Diversity in the Classroom

I have always thought that knowing your students was an important part of every classroom community and teaching. However, after the readings from last week and our class discussions, I’ve come away with an understanding that it is much more significant than I had thought. When we had time to brainstorm in class about what we thought “classroom context” meant, I had explained that I thought it was the people that make up your classroom, not only physically, but their personalities and their methods of learning as well. As we said, I think that it is important to adjust our attitudes as teachers and adapt our lessons and approaches to our student’s needs. I feel that by putting in an extra effort to know our students’ previous experiences with literacy and information about their personal lives, it will help to create a comfortable and inviting atmosphere. One positive way of doing this that I liked was the ‘student of the week’ bulletin board, or the interest surveys for parents and students. Both of these would be resourceful in discovering your student’s backgrounds and extra pieces of information that you may not get verbally, or directly, from your students.
When you are interacting with students during literacy, I feel that this can be an opportunity to learn about the diversity in your classroom as well. As Ladson-Billings stated in chapter six, teaching should be thought of as an art. By doing so, we are pushing our students to dig deeper and come up with more meaningful responses. The real life examples and answers that your students come up with will be able to tell you a lot about where they came from, what they believe in, and hopefully what they want to learn.
Another really important aspect I think teachers need to have in order to become aware and comfortable with the diversity aspects of their classroom is equality. In order to reach out to your class and get to know them all individually, there needs to be an understanding that each child deserves your interest and attention. I really enjoyed how the teacher Ann Lewis from the readings considered one of her underachieving students as “strong and beautiful but fragile”; she knew that he would need extra help, but that didn’t discourage her from giving him 110%. In the end, there are many different ways that you can learn about the diversity in a classroom. I don’t feel that it is as important which method you chose, as long as you do so as early as possible.