Strategies for a Multiculturally Aware Teacher
- Be open and non-judgmental.
- Being aware of your own culture and how your culture differs or is similar to the experience of children in the classroom.
- Be honest and open about your own bias, before you can even begin to act against the students' bias.
- Acknowledge your own insecurity and privilege when dealing with students from various backgrounds and cultural heritages.
- Teach Social Studies and History by including multiple perspectives and making sure to tell the truth about the history of this country and all of the people who played a part in shaping it.
- Act in accordance to end white privilege in the classroom by presenting students with the true history of this country and exposing students to how people have been marginalized in the past.
- Embrace language differences in the classroom.
- Advocate the inclusion of various cultural perspectives in your own curriculum.
- View social reality from multiple perspectives and understand the view points of various cultures about the same event.
- Teach lessons that involve listening to the stories of other people from various cultures and how they perceive different concepts and events.
- Develop lessons that nurture a passion for justice and skills for taking social action outside of the classroom.
- Advocate for students who are struggling in the school system because they do not possess the same social advantages as other classmates.
- Learn about students on a deep cultural level and try to understand and relate to the students.
- Understand that the achievement gap is not a fault of the students but rather a fault of the system they are being taught in.
- Classroom discipline should be culturally sensitive, where students don't get in trouble because they react differently from other students because of their culture.
- Classroom materials are inclusive of a variety of various cultural backgrounds.
- Build a multicultural library in the classroom.
- Celebrate differences!