Teaching Children with Diverse Needs

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Teaching Children with Diverse Needs
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What stereotypes come to mind

• Women
• Men
• African American
• Anglo American
• Asian American
• Hispanic American
• Native American

• A person with a disability
• A person who is homeless

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Stereotyping

• Along with visual stereotyping sayings should
  also be discouraged in stereotyping-No way Jose
  and Indian giver

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Children from Diverse Backgrounds

• African American Children
• Hispanic American Children
• Asian American Children
• Native American Children

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African American Children (Bennett, 1995)

• Feelings oriented and personal interactions
• Nonverbal communication
• Teaching strategies that stress cooperative
  learning rather than competition
• Rich tradition of oral story telling and listening

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Hispanic American Children (Garcia, 1992)

• Family and ethnic loyalty
• Interpersonal relationships
• Parents and teachers are highly valued

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Asian American Students (Feng, 1994)

• Respect for authority and submergence of
  individual
• Responsibility for relatives
• View teachers as having high status
• Respect for elders and deferred gratification

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Native American Children (Banks, 1994)

• Cultural preservation
• Holistic and shared view of the world
• Elders are highly respected and held in high
  esteem
• Value sharing and cooperation
• Learn through observation and patience

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Other Key Factors

• Development of language is closely connected to
  cognitive development
• Learning in the first language helps a child gain
  knowledge more than attempting to learn the same
  knowledge in a language in which the child has
  little comprehension.

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Recommendations

• Recognize all children are cognitively,
  linguistically, and emotionally connected to the
  language and culture of their home
• Acknowledge that children can demonstrate their
  knowledge and capabilities in many ways(diverse
  learning styles)

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Instructional Practices of Culturally Response
Teachers

• Hold high expectations for all students
• Achieve and maintain high levels of student
  involvement in learning tasks
• Have a strong sense of self-efficacy
• Create meaningful classroom activities built on
  students home cultural experiences

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Where Do I Begin?
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Before the school year starts

• Access information about the community your
  school is in
• Access basic information about school-population,
  test scores etc.
• Get to know your families

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During the School Year

• Get to know the families
• Review your students files for information
  regarding-name of primary caregiver, home
  language(s) spoken, special academic needs,
  possible ethnic background
• Develop list of possible methods of communication
  for families (notes, person-to person, e-mail,
  telephone, fax etc) pages 126-127 letters)

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Developing the Curriculum

• Anti-basis curriculum-curriculum that challenges
  prejudice, stereotyping, bias, and the isms.
• Bias- any attitude, belief, or feeling that
  results in, and helps to justify, unfair
  treatment of an individual because of his or her
  identity.
• Multicultural curriculum-teach others culture so
  that they will learn to respect each other and
  not develop prejudice
• Tourist curriculum-teach culture through
  celebrations and through artifacts such as food,
  traditional clothing and household implements
  Multicultural activities are separate from daily
  ongoing curriculum

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Assumptions and Issues involving curriculum and
diversity

• Teacher assumes multicultural curriculum in
  needed only in a multicultural classroom
• Multicultural curriculum is standardized and not
  addressing the unique needs and backgrounds of
  the students in the class
• Multicultural Education may focus on the
  information about other countries and not issues
  related to Americans.

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Recommendations (A.B.C. Task force
Derman-Sparks, 2000)

• Dangers of tourist curriculum should be avoided
  instruction
• Focus of Curriculum should incorporate all
  students particularly those in the classroom
• All students should participate in cultural
  diversity in instruction

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Creating an Positive Atmosphere in the Classroom

• Images of children and adults of various ethnic
  groups should be in the classroom
• Avoid tokenism-representation of only one or two
  of a certain ethnic group
• A fair balance of men and women shown in the
  classroom doing a variety of jobs ( in the home
  and out of the home)
• Images of persons of various ages and abilities
  in the classroom

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Materials

• Books,Dolls, manipulatives -reflect diversity in
  gender roles, ethnic and cultural backgrounds,
  abilities and range of occupations
• Present accurate information and images
• Variety of parents and family roles
• Different languages, Braille, sign
• Art should have various colors-tan, brown, black,
  and variety of artwork should be shown from
  various artists-ethnically diverse, women, men
  etc.
• Various forms of music and song from diverse
  cultures should be included

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Holidays and Curriculum

• Issues- Halloween-Witches and Healer
• Evil and the Color Black
• Christmas, Easter,Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Winter
  Solstice
• Approaches to instruction
• Include holidays from several cultural groups
• Do not celebrate holidays and allow children to
  share what the did for breaks and mention
  similarities and difference

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More on Lesson Planning

• Equity
• Relationships for parents student and teacher
• Knowledge of various cultures
• See and think from a multicultural perspective
• Correct distortions of historic and scientific
  record
• Improve society
• Willingness to cross ethnic and cultural
  boundaries

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Terms

• Lesson plan- a plan of instruction for a single
  lesson
• Instructional objective
• Materials
• Methods
• Evaluation
• Time
• Origin

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Ways to incorporate diversity into instruction

• Lesson sequence- series of individual lessons(
  one lesson builds on another)
• Instructional activity-integrated part of the
  lesson or an activity that can be the lesson
  itself (field trip oral presentations, class
  meetings, programs)
• Unit of instruction-comprehensive,
  multidimensional plan of learning