Overall, I believe having a diverse environment, particularly when it comes to literature is extremely important to allow each child to feel represented, and included in the classroom.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Diversity in Classroom
Having a diverse classroom environment is extremely important in order to allow children from diverse cultures and backgrounds to feel included, but also to introduce your students to different ways of life that they may not be familiar with. Having a diverse classroom opens up your students eyes to the world around them. Different ways to incorporate diverse cultures into your classroom is through making sure you practice an anti-biased perspective. By doing this, as a teacher, you will not feel biased against any particular race or ethnicity, and make sure to give equal representation to all groups. Having a diverse classroom environment can include doing and having many things. Making sure that children have different colors of crayons that relate to skin color is important, because not everyone's skin looks like the tan from the Crayola box. In terms of literacy, having diverse types of literature is important. Some children do not have a standard nuclear family, and when they can only read about this family in your classroom, they begin to question why they are different. In one particular instance, in my Fce320 placement, a children had two mothers. She was very upset when reading a book about a mother and a dad because she could not relate to that family. The teacher promptly placed a book about a child having two mommies, and the child felt included again. Another way to have a diverse classroom environment is by placing posters around the room that represent different races and cultures. A teacher may choose to have a bulletin board filled with different languages. In a classroom for my FCE321 class, a teacher has how to say "hello" in different languages on a bulletin board. Furthermore, when reading books to students, it is important for the teacher to engage conversations about the books. 'Book talks' are extremely important because, according to McGee, "through talk children fine-tune ways of thinking about and interpreting literature." Therefore, when we use diverse literature, as a group, we can discuss this literature and begin to understand the different backgrounds that this book represents. McGee also discusses "response centered talk" where he describes "readers can share their own understandings and insights" which is also important when discussing how to make a classroom diverse. In this instance, children can discuss how their families and background are different or alike to the ones being discussed in the books.
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I really enjoyed reading your blog entry because I learned different activities in the classroom that I could use to discuss diversity as a wonderful thing. I particularly enjoyed your idea where children could all use different colored crayons in activities. You could tie that into a lesson geared towards younger children specifically because sometimes diversity may be hard to explain and discuss. However, the different colored crayons could visually demonstrate that even though each crayon has a different name and color, all of the crayons belong to the box as a whole. Although teachers can do all that they can in school to express the positive aspects of diversity, there are always going to be children who share stories about how their households handle diversity differently. How could you deal with children who have racist parents or families that degrade certain groups of people?
I also enjoyed your classroom example of making the little girl who has two moms feel important by showing her a book that she could relate to. I know that in modern times, there are many different types of people with very different backgrounds. There are often schools, libraries, and parents that disagree with having controversial material in the classroom. How would you convince stubborn people that it is best for students in the classroom to be exposed to diverse literature? I agree with you in the importance of having a diverse style of teaching that can help students learn, relate, and discuss the positives of diversity in the world.
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