Week 6 Readings

After reading the article by Christine Sleeter I had several different thoughts going through my head.  At first I was comparing my best friend and me.  We both want to be teachers but we have two very different views of teaching and diversity.  We are both white females, she wants to teach in a farm town with no diversity, I want to teach ESL, I embrace the idea of diversity and would love nothing more than to teach in a more diverse setting than I was raised in.  We both grew up in a predominately white school system; the only difference was my school did have ESL.  Did this little exposure to diversity while I was young, change my whole outlook on education?  I thought about this a lot after reading about the amount of diversity training most pre-service teachers have and their ideas of diversity in the classroom.  Then I started thinking about ISU and how it prepares our teachers for a more diverse classroom.  I looked at my diversity hours and noticed that I had completed all 50 of them but I don’t remember doing this.  I don’t remember going to a diverse setting and it made me wonder what ISU considers as a “diverse experience”.  Not only that but how can just 50 hours prepare pre-service teachers for a diverse school, it doesn’t and it can’t.  Like the article said after the short exposure to a diversity class many pre-service teachers didn’t have a lasting impression.  Their ideas of diversity were changed for a few months and then returned to the previous state.  As diversity increases pre-service education needs to increase diversity teaching as well.  I like the idea of field experience or even the immersion experience.  This idea has good bones and can only benefit both teachers and future students.  My last thought follows the quote, “the researchers mentioned here attribute students’ learning to the power of community-based, cross-cultural contexts in which they have to grapple with being in the minority, do not necessarily know how to act, and are temporarily unable to retreat to the comfort of a culturally familiar setting”.  It’s a long quote but I feel it puts the shoes of diversity on the white majorities feet.  We get to feel what its like to be the minority.  Again this can only help our understanding of diversity in the classroom.