[MUSIC] Welcome back to Week 6, Recognizing Diversity. This is Lecture 2. I'm going to look at the types of diversity in our relationships, in [INAUDIBLE] relationships. I might not be the best person to talk about diversity because I come from a very homogeneous society, the Maldives, where we have one religion, one culture and a small population of people. However, let's just look at diversity and what do we mean by it. Diversity means, for us teachers, valuing the differences between the people and the ways in which these differences can contribute to a richer and more creative, more productive work environment. When we talk about diversity, we talk about respecting individual differences in terms of the differences in race, the differences in culture, age, ability, marital status, the region that we come from, the gender, the religion, ethnicity and many more. So when we actually deal with our students, when we deal with our colleagues, we have to understand the different backgrounds they come from, the different cultures they come from, the different ethnicities they come from. Especially when we deal with our students, it's very important that we understand their cultures. It's very important that we understand their ethnicities, their languages and so on. For example, in some cases, in some cultures, we don't have eye contact with the elderly. We don't have eye contact with teachers, out of respect. So when a student from a different culture avoids eye contact, that doesn't mean that the person or the student is avoiding any communication with you. It may be that it's a cultural thing, or it may be some other difference as well. These are things that, as teachers, we need to know and we need to understand. And there may be some visible symbols that we need to understand. For example, for Muslim women, they wear the head scarf, or hijab, which is part of their faith. For Jewish men, they wear a skullcap. So these again are things that are visible that we need to understand and we need to respect their diversities. In terms of the personal characteristics, there are differences in their communication styles. There are differences due to their economic backgrounds. There are differences due to their personalities. And even age there may be differences. In the same classroom you might have different age groups of students which you might have to be able to deal with differently. One of the other areas of diversity is the cognitive aptitude of the students. The abilities of the students vary quite a lot. In your classrooms, you would meet a lot of students with high ability as well as low ability, and we should be making sure that we actually treat them equally. The technical abilities, the skills of certain students may be higher than the others. The social abilities can, depending on where they come from, differ. So the social abilities, for example, in my country, in the Maldives, students from islands with smaller communities will be exposed to a lesser number of people. So their experiences will be less, so when they come to the main island, their social interactions are different from the students who have had their life in the main island. So these differences need to be identified and catered for in our classrooms. Some other aspects of diversity are the level of motivation and the diversity of opinion. Again, this is an area that, as teachers, we need to address. For example, as a teacher, I come across every day different levels of motivation of students in my classroom. In my postgraduate classes, students are more motivated, and especially students who have enrolled in some same courses where they come from far away islands they are more motivated because they enrolled themselves because they wanted to learn something. However, for undergraduate classes that I teach, the level of motivation is low. For undergraduate classes our approach will be different to the postgraduate because for postgraduate, as I said, that students are more motivated. The same applies to the diversity of opinions. Students who come from islands in the Maldives, they are trained in such a way that they don't really have a lot of opinion. They go by what the teacher says. So we have to create an environment where we open their minds. We have to create an environment where we allow them to express their opinions, while people who come from the main island will have their opinions. So we will have two levels of opinions in our classrooms. In addressing diversity we also need to address discrimination. Discrimination is prejudices put into action. So what do we think about the words prejudice and what do we think about discrimination? What comes to your mind when these two words are mentioned, discrimination and prejudice? Let's just look at discrimination, the three different types of discrimination that we might have in our classrooms. Positive discrimination, which actually means we discriminate a certain group of people in a positive way, for being, let's say, more affluent. We cater them in a different way. We provide them with a better resources. One example that I can give from my experience is that high-ability students in our schools we have a way of streaming. It's not actually streaming, but it's putting the high-ability students in a separate class to the rest of the students. And they get better treatment in terms of better resources, in terms of better teachers in schools. So this is a positive discrimination towards higher-ability students. It's good for those students, but we also need to know that when we do that we are actually failing our school system, because low-ability students are getting lesser resources as well as less talented teachers, which in turn leads to more school dropouts. We might also have direct discrimination, where, because of a certain race, because of a certain disability, because of a certain characteristic of a person, we actually discriminate the person. This is common in schools between students where we see bullying and other harassments. We also sometimes see teachers discriminating as well. And then we have indirect discrimination against students, against our colleagues and others. Again, this is an area where, because of certain characteristics we actually indirectly discriminate students. Once again, an example that I can take here is, in our schools we give projects for students to do at home or in groups where we ask the students to buy the materials and carry out the projects. When we do this, if we actually give projects where students from low socioeconomic background cannot afford that, we are actually indirectly discriminating them from these projects and from the actual instruction. So these are things that we have to think about when we actually carry out our instruction as well as when we are being with our students. That's all I have in terms of the types of diversity. In the next session I will be looking at why we actually need to address diversity in schools and what are the ways in which we can address diversity. Thank you very much. [MUSIC]
