Chapter 9 - Responding To Diversity

After reading all those history chapters, I found this one to be very interesting. The introduction to this chapter explained a scenario where a girl was in an auto mechanics class, and she was not being treated equal to the boys in the class. The author asks us if the girl should drop the class or not. I don't think she should, because American society needs to realize that things are changing and becoming more diverse, therefor, should encourage this girl for exploring auto mechanics; going beyond the stereotypes. I learned that a very important difference is all the different cultures; macroculture and microculture. Teachers need to understand the means of communication, the means of interaction, and the values of driving people or groups, and how these things influence learning. A new term I learned is enculturation, which means learning formally or informally through parents or other adults. Certain strategies on teaching culturally diverse students are as follows: emphasizing verbal interactions, teaching students to use self-talk, facilitating divergent thinking, using small-group instruction and cooperative learning, employing verve in the classroom, focusing on real-world tasks, and promoting teacher-student interaction. Multicultural education has two primary goals; 1. promote educational equality for all students, male and female, minority or majority, able or disabled 2. enable all students to learn and develop knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to successfully participate in and contribute to an increasingly diverse society. Multicultural education has five dimensions and they are: content integration dimension, knowledge construction process dimension, prejudice reduction dimension, equity pedagogy dimension, and empowering school culture and social structure dimension. Multicultural education also has five approaches and those are: teaching the exceptional and culturally different approach, human relations approach, single group studies approach, inclusive multicultural education approach, and educational multiculturalism and social reconstructionism approach. The author also states that the hardest thing as an immigrant is keeping a healthy ethnic identity while developing an American identity. The major elements that are produced by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act are: the right to a free and appropriate education, identification and nondiscriminatory evaluation, an individualized education program, least restrictive environment, and procedural due process. There were many other major points covered in this chapter, but these are the ones I found most interesting. America needs to learn to adapt to every situation, and realize that the whole world is slowly becoming a mixture of all the different cultures!

DaNo