Teaching DEI: Rolling with Resistance

With the turbulence rocking both US higher education and global corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, instructors who teach DEI in business schools may feel unsettled. The abrupt reversal of support observed in many regions during 2025, along with increasing disinhibition of critics, raises the following two urgent questions:

1. What approaches are most effective for enhancing the capacity of both willing and wary learners to engage with DEI concepts and challenges in business organizations?
2. How can DEI educators individually and collectively foster resilience while navigating shifting classroom and institutional dynamics?

To enable sharing resources that address these questions, the John F. Wood Center of the Ivey Business School at Western University hosted a conference on May 12‑13, 2026. The annual gathering, co-sponsored this year by Columbia Business School and Harvard Business School, invites leading DEI scholars and instructors from top business schools.

In May 2026, the organizing committee consisted of: Modupe Akinola (Columbia Business School), Heather Maiirhe Caruso (UCLA Anderson School of Business), Erin Kelly (MIT Sloan School of Management), Zoe Kinias (Ivey), and Michael Norton (Harvard Business School). Along with the organizers, a total of 23 educators from 14 business schools came together to exchange educational philosophies, teaching practices, and classroom tools.

Honoring inclusive practices in Canada, Kinias as host opened by acknowledging the original indigenous caretakers of the lands where the meeting was held. She invited participants to reflect on the evolving relationships among human and natural systems and technology, as well as educators’ and business leaders’ roles as caretakers.

Organizer Akinola traced the origins of the group to a three-day conference initiated by the late Katherine W. Phillips at Columbia Business School in 2019 to exchange strategies and resources for teaching DEI. Akinola gave an overview of the seven annual main gatherings since the inaugural conference. Each year, demo sessions and shared classroom resources seek to bridge research and emerging classroom needs, while opportunities for both formal and informal peer exchange bolster personal resources. Akinola described the group ethos as intentional alignment around the belief that teaching DEI is an educational activity with a greater real-world purpose.

Creating Connections to Foster Learning

The annual convening provides a live laboratory for participants to practice what we teach. Organizers included two activities designed to increase connection and promote exchange within the group. An open-ended two-minute check-in provided an opportunity for voluntary self-disclosure, a technique DEI educators could use at the start of a course or an individual session to encourage participants to begin to practice self-reflection and vulnerability.

Another rapport-building activity, the Fast Friends exercise, is adapted from the work of Art Aron and colleagues. As Caruso noted when introducing the activity, it is designed to help participants recognize that being intentional about discussing personally meaningful topics can deepen interpersonal connection. For teaching DEI, these types of exchanges foster the openness and trust necessary for more challenging conversations.

Designing Effective DEI Courses for Tricky Climates

As classroom learners in many locations become more vocal in expressing skepticism and resistance, the working group views course architecture as an essential topic. Accordingly, Martin N. Davidson (UVA Darden School of Business) led a session on “Designing an Outstanding DEI Course.” Davidson noted the importance of the instructional context when selecting specific course elements while offering important principles that span settings.

Davidson believes instructors should endeavor to educate every student who enrolls in a course, and that the primary lever for doing so is building a genuinely rigorous and open classroom culture. He encourages faculty to set clear learning objectives paired with behavioral guardrails, such as maintaining confidentiality, assuming positive intent, and holding students accountable when impact is more hurtful than intended. Naming these expectations early benefits students, the professor, and the learning itself. Even so, he acknowledges that, in times of heightened tension, bringing the requisite care and respect – “love and heart” – to every student isn’t always easy.

When, however, the class culture is well established, enforcing rigid behavioral rules becomes less necessary: students begin to hold one another accountable. This peer accountability matters because, when tension rises, the professor often becomes the target of student aggression. Faculty from historically marginalized groups, in particular, are frequently on the front lines of student confusion, frustration, and fear. Davidson doesn’t believe course design can eliminate these reactions entirely, but a well-designed course and classroom culture keep them in check, producing a healthier, more productive experience for students and for him as the professor.

In Davidson’s experience, the most effective courses situate DEI-related learning within the broader business school context. He, therefore, suggests using an overarching leadership model that guides the narrative arc of the course and allows instructors to connect difference and diversity to other concepts business students are learning. He suggests balancing conceptual and judgment-based learning with experiential and skills-based learning.

Effective DEI courses also enable participants to engage in critical thinking about DEI and “develop practical leadership skills [they] can use immediately.” Accordingly, Davidson challenges instructors to create “genuine contested conversations early.” He led attendees through a classroom role-play that uses pro-DEI and anti-DEI prompts to foster debates that reveal anti-DEI arguments. For Davidson, the goal is to legitimize opposition to DEI, which allows instructors and participants to deconstruct common criticisms.

Teaching DEI for Sustainable Impact

Bridging course architecture and educator resilience, Laura Morgan Roberts (UVA Darden School of Business) led a session based on her Four Freedoms framework. Like Davidson, she connects her Four Freedoms to broader leadership concepts and behaviors. Morgan Roberts indicated that her intended outcome for DEI education and interventions is to promote “flourishing” at work. Developing both a classroom learning objective and a desired real-world impact may help instructors with their course design.

Morgan Roberts opened her demo by immersing conference attendees in a reflective learning activity using the question: “Where do you feel most free?” In the classroom, Morgan Roberts uses Socratic questioning to guide participants toward identifying obstacles and disparities in experiencing freedom in the workplace. She also uses micro-cases (one-slide narratives) that illustrate how well-known individuals embrace the Four Freedoms. Micro-cases allow instructors to quickly make abstract concepts more concrete for learners.

A powerful question from Akinola (“Who is policing the freedoms?”) elicited additional insights into how educators might use the framework as a course design model as well as a diagnostic tool for individuals and organizations. At the individual level Morgan Roberts reminded participants that, to be effective change agents and promote our own flourishing, educators and those we seek to educate must confront the question: “What is the inner work that is confining us?”

Challenging Institutional Norms through Teaching DEI

Several sessions invited those teaching DEI to examine and, where possible, reshape norms within the broader academy or our institutions.

Norton led a workshopping discussion during which he invited participants to reflect on whether standard academic mentoring may thwart both institutional inclusion and individual well-being. He suggested generative mentoring might focus on helping mentees achieve Morgan Roberts’ Four Freedoms. New forms of mentor engagement could include coaching-type behaviors (such as powerful questioning to unpack assumptions), deliberate self-disclosure relevant to the mentee’s specific needs, and modeling failure rather than concealing it.

Hayden Woodley (Ivey) led brief demos of two cases that allow educators to challenge norms in more subtle ways. The first, Goldman Sachs: Are You Burnt-In or Burnt-Out?, focuses on a student’s decision about whether to accept an offer from the investment bank. The dilemma has broad resonance on ‘fit’ within an organization, while the social identity of the protagonist can open an exploration of deeper issues relating to individual pressures and choices. Woodley pushes the discussion further, challenging learners to develop “contextual awareness” about implicit norms among business students, faculty and leaders in hopes of, shifting students’ ideas about possible selves and careers.

His second case, Facing the Music: Diego’s Strategic Decision, portrays father and daughter business owners facing a strategic decision. Woodley emphasized that it can be taught as a “normal” strategic decision-making case, focusing on the strategic thinking styles of each protagonist. Nevertheless, the social identities of the protagonists – a founder who faced barriers after immigrating to Canada and his daughter co-leading the business – allow an examination of assumptions about diversity, inequity, and social norms.

Woodley’s advice to educators considering producing teaching cases is to place protagonists from non-majority backgrounds in scenarios related to standard business school topics rather than restricting such protagonists to cases with explicitly DEI-related challenges. He also urges case authors to recount the richness of their protagonists’ narratives to encourage a more complex understanding of all business contributors and leaders.

Three practice-based “flash talks” highlighted classroom and curricular innovations for developing human-centered leadership capacities. Danielle Carr (Manager Culture and Inclusion Learning at Ivey) presented a co-curricular experience that creates conditions for students to rehearse ethical judgment, ambiguity tolerance, and other leadership qualities by being more deliberate about embodying their “learning selves” instead of reflexively performing competence as their “LinkedIn selves.” As a conference participant, I, Felicia A. Henderson, introduced an approach I designed using literary fiction to practice foundational empathy skills. My facilitated “reading and leading” sessions provide a less threatening setting for participants to reflect on how lived experience and identity shape ability to empathize across difference. Caruso overviewed the ECHO framework developed at UCLA Anderson. The series of seven co-curricular workshops is structured to empower participants to Engage in meaningful dialogue with Courage, Humility, and Openness.

Finally, three research-based “flash talks” shared empirical work that contributes to new understandings. Tianna Barnes (Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth) reviewed her series of studies on identity threat and role clarity, felt confidence, and social integration among organizational newcomers. Her work illuminates the implications of threatening experiences for adjustment perceptions and the extensiveness of these effects for many different personal identifiers. Stephanie Creary (Wharton) presented research examining how members of boards of directors enact diversity voice – the ways they raise concerns, offer perspectives, and influence deliberations on diversity issues. Her work sheds light on the interpersonal and board dynamics that shape whether, when, and how board members speak up. In a third research flash talk, Barnini Bhattacharyya (Ivey) provided an overview of her work on identity transitions focused on factors influencing how immigrants with dominant identity dimensions in their country of origin navigate social identity hierarchies in their country of residence.

Inviting Engagement from Reluctant Learners

Two sessions focused on concrete tools for introducing and deepening discussions of DEI where learners may be reluctant.

Sora Jun (Rice Business) demonstrated “By the Numbers,” an activity she developed for her Leading Across Differences course to enhance awareness about the ongoing relevance of DEI. The quiz contains questions covering the historical expansion of legal equality and present-day representation in various aspects of US society. Jun observes that her reveal of the real answers and the distribution of student responses makes structural inequity more concrete and, even, visceral for students. To minimize the potential that participants experience the quiz results as threatening, Morgan Roberts and Kinias suggest that educators include identity-affirming pre-work, such the Reflected Best Self activity.

I led an abbreviated demo of the March 2026 case “The Forced Kiss that Rattled Women’s Football” (Henderson, Snellman, Medina Bardalez). Our case uses a notorious incident at the 2023 Women’s World Cup to prompt engaged discussions of the challenges of reporting and sanctioning toxic behaviors in the workplace. Many learners will have strong negative views of FIFA and its leadership, which stirs real debates about the possibilities for advancing gender equity and broader culture change in a tough organizational environment.

Coming together to engage with each other’s rich insights and innovative tools and practices empowered the community to recharge for the year ahead, leaving participants feeling ready to roll with the ever-evolving dynamics of Teaching DEI.