The other day at practicum, I was pushing my students on the
swings, and I saw an interesting encounter between a few of them. Three of
them, holding hands with one another, were asking my other students if they
wanted to play tag with them. The second thought that came in my mind was “This
is a real-life example what most schools are trying to promote: diverse and
authentic friendships.” This was because these three children consisted of a
white girl, a black girl, and a white boy.
My practicum classroom is quite diverse, and why it is this
way There are twenty students in the class, and around half of them would
consider themselves white, which is low compared to the percentage of white
students in the average public school classroom. The other races represented in
my practicum classroom are Black and Hispanic. This leaves out other racial
groups in the United States, but can easily be considered “diverse,” because
there are many individuals in my classroom who are not white.
Most schools in the United States are trying to communicate,
to those of interest, that their school is diverse and embraces a diverse
environment. Diversity (in this case racial diversity) is beneficial for
classrooms to have, because students are exposed to other students that have a
different walk of life from them. Many schools are pushing their environments
to be more diverse by hiring teachers of different races and accepting students
of different institutions (especially higher education institutions). However,
there are schools that are tremendously focused on promoting a diverse
environment, they do not always think of additional issues that non-white
individuals have to go through in the “diverse” environment.
One of the places that I have seen trying to become more
diverse is my high school. I went to a predominantly white high school, and the
students who were not white had to act white to succeed socially and
academically there. When my high school created advertisements, they would
almost always include a non-white students. One of my high school classmates,
who was half Asian and half white, would tell me asked to be in the school’s
advertisements, so the school would prove to the viewers that they were
diverse. She felt taken advantage of, because when she was asked by the school
to do something, she did not know if it was because they sincerely wanted her,
or that she was not fully white.
Another one of my high school classmates, who was African
American, felt that my school did not know how to treat students who were not
white. She grew up in predominantly white schools and is currently at a
historically black college. Right before high school graduation, she was asked
by a different student’s parent if they handled the diversity of the school
well. She said that the school claimed to be diverse, but it was not actually
diverse. The curriculum looked strongly at the history of those with European
descent, and that she did not learn about those who were not white. She felt
very out of place, because most of the white students only knew how to interact
with white students, and they were quite unfamiliar with students who were not
white.
The ideas of diversity are constantly discussed in my
education classes, because it is a new idea for most educators, and research
has proven that diversity benefits classrooms. Schools have a very difficult
time accommodating students from different classes and races, because there is
one system that every student has to go through. Teachers have to know where
they students come from so they will know what the child is experiencing at
school and when they are at home. Diversity is a large component to these
experiences, because what makes a child diverse influences the challenges that
the child will experience in school.