Diversity Training for Classroom Teaching: A Manual for Students and Educators

Students’ cognitive, social, and emotional functioning and development is to a large extent culturally, socially, and contextually based. It is critical that educators become familiar with recognizing the numerous ecological influences of cultural diversity on American educational systems. Educational systems have in many ways operated without a strong awareness of a multicultural context and there is much to change at individual, institutional, and systemic levels. Due to rapidly changing demographics in America’s schools, successful educators will be those who can work effectively and proactively with diverse students. Diversity Training for Classroom Teaching: A Manual for Students and Educators is a resource guide geared to help educators create classroom communities that respond to diversity. Current United States national policy mandates that all pre-service teachers take a course in cultural diversity. The ideology behind this mandate is the belief that as America’s classrooms become more demographically diverse, educators must learn how to respond to the different needs and cultural styles of children who represent such diversity. While textbooks that highlight these issues do exist, missing from current diversity education literature is a how-to toolkit designed to provide educators with activities, reflective scenarios, resources, and reference lists. The learning activities presented in this volume seek to fill this current gap in the literature. They define terminology, provide activities to raise self-awareness, include newspaper articles that illustrate the relevance of concepts, and allow for an overall dialogue about diverse issues. Diversity Training for Classroom Teaching encourages readers to generate their own construction of effective multicultural education and learn how to adapt it across various student populations and educational problems. At the same time, learning activities encourage readers to respect and seek to understand the experiences and worldviews of different people and how these diverse realities influence what is meant by multicultural education.