultures around them and we want them to learn this in a informal and fun setting. Because of the playful and competitive game character we hope to create intense and memorable learning moments that cannot be achieved with other training tools.
Kind regards
Lea Achstetter | HR Advisor
Fragomen Global LLP
Neue Mainzer Strasse 75, Frankfurt 60311, Germany | http://www.fragomen.com
Pumping the Colors (original version)
We are doing a one day team building, and I am using PTC as the one simulation for the day
We use the simulation to explore how the people (one department) communicate and work together. Typically their behavior has not been collaborative, but has been competitive.
Spencer, Shenk, Capers & Associates, Inc. – (310) 515-7555 – www.ssca.com
StarPower for Business
Large entertainment organization using StarPower as a team building excercise for their IT department to have participants understand and experience they aren’t working in a silo.
StarPower for Schools & Charities
- I am using it for a Social Justice Leadership Retreat that we are hosting at our institution. It is for a group of 40 college student.
- Throughout this and the retreat we are trying to help the students develop a better understanding of their personal leadership, how diversity is part of their college experience, and how to be advocates for social change within our community. Through this activity we are hoping to create dialogue about the differences that exist within our community that we try to ignore and how we can move forward on making positive change.
Lizzie Dement
Assistant Director of Leadership Development Student Development and Campus Vibrancy STETSON UNIVERSITY
StarPower for Schools & Charities
I have actually been familiar with and using StarPower since about 2012. At my old institution, I was a student leader and then later went on to work as a staff member with their student leadership programs that were offered in the student affairs division. The StarPower simulation was the property of the that institution though, so when I left, I sadly had to leave it behind. I am now working at Drury University as the Director of Community Outreach and Leadership Development and have recently been able to create my own leadership program here on campus called Elevate: Rise Up and Lead. I wanted to continue to use StarPower because I enjoyed the message it relayed to students, so I decide to by a copy of the simulation for Drury. The students will be going through the simulation at an overnight retreat at the end of this month.
I believe this simulation shows students why there are power struggles in the real world. It simulates to them that power abuse happens, and it can happen to anyone. Most of the students feel that they are very ethical and would not abuse power if they had it, but when put in a situation where others around them are also abusing their power, it is easy to get carried away. I ask the students to reflect on the ideas that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and systematic inequality. Most students find it very eye opening and have discussions about ways approach power abuse, ethical decisions, and systematic inequality. The door is also opened for students to discuss protests and how to effectively protest for change.
Ryan Gipson
Director of Community Outreach & Leadership Development Drury University, Springfield, MO
StarPower for Schools & Charities
Thanks for reaching out. I am actually using this product for Diversity Training for about 100+ staff members within a University setting. There will be 2 hours of “Star Power” time during one of our conferences that will tie into a conversation/presentation on the myth of meritocricy. Hopefully it will help staff members be able to see and hear our students better in order to serve them more effectively. Let me know if this helps.
Donald Gordon
Associate Director for Undergraduate Admissions
Biola University
Named One of America’s Top Tier National Universities
Connect on Twitter , Facebook , Blogs, & The Web
Schools & Charity version of BaFa’ BaFa’
I work as a guest lecturer at the University of the West of England, and we’ll be using BaFa’ BaFa’ with psychology students who are in their final year of their psychology undergraduate degree. During their final year, they specialise in different fields of psychology – one of which is organisational (industrial) psychology. One of the modules within the organisational psychology curriculum is understanding (organisational) culture. As these are young (20/21 year old) students, they tend to have little experience of different cultures and may consider different cultures to “weird”, merely because they are different to what they’re used to. BaFa’ BaFa’ will, I think, provide them with a memorable experience where they can experience significantly different cultures, and develop their appreciation of “different is ok”. The experiential nature of BaFa’ BaFa’ will make the learning stick.
Chris Neighbour
It’s Possible UK
Schools & Charity version of BaFa’ BaFa’
We’re using it in conjunction with our intercultural competency training for our study abroad program in Australia. It’s a part of our class called The View from Australia.
We’re hoping to help the students learn new perspectives when comparing cultures. Instead of describing everything different in negative terms, we want them to see the reasons behind the differences and understand that different is not bad (the differences can show what Australians value/love/desire as compared to Americans). There’s much more to learn, but that’s a quick synopsis.
Heidi Prillwitz
Director of Student Life & Experiential Learning
Australia Studies Centre, Connecting Purpose, Practice and Place
a program of the CCCU-Australia Pty. Limited, ABN: 76 128 260 793
Mansfield BC, QLD 4122, www.BestSemester.com/Australia
Schools & Charity version of BaFa’ BaFa’
On the seminar that I was facilitating in Lulea, Sweden last Sat we used BaFa’ BaFa’ to teach the cultural sensitivity and awareness to a group of young entrepreneurs from Barents region (Northern areas of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia).
Prior to the simulation, on Thursday we had a big workshop on Finnish business culture with various aspects of it where we introduced the concept of the cultural awareness.
So on Saturday after the simulation itself, during the discussion and analysis part of the programme participants were brainstorming and sharing their experiences with each other on how they can best avoid conflicts when working with people from different cultural backgrounds, what should be the right skills and personality traits developed in one’s character to work effectively at a multicultural workplace and so on.
Hope this is somehow helpful!
Maria Melnikova, M.Sc. (Econ.& Bus.)
International Affairs Specialist, Russia
BusinessOulu, http://www.businessoulu.com/
Schools & Charity version of BaFa’ BaFa’
I am the Senior Director of K-12 Education Programs for the National Wildlife Federation, a large conservation education non-profit. My team is distributed throughout the US and work with communities, schools, and volunteers. We are coming together for our annual planning retreat in March, and it is really important that we begin to develop resources and materials through the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion. Often times materials are created and then translated into Spanish later in an effort to be more inclusive. I’d like my team to start thinking about cultural relevancy and DEI on the front end of our planning, not as an afterthought.
Hope this helps,
Kim Martinez
Senior Director of K-12 Education Programs, National Wildlife Federation, www.nwf.org
Uniting all Americans to ensure wildlife thrive in a rapidly changing world
Schools & Charity version of BaFa’ BaFa’
- European Project Semester, one-semester programme designed to train mainly third year engineering students to carry out project work in international teams.
- Hope the game will be an eye-opener for young European students (various countries) in terms of reading other cultures with our own cultural glasses. Hope the discussion will lead to a deeper understanding of own and others values.
Sara Birgitte Øfsti Nesje
Assistant Professor
Department of Art, Design and Drama
Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences
Schools and Charities version of BaFa’ BaFa’
Our department is responsible for earlier career staff development for University of Michigan staff. One of our marquee programs is called Foundations of Supervision (FOS). FOS I is basic supervisory skills such as team building, hiring, UM finances, performance planning, etc. In order to enroll in FOS I, a person must be a supervisor and had to have taken a prereq of our compliance classes.
FOS II has a very different focus. It is Leading Others Successfully. In order to enroll in FOS II, one must be a supervisor for at least a year because in FOS II we are focusing upon leadership skills. We begin FOS II with BaFa BaFa. The entire first morning of FOS is playing and then debriefing BaFa BaFa. We use it both as a way to assist the class participants in understanding what it is to create a culture for their teams, but also start to get them thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion. The third day of FOS we refer back to our debrief of BaFa BaFa when we go through a case study that we’ve purposely designed to cause problems for the leader. As we go through the day we constantly refer back to the lessons that came from BaFa BaFa. It’s an effective and very popular use of the exercise.
Two of our schools, Public Heath and the Ford School of Public Policy both have used BaFa BaFa in their new student “orientations.” Because both school deal with social/diversity/poverty/community health issues, they’ve found using BaFa BaFa is a good way to start students thinking about how they relate to the populations they will soon be encountering.
Thanks for asking about BaFa BaFa. It’s an oldie but a very goody!
Deborah Orlowski, Ph.D. Senior Learning Specialist, ALP Program Manager
Learning and Professional Development, University of Michigan
Schools and Charities version of BaFa’ BaFa’
There are 2 instructors/programs that will be using this resource at our college.
- For over 15 years the instructor that taught our Inter-cultural communication course used this resource. She used the outdated set that has cassettes and the print materials are quite worn. She is retiring this year so I thought that I would not have to replace it. However, it’s possible that the new instructor teaching the inter-cultural communication course may use it. And if not:
- One of the instructor’s former students who teaches a leadership course focusing on cross-cultural studies, will be using it. She mentioned that she swears by the resource and would like all students who do any cross-cultural work to have gone through this program.
I hope that helps,
ANNE ANDRES, MLS, Library Director
COLUMBIA BIBLE COLLEGE
library https://www.columbiabc.edu/library
Schools and Charities version of BaFa’ BaFa’
Our office is called Spiritual Life and Intercultural Education (SLICE) and we do co-curricular education programs for students at NYU Abu Dhabi. We have an ongoing 5 module curriculum that we developed called Intercultural Competency Core Training (ICCT). We initially purchased BaFa’ BaFa’ in 2015 thinking we might incorporate it into ICCT, but given that we already had so much material that we were trying to fit into five 2 hour sessions, it just didn’t work.
However, after running the simulation with colleagues in our testing phase we felt that it was so useful, impactful and pertinent to our work that we had it in the back of our mind/tool box to see where we could use it.
Last summer we did it with 2 groups of 30 incoming first year students and it was a great success. So now we are planning to do it with twice as many students, running four simulations simultaneously, with all first years eventually getting to do the simulation.
Eric Rothman, Assistant Director, Spiritual Life & Intercultural Education, NYU Abu Dhabi
Schools and Charity version of BaFa’ BaFa’
We offer a Masters in International Education for teachers in International Schools around the world. The instructor for one of the courses called Intercultural Communications wants to use it with her class. She has seen it before and wants to take advantage of it.
The class is very multicultural with teachers from many different countries participating.
From the Dean of an international university program in Madrid, Spain.