Diversity

I teach in an extremely urban Baltimore community.  This area is primarily low to low-middle class homes with significant irregularities in home and family life.  Student home life is vastly unstable with minimal to slight structure.  Many students are homeless, in group homes, or in foster care placements.  Students who live with biological family are generally single parent homes or a step mother/father situation.  The vast majority of the school population is African American, with another significant amount of Hispanic students as well.  There is an extremely small amount of Caucasian and Asian students in the school.  The Hispanic population in the school is almost entirely in the ESOL program, and a significant amount of these students are new to the country.  The school is categorized as an ESOL center due to the high concentration of English Language Learners. 

The community and demographics of my classroom absolutely help to define and inform how I am going to teach and structure my course work.  I take a significant amount of time learning about the students and their communities and preferences to bring familiar or colloquial language/phrases, and ideas into my teaching.  I will frequently create problems that incorporate community events or student interests to build a bit of connection, which the students appreciate.  I teach mostly standard sections, but I also teach a specific Algebra 1 course purely for low level ESOL students.  With that being said, I must create completely adapted lessons of the same Algebra 1 content as my other sections, but with more support and structure for ELL students built in.  This section has given me an extreme amount of practice with UDL strategies as well as general ELL methods.  My school has a significant amount of minority students, but there is not a lot of diversity within it.  This creates an inverse of what would be considered to be “lack of diversity.”  Instead, it is just flipped the other way around.  Rather than being mostly Caucasian students with few minorities, my population is mostly minority with few Caucasian students.  This kind of lack of diversity creates it’s own set of issues, which have to be addressed and managed in a way that promotes general tolerance and understanding between students of all backgrounds.