William Cope
Daniel Kim
Wafa NiazNegotiating Learner Differences MOOC’s Updates
Update #1: Experience of diversity in my work as an educator
I've worked with adult English language learners for several years online and have had the opportunity to work with students from all over the world. Our classes are small and incredibly diverse. It's extremely common in our classrooms to work with a group from Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, Palestine, Spain and Saudi Arabia, for example.
A huge part of our model for language learning is personalization, which can be challenging to accomplish for any group of individuals, but there is a more notable challenge when working with people from such diverse backgrounds. We want everyone to feel not only interested in our discussion topics in class, but we want them to feel represented, at ease, and understood.
Something I've observed in our diverse classrooms is how teachers interact with the learners, how the learners interact with one another, and how learners interpret and react to the content we use in class. We certainly try to be inclusive and ensure everyone in represented equally in a group class, but I have experienced otherwise and find this to be a learning opportunity for our class structure. For example, I've observed teachers lead a class discussion on Dating & Relationships where students were tasked with giving advice for a first date. While most of the learners were talking about ideas for places to go on a date, or how someone should behave on a date, there was a Muslim student who explained that she doesn't have first dates in her culture, and that it's common for families (parents) to meet each other before agreeing that their children should date with the intention of seeing if they'd be well suited for marriage. The group explored this and included it in the class discussion without any issues at all, but I thought about how the initial framing of the task and even the topic of the class itself was perhaps exclusionary for this learner.
Our language school is planning to work with US-based immigrants and refugees soon, and I hope that we provide and support inclusion in our class so that our discussions and class topics are relevant to everyone and take into consideration that people in our classes have completely different experiences that will affect the way they interpret our content.
Growing up I had a friend who was Muslim and the summer after high school ended, she told me she was getting married and that her parents had found her the perfect husband. I was entirely blown away! I had never heard of people marrying a complete stranger. It would have been so great to have the same experience that your students did learning about other's culture and heritage.
Working in a school, I had to learn about the different cultures represented in the school and how to talk and connect with each student individually. Let me know how your class goes!
I think you've made some really important observations, which I'm sure many teachers encounter - even in a scenario as simple as playing a game as a way of introduction - but I'm particularly gratified by the fact that you're looking for ways to widen the spectrum so that an exclusionary experience need not happen in the first place.
I'm always grateful when people speak up about their heritage and background, so that the rest of us might realize that there are other views and options, but at the same time it also contributes to a stronger sense of 'otherness' and 'difference'.
At the school I work - a music college that works very hard to push individuality and uniqueness, for, I suppose, obvious reasons - a lot of people, particularly among the younger generations, tend to appreciate and even underline 'difference' and embracing the things that differentiate us from each other. While I understand where they're coming from when they present this view, I'm not sure I completely agree with it.