Teaching for Diversity

This book has a dual focus: how to teach diverse students and how to teach students to deal with diversity. To sharpen this focus, Ricardo L Garcia integrates three broad themes. The first is the role of the teacher in helping all students to learn and to accept personal responsibility for learning. This requires facilitative teaching based on constructivist principles that operate from the belief that humans dislike disorder and will organize ideas to make sense of them. Second is a developmental view of human diversity. Too often, diversity is regarded as deviation from a supposed norm. This view means that some individuals are seen by others as "substandard," "deficient," or "abnormal"-perhaps to be tolerated but not to be fully accepted. A contrary belief is that diversity represents variations on the common theme of humanity. Each person displays individual characteristics that, taken together, form the whole fabric of human existence. No thread in this fabric is "better" than another. The third theme explores seven guiding principles that Garcia believes can help educators to teach for diversity. Together, these three themes provide a grounding that all teachers will find useful as they strive to foster a positive learning environment and to select instructional strategies and materials that exemplify a value for human diversity.Ricardo Garcia is the author of 'Teaching for Diversity' with ISBN 9780873678575 and ISBN 0873678575.