Developing Cultural Diversity in Teaching
What is Cultural Diversity?
The phrase 'Cultural Diversity'means a range of different societies or peoples with different origins, religions and traditions all living and interacting together.
To be culturally diverse is to accept and celebrate difference. For tutors that means finding a way of ‘bringing the world into classroom’ to reflect the diversity of our community and to enrich the learning experience of all our learners as well as creating an inclusive learning environment.
To help tutors create more culturally diverse programmes we have put together the following guidance with a down-loadable Cultural Diversity resource 121kb for subject specific ideas.
Re-examine your teaching materials and planning, to identify where you can incorporate a broader view of the world.
- How outward looking are you expecting your learners to be? Are you encouraging learner autonomy?
- Do you expect them to research, and explore the subject outside the classroom? Are they dependant on you for everything?
- Do you draw learner attention to related activities happening locally, nationally and globally?
- Examine your own source of your inspiration, ideas, knowledge – how culturally diverse are they?
- Be pro-active and consider cultural diversity at the planning stage, otherwise it won’t happen!
- Be aware of individual rights and responsibilities (e.g. gender, age-related issues)
- Consider the differences in your learners i.e. age, sex, race etc and plan resources to include all.
- Share good practice – Make this resource useful to ev.eryone by sending your contributions to: email@example.com.