What is diversity?

This week, you’ll learn about how to use inclusive practices in teaching. This includes recognising and valuing diversity among your learners and encouraging them to do the same. You’ll also look at how to provide a supportive learning environment through the way you teach, the materials and activities you use, and the way you respond to your learners. Let’s start this week by looking at diversity. We asked some experienced teachers about what diversity means to them as teachers. Here’s what they said.

A symphony. I just feel like I’m a maestro, and there’s someone on the keyboard with a different sound, someone on the trumpet. We have to harmonise all these sounds together so that we have a beautiful melody.

Actually I believe that everyone has got special needs, like maybe they vary depending on their intelligence, their ability, their differences in their learning style. So everyone has got a different kind of special need, so we need to address all these things. So other than mentioning that, you have some got some special need, we will try to follow some strategies so that we can accommodate all kinds of learners. Maybe we will give more visual input, auditory input to the user by ICT and other teaching aids. So this is– teachers need to work with careful consideration of all the special needs.

Diversity for me means variety beyond the obvious differences in gender and background. In the classroom, I feel that diversity would mean different learning styles that students bring to the classroom. It might also mean different views learners have about learning.

Diversity, it means a lot of things in terms of, as I’m saying, different intelligences. It means that you understand your classroom, that they are different. Like in my context, we’ve got different races. We’ve got learners who come from different cultures, with different everything, even different world views. You find all that in the same classroom. So diversity for me, it means all those things in my context. I do have these learners who come from different ends of the world, but they’re all brought together in one classroom.