Posted: June 15th, 2015

Teaching Cultural Diversity

Teaching Cultural Diversity

Identify a lesson plan or a unit of lessons (of any subject) that you have developed for another unit or implemented in your practicum teaching (200 words). If you have not developed a lesson plan yet, then you can use someone else’s or pre-packaged lesson plans in your preferred subject area. Your task is to revise it in a way to demonstrate what you have learned through this unit. Attach a 1500-word explanation about the changes that you have made.

As for the specific lesson context, you get to choose any classroom context you would prefer (because multicultural education is for everoyne! See Nieto and Bode’s chapter) but you must have at least three ESL students in your classroom who need your special attention to their linguistic needs.

In your explanation, you must refer to a minimum of 12 unit readings (they can be required or suggested readings) drawn primarily (but not exclusively) from Topics 5-10.

You must submit 1) the revised ‘after’ lesson plan (with all the new changes underlined) and 2) a 1500-word explanation of the changes.

Here is the suggested outline for the explanation note:
•Brief discussion of the classroom context in which the revised lesson plan is to be implemented. The context can be real or hypothetical;
•Brief discussion of the rationales for the original lesson plan;
•Discussion of your revisions and rationales for each.

The first two have to be really brief (less than 200 words in total!). You are to focus on the discussion of the revised plan(s).

For your reference, I have included severalbefore/after’ lesson plans from Grant & Sleeter’s (2003) book Turing on Learning: Five approaches for multicultural teaching plans for race, class, gender, and disability in Topics 5, 9 and 10. These lesson plans will be of help when you think about ways to use the unit readings to multiculturalise your ?�before’ lesson plan (s).

If you are unsure how to approach this assignment, here are four elements that you can address when multiculturalizing your lesson plan

1. Inclusion of multicultural representation

First, integrate different ways in which a given topic of the lesson is understood from different cultural & national perspectives. In so doing, make sure you do not essentialize cultural differences (see Topic 6 on this).

Second, discuss the contribution of ‘others’ in the development of the given theme. For instance, if you look at the development of any scientific knowledge from the early modern era, it is actually very transcultural with thinkers around the world constantly interacting across cultural and civilizational boundaries. And yet, we tend to believe that all the scientific development took place in Europe.

2. Integration of world languages and ?�other’ dialects of English

Many concrete strategies are provided by the readings in Topics 7 & 8. However, you will need to balance this with the concern that Delpit raises in Topic 2, the explicit teaching of the ‘language of power.’ Linda Christensen’s numerous articles in Topic 7 and Gibbons’ suggested strategies should help us understand how this balance can be achieved in a classroom.

3. Integration of explicit linguistic scaffolding for ESL students

The readings in Topic 8 and 9 should be of use here. In particular, have a look at all the chapters (including those under suggested readings) by Gibbons. In one of the chapters, she suggests that teachers identify specific linguistic functions required in planned lesson activities and teach the relevant sentence structures explicitly while introducing the lesson content. This should be useful for any subject-based teaching.