An Insight Into Cultural Diversity in Education
When it comes to cultural diversity, a common misconception is that embracing diversity is primarily important due to changing ethnic and cultural demographics in the wider world around us. While this is somewhat true, Western countries have largely embraced multiculturalism over the past two decades. This, in turn, allows people to experience day to day social interaction with people from different ethnic cultures, traditions and religious backgrounds.
However, promoting cultural diversity in education isn’t just about instilling people with respect and appreciation of people of different cultural, religious and gender identities. As has been the case over the past twenty years, workforces around the world are set to become even more globalized in the future. Cultural diversity in education is, therefore, key to imbuing people with better potential to succeed later in life within the workplace.
Challenges to Educators
Of course, many educators teach not only the importance of cultural diversity, but also teach classes made up of students from a diverse range of backgrounds. With this in mind, educators are faced with a variety of challenges.
Firstly, there is the challenge of engaging with a mix of students directly. Secondly, young children especially are often predisposed to forming classic in-group and out-group behavior. In this case, although most students are willing to readily embrace traditional educational concepts, it is also true that young students can manifest involuntary exclusion behavior and apprehension when confronted by people, ideas and certain forms of behavior which they themselves are not familiar with.
In classes, for example, predominantly composed of one group, students of a minority group can sometimes manifest in-group behavior in response to perceived threats of being the so-called odd ones out. In the meantime, educators have to take care to show appreciation of each student's individual value, whilst not being perceived as favoring or affording more attention to one group over another. Malcolm Forbes once said, “Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.” and when it comes to cultural diversity within education, his quote still stands.
Lastly then, educators need to ideally facilitate a universal learning pace, whilst also facing the potential challenge of some students not having the same mother tongue and/or having more difficulty than others in communicating and understanding certain concepts. Therefore, it is highly important to have set rules instilled in the classroom. These can include:
- Setting clear rules as to how people should be treated
- Challenging negative attitudes
- Treating every individual equally whether a student or teacher
- Establishing an all-inclusive learning environment for staff and students
- Avoiding stereotypes in teaching materials
- Actively promoting multiculturalism in class
- Ensuring policies and procedures do not discriminate against anyone – students and teachers alike.
Ways for Educators to Challenge Classic In-group and Out-group Behavior
Addressing the first and second points, there are a variety of ways educators can challenge the formation of classic in-group and out-group behavior, the most powerful of which is through promoting in-class discussion about different students' backgrounds. A student telling a story or giving a presentation on their life is one-way such discussion can be fostered. Likewise, if participation in such an activity is extended to all students, students are less likely to develop a sense of one group or one person's story being identified as more important that anybody else's.
A second powerful way in which educators can help students embrace cultural diversity is by teaching students about different multicultural role models. Also, by presenting role models such as Gandhi and Malcolm X in the context of people's shared histories, (as well as the positive impact such people had on society as a collective) students can come to understand just how powerfully people from different cultures can benefit society.
Communicating Better with Parents
At the same time, educators need to be aware of potential challenges students might face in their home life. Prejudices, for example, can easily be passed onto children via outside influences. Likewise, if language or cultural barriers are perceived to exist between teachers and parents, parents may be less inclined to approach educators if they feel that their child has a problem.
In this case, it is important for educators to communicate with students' parents and make them aware of the fact that they are approachable. It’s also important for educators to be able to communicate with parents in order to ascertain if students are in need of extra learning support.
Teaching the Importance of Individual Cultural Identity
Another often underappreciated challenge facing educators is that which rests with teaching students to take pride in their own cultural identity. Indeed, whilst celebrating multicultural views and ideals in the classroom help engender mutual respect and appreciation between students of different cultural backgrounds, it is also the case that students can occasionally feel inclined to forgo their own cultural identity in order to better fit in.
When this happens, students can be faced with disconnecting from their wider family and community members outside of school. Resulting in subsequent social and emotional challenges for students, educators can avoid this by encouraging students to investigate and learn more about their own cultural heritage. There are a number of fun classroom activities that can explore the different cultural identities. Games such as true or false, exploration of ‘stereotypes’ and name the origin of the song can help classes interact with one another while learning.
Teaching Students About Stereotyping
Just as importantly, educators should always take a proactive approach to tackling negative cultural stereotypes. Primarily it’s important to help all students understand what stereotyping is and the negative impact stereotyping often has on certain groups and society as a whole. One way this can be achieved is by identifying historic incidences in which a person or group of people have been forced to suffer adversity, simply because of being marginalized and stereotyped in a certain way. Some famous examples of this include black slavery and the holocaust.
Working With Other Educators and Learning Resource Providers
Of course, approaching cultural diversity in education can be much more difficult in practice. It is easy for educators to feel that they are involuntary showing bias towards one group, or are not succeeding in helping student’s foster less classic in-group and out-group behavior. Moreover, educators need to be careful not to make cultural diversity the topic of a classroom, at the expense of actual academic learning.
In this case, it is important that teachers themselves know who they can reach out to for assistance. Whether, in the form of advice from fellow educators who are more familiar with engaging with students from a diverse range of backgrounds, or in the form of dedicated learning materials, good educators will know where and when to reach out should they ever feel the need to.