Outstanding Work

As part of the homework requirement for Multicultural Issues, students respond and reflect on a variety of assignments from their textbooks, Gollnick and Chinn's Multicultural Education in a Pluralistic Society and Kroeger and Bauer's Exploring Diversity, including scenarios, news reports, and questions posed on class situations and personal experiences.

The response below is an outstanding example of student work on this assignment.

March 28, 2008

Exploring Diversity Questions

1. What was your first experience with diversity?

My first experience with diversity was in high school when I began to date a Vietnamese girl who I went to school with. When I met her parents, I quickly found out that English was the second language spoken in their home. She and her parents only spoke to each other in their native language and never spoke English to each other. It was somewhat odd to hear her and her mother talk; it always sounded like they were screaming at each other. I remember asking her several times why she and her mom always fought, but they were not fighting. That is the way their language is spoken.

2. How did you feel about that interaction?

I did not feel odd about the time I met her parents. I did feel somewhat odd when I asked her why she and her mom fought all the time, only to find out that is how they spoke to each other in their native language.

3. Do you think students today are having similar "first experiences?" Why or why not?

I am not sure students had the same experience that I did. I believe everyone looks at issues and events from different points of view. Some students might have thought she and her mom were not fighting because they had some prior experience with that culture. I did not have any prior knowledge up to that point. Then again, some students now may have had the same thoughts that I did. I believe it depends of your prior knowledge and interaction with a person from that culture.

January 27, 2008

The Chance for Unity

I chose this to be the symbol for my homepage because I believe this picture represents the diverse people and cultures in our society and is an accurate representation of the children who will make up the population of our schools in the future. In addition, this picture also represents the chance for unity among different cultures; the unity that must exist in my classroom, and that as an educator my purpose is to teach every student in my class.