Diversity is much more than a word. It is something that all educators must look at and work hard on integrating into the curriculum. According to Dictionary.com, diversity is “1. the state or fact of being diverse; difference; unlikeness. 2. variety; multiformity. 3. a point of difference.” I believe that most educators realize that having diversity within a school and curriculum is important. We need to not only realize that doing things differently within our lessons is important, but realizing that our students are different is also important. Acknowledging that not all of our students come from the same type of family as we did or have is crucial. We need to make sure that we make all of our students aware of the diversity within not only or school, community, and country, but also within the entire world.
When looking at The Center for Diversity Education website, I really like the entire concept and point of the cite – to help educate not only K-12 students, but everyone on the differences that are present with in different cultures, what has happened in the past and how to prevent some of the same things from happening in the future. I think especially with everything going on within our country and world today, this is important. We have students that have no idea about has happened during the history of our country and world. They do not understand why it is important to recognize and understand what we have done previously in order to prevent it from occurring again. I think this is a very useful site, but do not see it being a viable site for a lot of information for my school district. The reason being that some of the materials – such as the exhibits and tours – are based out of our geographical area. However, I do see it being something that our teachers could use, and possibly go there and experience themselves and bring information back to use within classrooms.
When working on the DiversityInc and Diversity Executive websites, I really like the amount of information that they have, however I must admit my brain when into cognitive overload with the amount of information that they had on their homepage. The information that I was able to access was very timely and helpful; however I am not sure how I would integrate all of it into my classroom. Honestly, most of what I am currently teaching is computer applications – how to work a specific software program. As a result, there are not a lot of diversity issues within that area.
Overall, the information within all of these websites is great! There is a lot of information that can be very helpful to many different classrooms. However, in many of my classes, due to the nature of the class currently, they are not ones that I would utilize for a majority of a class or topic. However, I do see my using some of the information for my Consumer Education course when discussing careers and the different types of economies within our world. Having the students see some of the information contained in these sites, may help them realize that it does matter what they do and say. For many of my students, they have lived their entire life in our small rural area. They do not realize what kind of impact some of their actions may have when it comes to careers in the future. They believe that they are always right, never wrong, and that people should conform to their beliefs. Showing them some of the information contained in these websites may be very helpful.
Also, I try to keep up to date with the National Business Education Association Website. The overall design of the site has not changed in several years, but the information that they post does. The entire site and organization is devoted to helping keep business educators up to date on what is happening within Business Education and the entire Career and Technical Education field. Within this, they discuss what we should be teaching our students and why. Giving us rules and regulations, if you will, about why and how we should be teaching our students. NBEA publishes its own magazine, Business Education Forum and newsletter, Keying In, that helps keep educators up to date on what is going on. They also publish new policy statements yearly about what we as an organization believe we should be and are doing within business education.
Overall, I believe teaching our students about the importance of diversity is important. If we do not understand where other ideals and ideas come from and why some people are different than us, we will never move a head as a society. Having our students realize not only this, but help them learn from previous mistakes our forefathers have made is crucial. We do not want to relive the Civil War in the US, the Holocaust from World War II, or the like. We need to help students and even other educators realize that it is ok to be different and that these differences are a good thing. By being a diverse country, we are able to enjoy things that others may not be able to.
References:
Diversity Inc. (2009). Diversity inc. Retrieved from http://www.diversityinc.com/
diversity. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved December 20, 2009, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/diversity
MediaTec Publishing Inc, . (2009). Diversity executive. Retrieved from http://www.diversity-executive.com/
National Business Education Association, . (2001). National business education association. Retrieved from http://nbea.org/
The Center for Diversity Education. (2008). The Center for diversity education . Retrieved from http://www.diversityed.org/