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Culture the Change Collective

Cultural Capital: How Companies Rob Employees

This workshop is designed to both guide participants through the concept of insider trading, as it applies to systems of employment, and to offer ways in which leadership can actively value and use the skills employees bring with them to increase ROI. To help participants through this journey, we will use Paolo Friere’s banking metaphor where employees are the customers and investors, the office setting is the bank, leadership, and colleagues are the bankers, and wealth/capital is analogous to skills and promotions. The premise of the session is based on a basic proposition: minoritized individuals come to work rich in cultural capital; however, during their workday, some employees seem to earn more wealth while others seem to lose it. Simply put, the game of work is rigged.  Participants will leave with greater insights into how they might contribute to insider trading themselves.

Participants engage in experiential play based on Systems Thinking (Senge, 2015) and Cultural Capital (Yosso, 2013). The first layer goal of the game is to accumulate the most wealth possible. On a deeper level, the goal is to identify and interrogate systemic educational structures that misappropriate student ‘wealth’ and ultimately prevent rigor and learning. Each player takes on a student identity through which they navigate school-based scenarios. With every round players have to decide if they gain or lose trust and connectedness with school. Each move invites players to confront their own racial, class, gender, and ethnic stereotypes. Throughout game play there are intervals where players can make connections between the virtual world and the real world. In the end, participants are encouraged to see how the game of school is rigged. Which begs the question: How does one build their capacity to create more inclusive learning opportunities for all students?