Chapter 5: Diversity in Education

I've always been shown multicultural education as "content integration" so I've had a bit of a hard time making sense of what the chapter is suggesting is actual multicultural education. I remember when I was working at the preschool on of the teachers made a comment about how the school feels like it promotes multiculturalism because it serves cheese quesadillas once a month. She always said things like, "Yes, because all Mexicans just eat quesadillas." I totally get what she is saying and agree with her but I'm not sure I've totally figured out how you move from just including a few connections to a culture and minimizing it in that way to something more. I think in our SpEd article about math it talked about a teacher who had students research how certain mathematical ideas originated in Africa. Would this be considered content integration or is this more appropriate?

We talked about the idea of being "color blind" in our sociology class and it reminded me of a class I took in high school called Dignity in Diversity. I think there is value in helping students recognize that we do come from different cultural backgrounds and that just because someone doesn't act like a middle-class white student doesn't make them deficient. Understanding is really important and certainly cooperative learning opportunities would be helpful in promoting that. I remember when I first moved to Anchorage I was befriended by a couple of African American girls. I'm pretty sure I was the only white kid hanging out in their group at the time. They teased me a lot and I always felt like I was an outsider. I now understand that teasing is actually part of the African American culture and they probably weren't trying to be mean to me but were actually including me and treating me like a friend. I think I told you that my high school right now is only 40% Caucasian (out of about 2000 students). I'm not sure of the exact stats from when I was there (10 years ago!) but I'm sure they were similar. Even in such a diverse school, we were incredibly segregated. We had 6 floors and each racial group took a different floor to hang on. The African American kids hung out in yellow hall. The Laotian kids hung out on the other side of yellow hall. The Asian kids hung out on one end of blue hall. And so on... The white kids were either potheads in green hall, jocks in purple hall or ROTC in orange hall. I'm not sure if this is normal or not, but we had security guards that roamed the halls during the school. The Dignity in Diversity class was started because we had so many racial tensions in our school.

I did think it was really important that the text pointed out that we need to exercise caution when learning about other cultures because membership in a certain group doesn't determine behavior but simply suggests that certain behaviors are probable. For example, people often assume that Christians always vote Republican. I, on the other hand, am a Christian and vote Democrat. So we do have to be careful that developing understanding doesn't turn into believing stereotypes.

I was really amazed at the stories in the section about stereotype risk. The power of the mind is really incredible. The fact that telling a male student something like, "Oh, men typically don't do well on this test," can actually impact their test score is incredible. I've heard this in relation to health issues as well. Telling a person that they are taking a medication that will relieve headaches will often actually relieve headaches even though the pill is actually a placebo. It's more about the person's belief in the pill than the actual medicine in the pill. When I think of that in relation to stereotypes, it helps me see how important it is to believe in all my students and demonstrate that to them. No student should fail simply because someone else believes they will!