Ms. Kijowski's Classroom Website

Diversity is something that is hard to know how to handle in the classroom because we all have biases that come from our own cultural background.  Even teachers have biases.  It is important that teachers and students learn to see things from another's perspective instead of holding to the view that their own culture is the "right" culture.  

Milton Bennett's stages for intercultural sensitivity can help teachers think about how they want their classrooms to respond to diversity.  The first three stages are stages where differences are seen as negative, or they are just overlooked.  I would like for my classroom to be at one of the later stages: acceptance, adaptation, or integration.  When a person is in the acceptance stage, he or she understands that "ordinary behaviors" are not the same for all cultures, and he or she is interested in learning about other cultures.  In the adaptation stage, the person is able to shift perspectives and can adapt his or her own behavior to fit within the norms of another culture.  In the integration stage, the person is able to look at multiple perspectives.

Weinstein, Curran, and Tomlinson-Clarke (2003) give several strategies for creating culturally responsive classroom management.  They suggest that the environment is important.  The posters and bulletin boards in the classrooms should represent different cultures.  Students desks should be arranged in clusters so that students can interact with each other.  They also suggest that teachers create rules for the expected behavior in class so that students know that they need to be kind and respectful.  The teacher should model the rules and have class discussions about the rules.  The teacher should also create a sense of community by having the students do activities to get to know one another and learn about each other's cultural backgrounds.

I plan to implement these strategies in my classroom so that we create a community that celebrates other cultures.  I plan to have my students do a lot of cooperative learning, where the students learn to work together as a team.  In order to help students feel comfortable working together, I will have them do activities to get to know one another.  Incorporating cooperative learning will affect how my classroom is arranged.  I will have my classroom set up so that students are sitting at a table with a few other students, making group work easier to do.  I also want to incorporate the history behind the mathematics that we are learning in class.  Students will be able to learn about different cultures' contribution to mathematics.  The students would be able to see how each culture has played an important role in developing mathematics into what it is today.  Lastly, the activites that we do to learn about the different cultures would be displayed on our bulletin board.