Teaching for Cultural Diversity Essay
Multicultural lesson plan
Identify a lesson plan or a unit of lessons (of any subject) that you have developed for another unit or implemented in your practicum teaching (no more than two pages in single spacing). If you have not developed a lesson plan yet, then you can use someone else’s lesson plan or a pre-packaged lesson plan in your preferred subject area. PLEASE NOTE the quality of the original lesson plan does not matter, for your task is to revise it in a way that demonstrates what you have learned through this unit. Attach an 1700-words explanation about the changes that you have made. The classroom context in which the lesson plan is to be implemented can be real or hypothetical, but it has to have at least 3 EAL/D (English as an Additional Language/Dialect) students (preferably with differing backgrounds) for whom you will have to implement various language support strategies. Use the EAL/D ‘learner phases’ briefly (see EAL/D Advice for Schools 2020) to describe the level of their English language competency.
In your explanation, you must refer to a MINIMUM OF EIGHT (8) unit readings (they can be required or suggested readings) drawn primarily from Topics 1-8 (PLEASE see the assessment rubric for details).
You must submit:
1. The original lesson plan (no longer than 2 pages) with all the new changes either underlined (when added) or struck out (when removed) the new additions must be no more than 300 words;
2. A 1700-word explanation of the changes. Here is the suggested outline for the explanation note:
- Brief discussion of the classroom context in which the revised lesson plan is to be implemented. The context can be real or hypothetical. Describe the level of English language proficiency of the EAL/D students in the classroom, using the EAL/D ‘learner phases,’
- Discussion of your revisions and rationales for each change.
For your reference, we have included several ‘before/after’ lesson plans from Grant & Sleeter’s (2003) book Turning on Learning: Five approaches for multicultural teaching plans for race, class, gender, and disability in Topics 3, 7 and 8. These lesson plans will be of help when you think about ways to use the unit readings to multiculturalise your ‘before’ lesson plan (s).
Here are four elements that you can address when multiculturalising your lesson plan:
1. Inclusion of multicultural representation
First, integrate different ways in which a given topic of the lesson is understood from different cultural and national perspectives. In so doing, make sure you do not essentialise cultural differences (see Topic 4 on this).
Second, discuss the contribution of ‘others’ in the development of the given theme. For instance, if you look at the development of any scientific knowledge from the early modern era, it is actually very transcultural with thinkers around the world constantly interacting across cultural and civilisational boundaries. And yet, we tend to believe that all the scientific development took place in Europe.
2. Integration of world languages and ‘other’ dialects of English
Many concrete strategies are provided by the authors in Topics 5 & 6 &7. However, you will need to balance this celebration of linguistic diversity and affirmation of ‘other’ students’ identities with the concern that Lisa Delpit raises in Topic 3, the explicit teaching of the ‘language of power.’ The next element (Integration of explicit linguistic scaffolding) addresses this second concern well.
3. Integration of explicit linguistic scaffolding for EAL/D students
The readings in Topics 6 and 7 should be of use here. In particular, have a look at all the chapters (including those under suggested readings) by Gibbons. In one of the chapters, she suggests that teachers identify specific linguistic functions required in your planned lesson activities and teach the relevant sentence structures explicitly while introducing the lesson content. This should be useful for any subject-based teaching.
4. Critical pedagogy
Two approaches can be pursued here. First, introduce a given subject topic in a manner that involves students in social critique (note Ladson-Billings’ idea of critical consciousness). Design a lesson in a manner that encourages students to interrogate a given topic in terms of whose knowledge, worldview, and norm gets represented in, say, the school curricular, textbooks, the media, government policies and whose gets left out.