In my teaching of pre-service educators, the majority of whom are widely known to be Caucasian from rural and suburban backgrounds, I seek to engage in critical dialogue about their developing understandings of diversity, making it explicit and modeling through personal and carefully selected examples that educators need language and strategies to understand and address difference. I have used arts-based strategies to ask students to explore their own identities as educators and to investigate the limits of their conceptions of diversity and strategies to promote inclusion.
Drawing upon the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center, collectively we consider, how young students could use observation skills to examine their own and their classmates’ skin color. Future educators are, therefore, able to reflect upon how direct observation, and descriptive language can enable conversations that transcend labels of black and white leading to more nuanced perspectives that recognize the need to examine the space between one’s skin color and his or her lived experiences, including privilege and prejudice. Further, through systematic reflective assignments students are engaged in reflection about their own nuanced identities in an effort to connect how their personal experiences influence their core values as educators. One of the signature assignments I propose is the creation of short digital story that investigates the students’ own identities as educators. This assignment has provided very powerful exchanges among students in which they grapple with the relationship between their core values, intended educational goals, and the limits of their own experiences.
I consider experiential learning and community engagement essential in expanding students’ own understandings of diversity. To that end, I seek to engage with the world outside the classroom, creating partnerships with various community-based organizations and using the arts a means for students to develop equitable relationships with each other and with community partners. Whether we are collaborating with a childcare organization to create a mural, developing visual arts activities for an after-school literacy program, or working with urban teens to create covers for their recently recorded singles, in these situations the arts provide connections between participants. Teaching with diversity in mind privileges establishing new relationships and honors the various ways in which we are able to participate and contribute. I challenge students to sustain a stance of self-reflection and openness as they engage in new experiences that require questioning and changing their behavior and perspectives.