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Ethnic Diversity Our era of expanding school enrollment has been marked by a significant rise in minority students, driven mainly by an extraordinary influx of Hispanic students, who account for more than 50% of the increase in student enrollment. By 2012, 45% of public school students were considered to be part of a racial or ethnic minority group. In fall 2014, the percentage of students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools who were White was less than 50% (49.5%) for the first time since these data were reported (see Table 5.2). This represents a decrease from 58% in fall 2004. In contrast, the percentage of students who were Hispanic increased from 19% to 25% (Stepler & Lopez, 2016). Overlapping Attributes: The Social Context The aspects of student diversity we have been considering are not isolated and independent. Often they overlap. Consider, for instance, what happens when poverty intersects with the need to learn a new language. The reality of many ELs is that they also represent our poorest children: Many live in crowded housing environments where transportation and employment opportunities are limited and where schools are old and overcrowded. In fact, of all students who live in poverty, more than 28% are Hispanic or Latino, and 36% of all children in poverty are American Indian (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2016). While these percentages represent a decrease in the number of children from these ethnicities who are living in poverty over the last 5 years, it is still a matter of grave concern. Poverty affects the students’ achievement in school, putting many of these students at risk for educational failure. In the next section, we will consider the term at risk and its full implications, but it is important to remember that poverty is not a learning disability and all children have the ability to learn and succeed in school. Differences do not mean deficits; they just mean differences from the norms in public education that were once thought to be White and middle class. The norms are shifting, and it is important that we never think of students who are different in any way as lesser. As future teachers, the guiding question must be: How can I help each child feel successful in school? Student Diversity: Challenges and Opportunities As you might guess, the increasing diversity of U.S. students has led to controversy about educational priorities. In this section, we focus on three areas that have provoked much recent discussion: multicultural education, gender- fair education, and the role of religion in the schools. Multicultural Education You may be feeling dizzy from all the data and statistics you have read in this chapter. Why are these details about students important? As we seek to become better teachers, we must understand the origins of our students and the ways their needs can be met in the classroom. If you are not of the same culture, race, ethnicity, or social class as your students, you should make a special effort to understand their needs. You can also turn the diversity of your students into an advantage-an opportunity to share identities and cultures as you create community in your classroom. It is a way to broaden our understanding of the human condition and reminds us that the informal curriculum can be both window and mirror! If you pursue a career in teaching, you will hear a lot about multicultural education, a broad term for many approaches that recognize and celebrate the variety of cultures and ethnic backgrounds found in U.S. schools. Students from groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in the school population-ethnic and racial minorities-have also been understudied. That is, until recently, most educators have not focused on what these students need to succeed in school. We now realize that these students will not be served well and will even become marginalized unless we seek answers to complex questions like the following: • Whose stories are told in the classroom? • How do we build community in a diverse setting? What is the role of identity formation in our work? • What can we learn by hearing the stories of those from traditionally marginalized groups? (Nelson & Wilson 1998, p. xi) multicultural education Education that aims to create equal opportunities for students from diverse racial, ethnic, social class, and cultural groups. A diverse student body provides the opportunity to learn about other ways of being in the world. Joe Carini/Perspectives/Getty Images Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) Project The national project on inclusive curriculum that promotes multiculturally equitable, gender-fair, and globally aware curriculum and pedagogy through professional development and leadership training for teachers, parents, college faculty, and administrators. For over 25 years, the Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) project, begun by Dr. Peggy McIntosh at the Wellesley Centers for Women, has offered teachers from all over the country the opportunity to participate in professional development workshops designed to broaden the possibilities for both curriculum and instruction, and teaching in environments rich with students from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities (http://www.nationalseedproject.org). They are able to share strategies for appreciating that diverse learning environments offer a wonderful gift. Emily Style (1996), a director of SEED, offers the metaphor of diverse learning environments being “windows” into the worlds of people other than ourselves and create rich experiences for both students and teachers. As a result of these experiences, teachers are encouraged to develop culturally responsive teaching practices, also referred to as culturally relevant pedagogy. These teaching practices have several important attributes: . They use cultural referents-from all the cultures represented in the classroom-to develop students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes. They honor the students’ life stories and belief systems, and find ways to incorporate them into the curriculum and learning context. • They create classroom community by granting voice and legitimacy to the experiences of students from diverse backgrounds. Your teaching should incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy. For a geometry lesson, one teacher had students look for symmetry in the flags of their native countries. All of these strategies help us to honor the learner and create a classroom community in which each other’s stories create the foundation for a caring community. Culturally relevant pedagogy is one of many instructional strategies that seeks to answer the question: “How can the lived experiences of my students be reflected in the discourse of the classroom?” Consider the planning of a geometry unit in an eighth-grade math classroom in an urban area in the Northeast. Ms. Petersen is in an old, overcrowded school building in an urban area. Ms. Petersen is exploring different types of symmetry that may be found in shapes using several patterns. About one third of her students are Latino, and the rest are of many racial and ethnic origins. This unit in geometry considers what happens to shapes when they are moved through space. Ms. Petersen has examined the basic concepts in many ways with her class, emphasizing that symmetry may be found in patterns in everyday life and having the students create symmetrical patterns with more than one shape. For instance, she brought in men’s ties with many patterns on them and asked students to decide what type of symmetry each pattern represented. She then invited them to explore their native countries’ flags. The classroom has three networked computers that students used to print pictures of their flags. The flag designs were examined for geometric shapes and symmetry (see Figure 5.1). It was a lesson that engaged all the students. After the students had experience with several types of symmetry, Ms. Petersen posed a challenge. In groups of two, the students were to design and create a classroom flag incorporating their room number. The flag had to be in the shape of a rectangle, include two types of symmetry, and appropriately represent the students in the classroom. Students were excited about designing patterns, and they selected the colors from the flags of their various countries of origin to represent themselves. Colors from the flags of Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, South Korea, and the United States adorned the design of Room 303’s classroom flag. What do you think of Ms. Petersen’s lesson? Can you imagine how excited the students were that their countries’ flags were part of their study of mathematics? The concepts of rotation, reflection, and translation are quite complex in geometry, but by using materials her students could relate to, Ms. Petersen engaged them in a personal way. We know from research in cognitive science that learning occurs best when students are fully invested in the process, when they can interact with the materials, “play” with them, explore and reexamine the concepts, and then individually make those concepts their own. You can see how culturally relevant pedagogy helps make this possible.