Good news

I wondered if this might be an appropriate place to post straight forward good experiences? Where we can share those things which have encouraged and reassured us that the human race will get through? Anyway, I'm going to....

I teach in a University based in the City of London, and my students have their ethnic roots in every corner of the world. All students on my course are organised into 'Learning Support Groups', of about eight members each. As part of their course these students, who are all HR professionals, are taken to France for a week to get first hand experience of a European approach to HR, so that they can contrast it with the Anglo-American form of HR they learn in London. (It's interesting that I only have to take them across a 26 mile stretch of water to experience a system quite unlike what they're used to, but that's another story.)

Each year the students make the most of French nightlife in the few evenings we allow them time off, and one year recently in Paris one Learning Support Group took itself off to a bar on the Left Bank where I understand they had a thoroughly enjoyable time, starting the dancing, and some communal singing. The following morning they commented how fascinated the French locals in the bar had been by their diversity - the group included people whose ethnic origins lay in southern Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa. They were asked time and time again how they all came to be together, and the students reported back to me that it was obviously a phenomenon that delighted the locals. They bought the students countless drinks, asked them to dance, and wanted to become part of their group for the evening.

I wondered if the same thing would have happened in other less multicultural parts of Britain. My students seemed to be of the optmistic opinion it would.

I suppose, working in a successful multicultural environment as I do, I tend to take a lot of things for granted, but it was lovely to hear how other people, who don't seem to have had the opportunity so far for whatever reason, would like to be able to take it for granted as well.

Helen