Majoria-Minoria: An Effective Intercultural Skills Workshop for Engineering Students

Research Paper Recommended citation: McKennedy, J., Beagon, U., Morgan, M., Henry, R., & Jani, R. (2025). Majoria-Minoria: An Effective Intercultural Skills Workshop for Engineering Students. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631467. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. MINORIA-MAJORIA: AN EFFECTIVE INTERCULTURAL SKILLS WORKSHOP FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS J. McKennedy a,1, U. Beagon b, R. Jani c, M. Morgan d, R. Henry e a Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, ORCID 0000-0003-0565-6116 b Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, ORCID 0000-0001-6789-7009 c Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, ORCID 0000-0002-0080-8494 d Ulster University Belfast, United Kingdom ORCID 0000-0002-6827-031X e Ulster University Belfast, United Kingdom ORCID 0009-0006-7442-633X Conference Key Areas: Diversity, equity and inclusion in our universities and in our teaching, Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills Keywords: Intercultural skills, Summer School, Engineering Education for Sustainable Development, Professional skills ABSTRACT The skills that are required for engineers to meet the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the 21st century are different to those learned by traditional engineering students. One skill which has been identified as a requirement is an Intercultural competence. As part of the PROFESS 12 research project, the intercultural workshop Minoria - Majoria was facilitated with a group of 20 students: 10 from TU Dublin and 10 from Ulster University. The purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate the skills required in intercultural negotiations. Seven different nationalities were represented in the workshop. One of the valuable outcomes reported was that students learned that listening was a useful tool to manage misunderstanding. Both qualitative and quantitative feedback demonstrated that the intercultural skills learning outcomes were met. This paper provides a template for this workshop to be used with engineering students worldwide. 1 Corresponding Author Initials Last name J McKennedy e-mail address [email protected] 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Literature Review Intercultural competence has been defined as the ability to negotiate and interact effectively and appropriately in diverse cultural situations (Deardorff and Arasaratnam-Smith, 2017) in terms of behaviour, with cognitive awareness and empathy (Mahadevan, 2010). In a recent survey, intercultural skills were identified as one of 53 skills required for engineers to achieve the SDGs (Beagon et al. 2022). It has been acknowledged that intercultural competences have become integral to the education of a successful engineer. There was a lack of awareness of intercultural skills in engineering students by Yu (2012). Mills et al. (2010) espoused the incorporation of various levels of intercultural awareness into engineering programs to provide an inclusive engineering education for undergraduates. Different intercultural aspects are addressed by Mahadevan (2010): societal, functional, institutional – all of which have an impact on the work of an engineer. Similar to the work presented in this paper, De Jong & Warmelink (2017) used a role-play workshop with engineering undergraduates to effectively teach intercultural skills. To date there have been some different approaches to incorporating intercultural competencies in engineering undergraduate programmes. Mahadevan (2010) embedded it into their international engineering programme incorporating seminars and a foreign work placement. At Ohio State University, intercultural competence was incorporated into a capstone project (Sours, 2023). Intercultural workshops have been used extensively and effectively for at least 50 years to develop the required skills for the development of this competence (Ruben, 1976). Over that time the concept has developed. The value of intercultural workshops prior to any international student placements has been acknowledged by many academics (Dorzhinova and Mantusov, 2019; Rico-García and Fielden Burns, 2020) as well as with engineering students specifically (Berka et al. 2021, Paterson et al. 2016). The workshop used here, Majoria Minoria, was developed by Kohls and Knight (1994) around the premise of economic negotiations between two fictitious nations with unequal wealth and resources. It has been used in a wide range of scenarios since then and has been praised for its open-ended structure (Fowler and Pusch, 2010). 1.2 Background to the project The PROFESS 12 project was a joint initiative between Ulster University in Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK and TU Dublin in Ireland. Funded by the Higher Education Authority (HEA), its principal aim was to improve cultural relationships between North and South and build connections between researchers, academics and students in each jurisdiction. Hence a five-day summer school was designed with ten student participants from each university and was hosted in each location with travel and accommodation fully funded by the project. The first 2.5 days of this week-long school were held in TU Dublin and the second half of the week was hosted by Ulster University. The intercultural workshop formed part of the first half of the programme. The objective of the exercise was to make participants aware of the importance of intercultural skills and met a key aim of the funding call, addressing intercultural skills required to meet the SDGs. The objective of the exercise was to make participants aware of the importance of intercultural skills. The Minoria Majoria workshop addresses the concept of Ethnocentrism where judgements about other cultures are made from the perspectives of one’s own culture and the impact that that can have. The research questions addressed in this paper were (1) What are students’ perceptions on the effectiveness of an Intercultural workshop? and (2) What is the impact of using a workshop pedagogy to develop undergraduate intercultural competence? 2 METHODOLOGY 2.1 Ethical Approval An ethical approval application was approved by the Research Ethics and Integrity Committee, TU Dublin for the delivery and evaluation of the summer school in May 2023. 2.2 Approach A workshop was designed based on the previously developed Minoria-Majoria simulation (Kohls & Knight, 1994). The learning outcomes that were addressed in this session were (1) to appreciate the similarities and respect the differences in how people from diverse cultures perceive things (2) to raise awareness of our reactions in conflict and communication styles. An outline of the lesson plan used is presented in Table 1 below. Table 1:Lesson Plan for delivery of Majoria-Minoria workshop Timing Content/Activity Introduction: 10 minutes 1. Explain to the group that they’re going to participate in a game called “Minoria-Majoria.” The game centres around helping people from other countries. 2. Divide the group in two. Allow them to pick their country from a hat. Half the group will be Majorians from the “country” of Majoria and half will be Minorians from the “country” of Minoria. 3. Send the Majorians and one facilitator to another room, the “country” of Majoria. Have the Minorians stay in the original room, the “country” of Minoria. The facilitators in each room should pass out the appropriate instruction sheets, and other supplies. 4. Give the teams about 2 minutes to review their instructions. Then have the Minorian facilitator tell the Minorians that they have 20 minutes to plan an independence celebration for their country and decide how to greet the Majorians when they arrive. Have the Majorian facilitator tell the Majorians they have 10 minutes to plan how to help the Minorians. 10 minutes: Develop strategy 1. After 10 minutes, have the Majorians “arrive” in Minoria. If the Minorians protest that they’re not ready for the visit, the Majorian facilitator should explain that the Majorians must stick to a tight schedule because of funding regulations. 30 minutes: Negotiate 1. Allow up to 30 minutes for the groups to negotiate and discuss the situation as their country representatives. 30 minutes: Feedback to other country and discussion/reflection .1 Ask both Minorians and Majorians to stay with their respective countries. 2. Now ask the Majorians to describe the Minorians’ culture. Write the Majorians’ comments on flipchart and don’t allow the Minorians to speak. 4. Next, let each group respond to the other group’s description. Note whether the descriptions are positive or negative and why. 5. Ask a representative from each group to describe his or her group’s culture and original task to the other group. 6. Ask both groups to vote on which group they’d want to be a part of in real life. Open discussion There were 20 members in the group and they were split into two groups of 10. The original exercise stated that the citizens from each country were to make and wear armbands of different colours to identify where they came from. This was not considered necessary in this iteration. There were 7 different nationalities represented in the workshop: 11 Irish, 4 British, 1 Portuguese, 1 Chinese, 1 Mongolian, 1 Tanzanian, 1 Nigerian. The instructions for each “country” were given as per the original exercise by Kohls and Knight (1994). At the end of the workshop the prompt question that was used was “Would you prefer to be from Minoria or Majoria?” This generated a rich, open discussion around the participants perceptions of the workshop and their own experience of cultural diversity was enabled. In order to evaluate the impact of the workshop and other elements of the summer school, aural and written data were collected from all the participants. The audio from the workshop and the subsequent discussions were recorded. Qualitative survey questions were developed based on the learning outcomes. Students’ survey responses and reflections were analysed. These provided both quantitative and qualitative data. 3 FINDINGS In this iteration of the workshop the timing worked perfectly. One hour and twenty minutes was allowed for the workshop. This allowed for the participants to engage with the material, to share their own personal experiences of interculturalism and reflect on their own personal intercultural perspectives and their perspectives of the workshop. As with any group, there were a wide range of personalities present in the group and this workshop allowed for all those present to contribute. A survey using a 5-point Likert scale was used to determine if students felt they had met the learning outcomes for the workshop. A range of statements relating to the learning outcomes were presented and options from strongly agree to strongly disagree were provided. The responses given for the intercultural skills related statements are presented in table 2. These data show that students agreed or strongly agreed with the statements presented with the exception of one respondent who provided a “neutral” response to the statement “Be more aware of my reactions in conflict and communication style”. There were no disagree or strongly disagree responses. The median response for all 4 questions asked was “Strongly agree”. These statements were designed to evaluate students’ own perceptions on how their intercultural skills had developed and how much more comfortable they were to engage with intercultural scenarios. Table 2: Student Responses on Intercultural Skills Development Feedback Strongly Agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree Collaborate with students from diverse backgrounds 15 (78.9%) 4 (21.1%) 0 0 0 Appreciate the similarities & respect differences in how people from diverse cultures perceive things 15 (78.9%) 4 (21.1%) 0 0 0 Be more aware of my reactions in conflict and communication style 11 (57.9%) 7 (36.8%) 1 (5.3%) 0 0 I have more awareness of intercultural skills 13 (68.4%) 6 (31.6%) 0 0 0 Qualitative data was collected at the end of the summer school when students were asked to reflect on the question: “I see you did something on intercultural skills, can you tell me what you learned from that”? Participants recorded their reflections orally. Below are representative samples of the responses from that question. Space does not allow all of the responses to be included: “cultural diversity was discussed, highlighting how culture varies from country to country and the importance of adapting to different cultures”; “need to foster positive interactions with individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds, and the importance of understanding and respecting diverse cultural norms and practices. By promoting cultural diversity, the program aimed to create an environment that fosters inclusivity and promotes international understanding”; “I learned that different people have different perceptions of a subject and a specific situation”; “Basically respect, communication actually being able to listen and speak clearly and present your ideas in an efficient way”, “you could actually see and feel the moment and how different cultures can effect (sic) a person and how conversation can lead a completely different way if there is a misunderstanding”; “we were 20 different people different mindsets and different cultures from Brazil, China, Nigeria, so from there on we can also say that yes, it was really intercultural”. These responses represent the development of intercultural skills and awareness through the medium of the workshop along with the diversity of nationalities participating in the summer school. From the first sample response above, the respondent indicated appreciation of the cultural differences by “the importance of understanding and respecting diverse cultural norms”. Additionally, both respondents used the word “respect” in their reflections, a perspective which is fundamental to any intercultural awareness. Interestingly, as can be seen in the second response the facilitators observed that the students started using words such as “we are the majority” or “but we have to help the minority” subconsciously reflecting the impact that words or titles can have on one’s preconceptions. Both the quantitative and qualitative responses demonstrate that the learning outcomes of appreciating similarities and respecting differences in how people from diverse cultures perceive things and raising awareness of our reactions in conflict and communication styles were achieved. The qualitative responses display rich experiential learning gained by students from their involvement. SUMMARY In summary, the Minoria – Majoria intercultural workshop was used in our summer school for engineering students on the island of Ireland in an effective manner to teach the intercultural competence required for engineers of the future. This can easily be used with another group of engineering students although the diversity of nationalities and personalities present in our group certainly added to the learning gained. The workshop could be modified to incorporate the impact of intercultural differences specifically in an engineering context. This paper examines how societal and national intercultural awareness is used to develop the cognizance and skills identified by Mahadevan (2010) in the summer school participants. The student perceptions of this workshop demonstrates that the learning outcomes were met and that this workshop can be used as an effective way to teach intercultural skills. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to acknowledge the HEA, DFHERIS and the Shared Island Fund for support of this project under the North South Research Programme. Co-funded by the European Union under Grant Number 2023-1-PL01-KA220-HED000165199. Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author or authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Foundation for the Development of the Education System. Neither the European Union nor the entity providing the grant can be held responsible for them. We would also like to thank all students who were involved in the summer school for their engagement and open and honest feedback and the companies who hosted the site visits. REFERENCES Beagon, U., Kövesi, K., Tabas, B., Nørgaard, B., Lehtinen, R., Bowe, B., Gillet, C. & Monrad, C. 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