Promoting Acceptance Among Students

In classrooms these days there is a huge amount of diversity among the students and teachers. There is cultural diversity, economic diversity, and all kinds of other diversities. One of the challenges of being a teacher will be to not only check any prejudices that you may subconsciously have at the door, but also teach the students to not have any prejudices. I don’t think that teachers should have any sort of prejudices against any cultures because they may be unknowingly passing these on to their students through behaviour. As we discussed in class a great deal of what students learn is through watching the teacher. Teachers need to be aware of the impact their actions can have on students.

            I also think that we as teachers need to be promoting acceptance and respect of other cultures, not just tolerance. Throughout their lives, especially in a multicultural country like Canada, students will be working with and encountering people from many different cultures. This is why they need to learn acceptance from young age, and since teachers are such a huge part of their lives and spend so much time with them, we can be instrumental in teaching this acceptance.

An example of a teacher promoting acceptance comes from my experience volunteering in a grade two classroom. I thought my mentor teacher used a very interesting system in her classroom that promoted acceptance. She had the students desks arranged in groups of four or six, and every week or so she would rearrange the seating arrangement. This ensured that all the students in the classroom were working with each other. It seemed to have a positive effect in the class, and most of the students were friends. There was also a little boy in the class that was deaf, and it amazed me that all the kids in the class were making an effort to learn sign language. I was astounded at the level that the students went through to make sure he was included as part of the group. While kids will never be perfect in their acceptance of others, an idea as simple as moving the desks around (among other things) seemed to be leading to more acceptance in that classroom. This was one of the ideas that I took away from the experience that I would like to try and apply in my own classroom.