Unit 1: Understand Why Creating Diversity-Neutral Learning Environments is Important to You!
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Unit Objectives
- Participants will examine their own behavior in order to understand how they relate to people outside of their comfort zones.
- Participants will gain insight into other perspectives about diversity and inclusion.
- Participants will identify their feelings in order to fully reflect on a specific personal experience of feeling different in a learning scenario.
Examine Your Behavior
- Talk to at least ten people over the course of the next few days with whom you wouldn't normally interact
- Reflect on your thought processes and feelings as you are interacting
- Write down your feelings and thoughts on the experience in this Examine Your Behavior padlet
Review Resources
- Watch, Read, and Reflect on these resources:
- Watch this video:
- Read this chapter:
- Chapter 6 of Frank Partnoy’s book Wait: File:Partnoy Wait.pdf
- Read this article:
- Here are some questions for thinking about the inclusion of all students in learning:
- How do you see the types of changes going on in the "A Journey to Inclusion" video as impacting the future of school climates? How did the video make you feel from a potential student's perspective? What about from an educator's perspective? What about from a parent's perspective?
- How do Frank Partnoy's observations about stereotyping make you feel? Did stereotypes have an impact on your choices in how and with whom you chose to interact during the first exercise in this Unit?
- Do you think that the work that Ruby Payne is doing is important to the field of education? How do you relate to students whose socio-economic backgrounds differ from your own?
React and Reflect
- Spend a few minutes thinking about how you relate to diversity
- Use the emotion words from the Emotions chart below to describe your feelings about diversity in your work as an educator
- Reflect about a specific experience where you felt left out of a learning scenario because you felt different from the other learners
- Share your emotional reaction to diversity, your experience, and your reflection about the experience in the Feeling Left Out Because You Are Differentwiki-space
Click here to go on to Unit 2: Identify What You Already Know About Diversity and What You Need to Learn!