Blog Post #5: Making Schools More Diverse

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.