Mix it Up: Employing New Strategies to Teach Multiculturalism in Schools

Often referred to as “the melting pot,” America is considered one of the most diverse nations in the world, providing home and new opportunity to individuals from the all over the surrounding universe. Immigrants’ children are reshaping the demographics of schools by making institutes more multicultural than decades ago. Teachers are creating young people who can benefit from the richness of the many cultures that fill our country. Multiculturalism opens doors; it does not close them. It helps us understand who we are as a nation and how we can learn to work together as a world. Subsequently, teaching students to recognize the fundamental dignity of all people and to respect their unique backgrounds and traditions is beneficial for educational systems throughout the country. Suburban schools like Student Travel And Research School (STARS), provide students with lavish opportunities to travel abroad and learn about different cultures, such as visiting South Africa or exploring Great Britain. This initiative is outstanding in that it diversifies students and fosters greater appreciation for new cultures; however such luxurious opportunity is not available for all students, specifically those residing in urban areas. Therefore, teachers must actively seek new strategies that will promote and better educate multiculturalism for their inner-city students. Recent studies by university professors across the globe and here in America found new techniques to employing diversity in schools. Effective teaching of multiculturalism requires practicing; thus we not only need to lecture students about different cultures but provide hands-on opportunity for them to be efficiently educated.

In an Australian recent study by Deakin University’s associate dean, Fethi Mansouri, he found that since 2001, racist behavior has increased dramatically towards Arab and Muslim background students. Having dealt with great animosity from peers, including “verbal taunting, humiliation, exclusion, and physical aggression,” Arab and Muslim students often feel ostracized at school and their parents ultimately feel excluded. The results demonstrated that these alienated students experienced “higher absenteeism and lower academic achievement.” Along with this study, teachers reported that they had no experience in teaching cultural awareness moreover “did not understand the concept of culture, full stop.” Similar scenarios of racist hostility were promulgated in inner-city Los Angeles Unified schools such as Locke High, Manual Arts, and Washington High school, just this past spring. The controversies grew so large that racial riots broke out often on the school premises causing several police and helicopters to swarm the school. Below, "Two Black students in the forefront run for their lives at Fontana High." Nonetheless, Fethi Mansouri and his research team intervened before similar catastrophes could have occurred in their institutes. The Australian Research Council and the Scanlon Foundation gave funds to develop a program to help teachers better educate and promote diversity issues to students, as well as their parents. Teachers learned to deal with multi-cultural issues through diverse linguistic and cultural trainings and programs and better managed their multicultural classroom. Results of the new initiative were striking: 2 years after Professor Mansouri’s first encounter, the percent of students who “described ethnic relations in their school as good or excellent” nearly doubled to 80 percent. Likewise were the results of the parents who participated in the study. His study favored great results for the students; taking on new initiatives like Mansouri’s team, through multicultural trainings for teachers, could reduce, if not diminish, the racial tensions students display at school.

A relating research-finding was recently conducted in the US. Cynthia Garcia Coll, professor of education and Amy Marks, affiliated with Brown’s University Center for the Study of Human Development operated a study of more than 400 children of first generation immigrants to find that as children grow, their playmate preferences tend to expand across ethnic groups. At end early age, children prefer to play with peers from their own ethnic backgrounds, but are open to playing with other kids,” the study found. “Importantly, the better children feel about their own ethnic identities, the more they want to play with others, regardless of ethnicity.” Subsequently, this has implications to how teachers deal with and promote multiculturalism in the classroom, even at the primary level. If teachers employ diverse and interacting strategies in teaching students about diversity in society, they will have a better understanding about culture and feel more acceptant to students from all kinds of backgrounds, the study suggests. By middle school, children like to play with classmates from any ethnic background because their own ethnic identity has been better formed. Furthermore, by that age, children usually have had more experience in positive co-ethnic settings. A way of supporting this result is through engaging students in multi-cultural activities and promoting interaction with all students, even with different ethnic backgrounds. As a way of resolving segregation amongst students in southern public schools, Central High in Little Rock incorporated diversity-related activities for their primary and secondary institutes. “The younger kids make and exchange differently colored butterflies and then discuss their feelings on interacting with the various colors,” says Brian Freedman, author of Lesson in Color. “Older students draw a map of the school lunchroom, identify where different races usually sit, then venture out of their ‘comfort zones’ and note their movements on the map.” This initiative was very successful and has even spread nationwide. The national, “Mix it Up at Lunch Day” will be held on November 13, 2007. The mission of this program is to get students to interact with students of different ethnicities, of which they would have otherwise not met. The following picture displays some of the positive interaction between students on the international occasion.

Indubitably, the world is not utopian in which all cultures value the same traditions; moreover people from dispersed ethnic backgrounds inevitably do not co-exist in homogeneity. The sole purpose of educating students about multiculturalism and practicing it in the classroom setting is to promote cultural awareness and to enable students to be aware culture differences but at the same time generating respect for people, regardless of their ethnic background. This mechanism essentially discourages negative stereotypes that people have about opposite culture groups and teaches students to judge people based on their individual actions, rather than the group they resemble by physical characteristics alone.

These multicultural efforts can assuage the transitioning into the diverse world that awaits these children. Moreover, through promoting diversity awareness at the primary level segueing into the high school settings, children will develop better social skills with students coming from different ethnic backgrounds and will learn to appreciate the different cultures.