What is Diversity to Me?

Diversity is a fact of life in Canada and this is reflected in Canadian classrooms.   There are many facets to diversity including: gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic status.  Each child in a classroom comes from an unique family with their own beliefs, values, and culture.  This becomes an issue for teachers when they allow these differences become racism, sexism, or biases that affect the classroom culture and students learning opportunities.  How then do teachers ensure that their classrooms do not include these influences and that all students have a chance to succeed?  There are many ways to help students succeed and the hope is that as we create this blog we will also identify a wide range of strategies and resources to help us as teachers. 

However in brief there are some essential steps that a teacher must take to create a positive classroom culture.   It is important that teachers find strategies to examine their own beliefs in order to identify and hopefully address any biases they may have.  Teachers must then evaluate the materials they choose to use in their classroom to ensure that they are free from biases and represent a wide variety of life experiences.  The material should be multicultural, gender neutral, open to many diverse types of families and beliefs and above all well balanced.  This would then lead into active lesson planning where the teacher invites the students to explore their own backgrounds to embrace what is great about their families and to share this with their classmates in a safe environment.  The hope of this would be that every child would learn that families are different but that difference is good.  The teacher would also ensure that sexist, racist and biased behaviours are not tolerated in the classroom.  All together this forms what is referred to as anti-bias teaching.  This simple explanation makes this sound easy but this is actually quite hard work.  

Unfortunately our society does not treat everyone as equal and most of these beliefs are deeply hidden.  For children from other cultures everything about school organization in Canada can be foreign and intimidating.  For children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds there are many obstacles to learning and fewer opportunities to succeed in school.  Even today women do not earn the same as men and gender roles are still deeply ingrained.  Sexual identity is now more publicly debated but for those outside the hetero-norm there is great discrimination.  Children of colour or aboriginal background still do not achieve as highly as we know they can due in part to a system that doesn't address their ways of knowing.  For such a multicultural and diverse country we still have a long way to go in order to provide truly equitable and anti-bias education to all students.  This work begins with each teacher, it may not always be possible to change the whole system but it is possible for each teacher to change their own classroom.  

Megan