Culture is the difference in characteristics between people on how they were raised or what they believe in. When going into culture there are many different things that you look at such as race, gender, religious beliefs, economical views and morals in general. All of these things together is what makes each culture different from the other.
What is multicultural education? What are the goals of multicultural education?
Multicultural education is when you incorporate every single students culture into the classroom and try to make them all aware and understand where each other comes from. This is great because it gives children diversity and educates them on things they would have never learned before hand. The goals of multicultural education are to make every single child's culture is brought into the classroom so they can better understand and relate that to their own life moving forward.
How does multicultural education reflect responsive teaching to help meet the academic needs of diverse student populations?
Where i come from and where we all live in general there is a lot of culture for the most part, there are many different ethnicities and that also reflects in the classroom. With that said teachers should take the opportunity they have been given and expand on their teaching more then they regularly would have so that they can take advantage of all the diversity. The way things happen these days everything changes so fast so the teachers have to accommodate that change and put it into the curriculum. The worst thing would be to make a student or group of students feel like they aren't like the rest of the students because they aren't the same.
How can multicultural education affect broader social issues that impact our society? (e.g. intercultural communication/relations, prejudice, stereotypes, crime & poverty rates, achievement gaps, etc.)
The way things are going now students are taught at a very young age about stereotypes and that really has a huge impact on them throughout their lives. If we can educate them that diversity is good at a young age then i feel some of the social issues wont be as bad because people will be more open to things from the beginning. There are the kinds who were either taught in school or by their parents that diversity is good and to not discriminate against anybody and the social issues for them are not as bad. You can never judge a book by its cover because at the end of the day you will never know that person until you get to know them.
What other significant insight(s) have you gained and how will this insight impact your personal/professional life?
At the start of the semester i didn't know much about how it really impacts peoples lives but as the semester went on you read books and showed us that children's literature is a great way to bring up the topic of diversity and educate them from there. Growing up i saw both sides of the spectrum because in grade school all the classrooms were diverse but when i went to private school i saw an entirely different way things were ran and how much in the same everybody was. If i ever decided to be a teacher in the future i would make sure that the literature was diverse.
The poem i chose is "I Am Diversity, Please Include Me'' by Simma Lieberman.
The reason i chose this poem is because i think it really said everything i learned throughout this semester, it says that allthough you may be diverse and not like everybody else you should still be given the chance to be apart of everything and not looked at as weird because you may be different. At the end of the day we are all equal so that is how we should treat each other.
