Promoting Diversity,
Valuing Difference

The census data for 2000 confirm what most teachers already know: our student populations are becoming more and more diverse. The United States is on its way to becoming a plurality of minorities, and the changing demographics are profoundly affecting the makeup of student populations. Now more than ever, schools and teachers must find ways to engage a wider range of students with more diverse backgrounds, interests, and experiences.

Previous efforts to foster greater inclusion warn us that addressing the current needs will not be easy. Ironically, a system of universal schooling designed to provide opportunities for all has matured into a system that more frequently than not sustains social and cultural divisions. From the great struggles for racial integration and second language instruction to the mainstreaming and detracking movements, American schools have strongly resisted political and pedagogical pressures to serve broader audiences more equitably. Though the resistance has eventually been overcome, the pattern of quality in schools continues to mirror closely our uneven social, cultural, and linguistic demographics. If schools are to provide a meaningful experience for all, then we must begin to think very differently about the goals and purposes of schooling.

Schools are truly remarkable institutions. Parents, even grand-parents, can walk into a typical high school physics or algebra classroom and feel at home; some things just have not changed that much. Yet the social role of schools has changed dramatically. Traditionally, schooling serves two functions for a society: first, the transmission of particular skills from experts to novices; second, the transmission of social traditions and standards. As institutions for the preservation of social systems, schools are highly resistant to novelty and invention. Schools are therefore essentially conservative institutions; that is to say, they are designed to pass along understanding and knowledge that are already defined and codified.

At the same time, however, schools have become the prime marketplace for the youth-to-youth exchange of popular culture. Fads in music, clothing, and media create instantly fashionable icons and superstars resistant to the rules. The struggle for identity for many youth frequently hangs on the actions of their crowd as they track quick reversals of what is "in" or "out." The struggle to fit in creates a youthful solidarity where difference can create a painful isolation.

In classrooms, another type of sorting takes place as teachers differentiate students based on perceived ability to learn. Deciding whether or not students should be promoted into programs for further study is a commonly and widely practiced part of teachers' evaluations of students, anchored rather thinly on the teachers' capacity to accurately assess student understandings. Teachers sometimes think of themselves as miners for rare gems in the great matrix of ordinary students.

At each step in the educational process, those students who best fit teachers' expectations of "most able" are filtered from the general student body and are offered more advanced learning experiences. Eventually only "the brightest" students survive to be selected by colleges and universities. When schools provide preferential treatment toward certain students, they can no longer claim to function neutrally to provide equal opportunities for every student.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, the vision for schooling has been redefined to include "all." The mantra for the new administration has become "no child left behind." With an official education policy focused on serving all students equally, the metaphor for schools has changed from "filters" to "pumps." Especially in science and mathematics, the stated purpose of schooling has shifted from finding and polishing a few diamonds in the rough to creating opportunities for all students to reach their greatest potential. Yet, in reality, schools have been slow to adopt strategies to narrow the gaps in achievement that closely track income and ethnicity.

With this push for inclusiveness, many educators have come to see equity as part of ethnic equality, and diversity is commonly linked to racial or ethnic identities. Author Neil Postman has noted this change:

some schools [have attempted] to ensure that students cultivate a deep sense of ethnic pride, a task once undertaken mostly by the family…I think this to be a bad idea-to the extent that it subordinates or ignores the essential task of public schools, which is to find and promote large, inclusive narratives for all students to believe in. The principle of diversity is such a narrative…diversity wants one to turn outward, toward the talents and accomplishments of all groups. Diversity is the story that tells of how our interactions with many kinds of people make us into what we are (1996).

Ultimately, public schools will become institutional spaces where the great variety of Americans can come to know and understand each other. As more diversity among students is recognized and honored, the life stories and insights of all students become part of the narratives of the schoolyard. Schools will have to make the diversity narrative positive for all, and this will require reconsideration of some basic educational ideas. The goal for educators has moved from making all students the same to creating learning environments that nourish the differing strengths of each student.

The Classroom Ecosystem

Using a healthy ecosystem as an analogy to a healthy learning environment lends another perspective to the issues surrounding diversity. In biology, the well-being of an ecosystem is measured by the diversity of its species - greater diversity is an ecological advantage. Increased diversity means more interconnected relationships that lead to greater stability. When a relationship weakens, the community picks up the slack.

If we think of classrooms and students from an ecological perspective, we see the analogy extends to educational systems as well. When both teacher and student understand the strengths and limits of the student's skills, these can be utilized in a healthy, productive manner with teamwork. When a task lies outside a student's individual boundaries, creating opportunities to work together to benefit from the strengths of others can be productive. This method promotes strong relationships, encouraging codependency within groups and a greater chance for success. Multiple relationships distribute the load, taking the pressure for the maintenance of the system off of any particular species or interspecies relationship.

Our insistence that all students meet the same criteria for success - criteria based on national norms dominated by one cultural, ethnic, and language group - creates a permanent underclass in schools (Furr 2001). Driven by high stakes tests promoting basement learning expectations, the culture of schools enables the academically acculturated student to collect the rewards of success with little effort. At the same time, devaluing diversity forces students from unique backgrounds and experiences into a shadow world of pretense and catch-up, a world that rarely rewards their strengths and cultural background knowledge. There is only one path to success in the classic classroom ecology, and most students are never able to follow it.

Often, racism, sexism and social class are key determinants in the "ability" labeling process prevalent in the majority of the American education system. Predominant methods of science teaching and assessment basically select students most able to perform the rituals of note-taking, memorization, and timed tests that define divisions according to the ability label (Gill and Levidow 1989). In an interview with teacher-researcher Josiane Hudicort-Barnes, Rogers Hall notes that she identifies the tendency of some teachers who might begin class with a set of expectations and a task to accomplish. The "model student" is usually the one to take up the teacher's agenda and participate in the way that the teacher expects. When teachers create a more flexible learning environment that allows the exploration and expression of ideas while leveraging students' language and cultures, diverse students show a greater capacity for comprehending difficult mathematics and science content (Hall 2001). In fact, research shows that when students can relate personal experiences to a science task, for example, they show a more complete understanding compared to their performances with unfamiliar tasks (Fradd, Lee, and Sutman 1995).

Teachers who discover, value, and promote the differences of each of their students create a rich learning environment, one with many paths to success. The teacher can alter the factors in the classroom to assure that each student is nurtured with multiple opportunities to thrive. Rather than filtering and sorting by focusing only on some of the students, teachers can develop strategies to help all students succeed.

It is important for teachers to value diversity. The real benefit, however, comes when teachers can use diverse student perspectives as an asset in instruction. Then, teachers create learning environments where all students can truly flourish. To successfully promote students with widely different skills and backgrounds, however, teachers must do much more than simply change their outlook. They must also look closely at classroom goals and practices for ways to support their students as they create diverse narratives.

Integrating Differences

New Mexico high school mathematics teacher Marilyn Gutman has developed a variety of techniques for classroom inclusion. When asked about her encounters with diversity in the classroom, she responds: "If you're a good teacher, you realize each person is so different from the other that you hardly notice it." At her school, 50% of the students are Hispanic, and many of those are non-native English speakers. In addition to bilingual students in her class, she has a student with cerebral palsy who is in a wheelchair.

She challenges teachers to be flexible, make accommodations, and use many different types of assessment. Ms. Gutman has students do most of their work in groups, using extended projects, labs and discovery-type activities in place of tests as the sole assessment tool: "Let big group projects count as tests. In those, they are doing a lot of math and don't even realize it."

She has partnered with New Mexico State University on a long term, hands-on mathematics and science group project involving deeper thinking. This project has been extremely beneficial to her because there are so many different levels of learning to which she is teaching.

She finds that when students work together, they are in effect teaching each other because their group grade depends on it. The result is that they learn twice as much, and all students benefit. The key to group work, according to Ms. Gutman, is having many jobs for each student as this results in a variety of shared responsibilities. She says, "Having diversity in the assignments so that one student or group of students does not get singled out as the special one who only has to do half of the work is important."

Ms. Gutman also pairs bilingual students with native English speaking students to facilitate lessons. For book work, she allows them to split the assignments when they are working together so that both benefit. One may do the even numbered problems, and the other might do the odds: "If they both can show they know it, that's all I care about."

Valuing difference rather than sameness in schools includes all students as part of a larger system, a classroom ecology. Each child contributes important ideas and energies that promote diversity by honoring difference through interrelationships, interdependence, and the unique qualities in each classroom.

Supporting Diverse and Personal Connections

Even teachers who value diversity can still miss opportunities and misunderstand students' intentions. Consider this dialogue adapted from an incident reported in Closing the Achievement Gap (Urban Education National Network 1995, 30):

Teacher: Today, class, we are going to think about eggs. [She holds up a chicken egg.] Think about the times you have cooked and eaten eggs. What do you remember about those eggs? [A few seconds of silence follow as the children think, and the teacher waits for them to collect their thoughts. Soon, a little girl on the front row hesitantly raises her hand, and the teacher acknowledges her.]

Teacher: Yes, Rosa, what do you remember about the eggs that you have eaten?

Rosa: Well, my grandmother always prepares this special egg dish for me when we visit her house. She cuts up bread and…

Teacher: I know that your grandmother must make some really wonderful dishes, Rosa, but what about the eggs themselves? What did you notice about them?

Rosa: The eggs themselves? Well, my grandmother and I gathered them from the hens. She told me about how you have to be really careful because the roosters can be mean and attack you when…

Teacher: Rosa, let's focus on the eggs. What did you see when you looked at the eggs?

Bill: Well, you know when I eat eggs there is a yellow part and a white part.

Teacher: Yes, Bill, what about those parts? What can you tell us about them?

Bill: Well, the white part is all around the yellow part and sometimes there's this slime…

Obviously, this teacher is trying to draw on the daily life of students by asking them to recall their own experiences with eggs, but Rosa's attempts to talk about eggs from within her cultural context are being misinterpreted. Rosa values objects as part of social relations. She approaches the egg as part of a particular social experience. Bill and the teacher, on the other hand, are more comfortable talking about the egg as a physical object and discussing its constituent parts.

This teacher, and all teachers, can consider some steps that will help them value the differences science and mathematics learners bring to school.

• Honor the understandings that students bring with them to school about how and why things work.
• Listen carefully to understand student ideas because these will not always be clearly articulated and because listeners will not immediately see the value they offer.
• Provide opportunities for students to engage with the learning in a variety of ways and demonstrate their understandings in a variety of assessments.
• Look for multiple solutions or perspectives to a problem or issue. Ask for alternative solutions and consider them all.
• Create personal links to knowledge, events, and ideas and encourage conversation about those links.
• Move to create a sustaining community around the ideas.

Diversifying Teaching Strategies

The teacher in the vignette did not clearly hear the relevance of Rosa's story to her lesson. She did not recognize it as one of many possible perspectives on the natural world. More importantly, she did not attempt to see if there was a connection. Rosa's contribution could have been paired with Bill's as two parts of the discussion about the nature of eggs. This process begins when teachers demonstrate that student understandings and experiences are valued in the classroom.

By valuing Rosa's stories about eggs and her grandmother, the teacher could have provided all the students with a richer learning experience. Experience, observation, and work, however, are needed to acknowledge each student's understanding and to make it available to the whole class. The teacher will have to consider and support what each student can contribute to the diverse understandings of rest of the class.

For a mathematical lesson that encourages a range of approaches to problem solving to help diverse student populations understand the abstract idea of number concepts, see the lesson in this Classroom Compass: "Making Connections among Mathematical Concepts." In Other People's Children, Lisa Delpit lists five ways good teachers can show that they value all student experiences (1995):

1. Good teachers care whether students learn. They challenge all students, even those who are less capable and then help them to meet the challenge.
2. Good teachers are not time-bound to a curriculum and do not move on to new subject matter until all students grasp the current concept.
3. Good teachers are not bound to books and instructional materials but connect all learning to "real life."
4. Good teachers push students to think, to make their own decisions.
5. Good teachers communicate with, observe, and get to know their students and the students' cultural background.

Following Delpit's guidelines, the teacher in the vignette could have responded to Rosa's stories by allowing the class time to depart from the curriculum and explore, for example, how Rosa's grandmother's experiences resemble those of their own grandmothers. She could have used these real life connections to return to her consideration of eggs as physical objects and could have asked the class to compare their own and their relatives' egg stories with the descriptions in the textbook. Are there any differences between these stories? Any contradictions between stories? By carefully interweaving all the stories in the class, she would have acknowledged the diverse backgrounds in the class and helped each student to connect the classroom learning to the world outside. Students whose ideas are valued in this way will create their own community of ideas.

Learning is contextual - we interpret the world based on our diverse beliefs and backgrounds. In mathematics, there are multiple ways to arrive at a solution; in science, there are many techniques of knowing how something works. Teachers must learn to build on belief systems held by each student, helping them make their own connections to science and mathematics. In turn, students gain confidence in their abilities to do science and mathematics and develop a greater understanding of the many narratives they will hear throughout life.

Special thanks to Marilyn Gutman, a Presidential Awardee and SCIMAST teacher mentor, for her contributions and insights within this article.