1. Diversity in the
Classroom
By Amanda Menzel and Gaby Senz

2. Linguistic Diversity and
Instructional Practices
Ann M. Johns

3. Linguistically Diverse Students
“Vague, broad-rush census categories are not useful
for distinguishing individual students.” (133)
Example: There are 3 types of “Hispanic” students:
1. International students from Spanish-speaking
countries.
2. Generation 1.5
3. Second Generation

4. Pedagogical Possibilities
 It is beneficial to find out student needs, their course-
related interests, and linguistic backgrounds.
 It is important for students to make a connection
between life experience and disciplinary learning.
 Students should understand how what their learning
serves a function in the community and society
 Students should understand how experts talk and
write.

5. Interactions between our linguistically
diverse students and ourselves
 All teachers face difficulties
 Our own biases
 Social construct of learners

6. Question:
 “How do our biases and expectations intersect or
clash with those of our diverse students?”

7. Faulty Critical Thinking
 If critical thinking is cultural thinking
 It is only discoverable by those who are brought up in
that culture
 3 notions directly indicated in critical thought
 Individualism
 Self-expression
 Using language as a tool for learning

8.  Critical thinking = social construct
 Not a cluster of universal abilities that asses students
and model teacher beliefs
 Especially for non native or mainstream English
speakers

9. Student Errors
 Teachers find some errors more offensive than others
 Examine our negative responses to student errors
 Update your own knowledge of language
 Find a balanced way of grading
 Decide on which assignments should be corrected and
which should just be assessed for content

10. Faculty Assignments and
Assessments
 Assessment process should be connect to learners
world
 Demonstration should show multiple ways to
represent knowledge and skill
 Self-assessment should be essential to the overall
assessment process

11. Plagiarism
 Undermines teachers authority
 Determine and discuss with class
 What is plagiarism
 Why it is unacceptable
 What are its consequences
 Within the classroom
 Outside the classroom

12. Enhancing All Students’ Learning
Opportunities
 Ways in which students can apply classroom concepts
and approaches in the world
 Integration of linguistic and culturally diverse students
into the classroom

13. Assist Students in Setting Goals for
Achievement in Your Classroom
 Look at classroom readings and text
 What goals do you have for yourself and your
learners?
 What do you consider your strength as a learner for
this class?
 What do you still need to work on?

14. Make Your Goals and Expectations Clear
 What is required of them in an assignment
 What is a good example of that assignment
 How assignments and other assessments will be
scored
 What other expectations you have

15. Encourage Positive Group
Interaction in the Classroom
 Select groups yourself
 Rotate students roles within groups
 Assign group projects that can draw equally from linguistically
diverse and native speakers
 Create situations were diverse students teach others and vice
versa
 Make group session with problem solving exercises
 Establish positive interdependence
 Provide accountability for individuals within group

16. Assess Your Attempts at Inclusion
 Have student write an unsigned “minute paper” about what the
most important thing they have learned.
 Have students list in writing, key concepts or ideas.
 Ask students to define or apply their own learning to key
concepts.
 Randomly collect student lecture notes.
 Come early and talk to students who are not participating
frequently.

17. Conclusion
 It can be challenging to teach diverse students.
 The challenges are great but the rewards can be even
greater.

18. Teaching to Transgress
By Bell Hooks

19. Question
Hooks mentions on page 29 that there are people who
believe that racism does not exist anymore. Do you
agree?
If not, how can you, as a teacher, join the struggle to end
racism?

20. The Promise of Multicultural Change
• Desegregation in schools did not mean the end of racial
apartheid/racism.
• “thing”-oriented society  “person”- oriented society
(Martin Luther King Jr.)
• Traditional role of the university: pursuit of truth and
sharing of knowledge and information.
• “recognition of difference might also require of us a
willingness to see the classroom change, to allow for
shifts in relations between students.” (page 30)

21. “Many folks found that as they tried to respect
‘cultural diversity’ they had to confront the
limitations of their training and knowledge, as
well as possible loss of ‘authority.’”
(page 30)
As pre-service teachers, can you foresee
yourself having to confront your limitations? How
would you approach such a situation?
Question

22. To create a culturally diverse academy, we must:
• commit ourselves fully
• learn from other movements like civil rights
and feminist liberation efforts
• be vigilant and patient
• accept that it is a struggle

23. Intellectual Openness
Intellectual openness:
• celebrates diversity
• welcomes dissent
• rejoices in the collective dedication to truth

24. Approaches
 Freire’s View
 The Educator and The Oppressed
 Less interest in actual ideas or subjects
 Viewed self as outsiders, observers
 Hook’s view
 Southern black community to University
 Viewed self as

25. Decolonization & Conscientization
 Initial stage of transformation
 think critically about the self and identity in relation to
one's political circumstance
 Conscientization not an end itself
 always joined by meaningful praxis
 Praxis
 Not blind action
 Action and reflection
 Makes human being capable of giving meaning to the
world

26. Progressive Political Movement
 Fails to have lasting impression on the US
 Not enough understanding of praxis
 Act as though it is naive to think
 Lives must be a living example of our politics

27. Freire’s Flaws
 Sexism of language
 Phallocentric paradigm of liberation
 Freedom and the experience of patriarchal manhood
are always linked

28. Question
 How do you view Freire’s usage of sexist language?
 Do you find truth in Bell Hook’s statement?
 “to have work that promotes one's liberation is such a
powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is
flawed.”

29. Hook’s theories
 Feminism and Freire
 Two experiences converge
 Parts of Freire woven into feminist pedagogy
 Personal experiences
 Freire’s work
 lived pedagogy of the many black teachers of Hook’s
girlhood