How can we transform cultural diversity into valuable resources at home?
The first question when we were in class was: Is something wrong with the diversity? I think that there isn’t anything wrong with it, maybe we are the problem. Maybe we don’t accept the diversity as much as we think, because we always are trying to be like the others; the same clothes, the same haircut, the same... In the classes at school happens the same. Everybody try to be with the people that they konw, with the people who is familiar for them. We us educators have to try to mix between them. So if we are working in a multicultural class we should organize the groups because if not everyone will go with they know, they won’t be mixed. In this way, we get that everyone will be included in the group, so there won’t be exclusion in our class. Also we must show what is diversity to the childrens.
The first question when we were in class was: Is something wrong with the diversity? I think that there isn’t anything wrong with it, maybe we are the problem. Maybe we don’t accept the diversity as much as we think, because we always are trying to be like the others; the same clothes, the same haircut, the same... In the classes at school happens the same. Everybody try to be with the people that they konw, with the people who is familiar for them. We us educators have to try to mix between them. So if we are working in a multicultural class we should organize the groups because if not everyone will go with they know, they won’t be mixed. In this way, we get that everyone will be included in the group, so there won’t be exclusion in our class. Also we must show what is diversity to the childrens.
Brainstorm of diversity: DIFERENCES (looks, religion, traditions, behavior, personality...), language, social class, political believes, multicultural, education, age, way of thinking, nationalities, sexuality...
In this way, we also have to make easy the diversity in the class. If we are in a class where someone is excluded there is no diversity. We have to be sure that everybody can have a relationwork with everybody. We have to be sure that we are in a possible learning enviroment to everyone. This is only the educator work. It’s the teacher responsability to include each child in the class. We must start the process that the students become familiar with the cultural diversity and motivate them to know and apply it more and more in their lifes. We can use the Bank’s level of integration for it. For example, if there is a new boy from Africa in our class, following the levels that he describes:
- The contributions approach: maybe we can make a little project about
- The additive approach: we can celebrate different holidays of different traditions in class or maybe we can do a food festival.
- The transformation approach: we have to adapt part of the curriculum for this child.
- the social action approach: we have to change all the curriculum to integrate this child.
Finally, I think that it’s important for the educators to view learning enviroments from other countries that deal with diversity more often. So we can use some good ideas from them to integrate the diversity into our class and into our evry day life. The diversity should be utilized to the benefit ot all so we have to use all methods and techniques available to us, to make it easier for us and the students, like we saw in class making a story in our own language for example, so we can be more confident and motivated for learn. Here is a proposal of a classroom poster for the children on how to appreciate diversity.
I have choosen this one because it's an image for children and it seems very well what is diversity, I think.
Here is another picture that maybe we can use in a classroom for teenagers, because is more formal. In the picture there is a text, it means: " Diversity, the privilege of a whole life is being who you are". It is relationated also with your own identity. Your own identity gives to the group diversity. So I think that this is a good sentence also to finish my blog and to resume what I have learned in this course.
