Teaching in a Diverse Society Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Teaching in a Diverse Society - Term Paper Example In addition, ethnically diverse students, within the US social landscape, have been known to perform much poorer than their white counterparts. Hispanic, Asians, American Indians, and Blacks are some examples of student groups with problematic learning experiences. Within the diverse cultural setting, it is observed that students of different races or ethnic groups are referred not with their names, but with their ethnicity. This, according the Terry and Irving (2010), is a factor that shows obvious differences within the class and therefore a student is unable to deliver his best performance in such an environment. The article presents the problems associated with cultural diversity and their influence on performance of the individual student. Article 2: Cultural Competence guidelines and protocols According to the Ethnic Communities’ Council Of Victoria (2006) culture is a set of functions that shape the lifestyle of an individual as it reflects behaviour, knowledge, beliefs , values, and customs. With regards to the article at hand, culture is described as the lens with which people view and perceive the world they live in. For example, the culture of a Chinese and the culture of a Russian differ immensely in that an individual from either culture cannot view the world in the same sense as the other. Therefore, while the article is a guideline to achieving cultural competency, various considerations are included on how one should acquire cultural competency. Firstly, the article takes a holistic approach in presenting culture as a personal factor that influences the individual at a first-person’s perspective. Therefore, a person must be self-aware of his her culture. Secondly, the article suggests that empathy is a major instalment when establishing relationships and dealing with the outside world. It is suggested that an individual must be able to understand that his/her point of view on to the world differs with that of the other person, there fore, an understanding should be cultivated to help one decode signs and elements of dissatisfaction. The influence on diversity is characterized by factors such as cultural identity, perception of time, ethnic identity, language, sexuality, education, gender, family configuration, class, literacy, social history, assimilation, religion and spiritual bias, political orientation, and acculturation. These factors are supposed to be integrated into an individual set of consideration when cultural competency is sought. Article 3: Cultural Competency According to the National Technical Assistance and Evaluation Centre (2009), children in the United States of America differ from the rest of the population in that they need to be protected from a variety of factors. For example, children are easy to bully, easy to offend, easy to convince, and require more time to comprehend things they are taught or things they observe. In this case, while children need the protection of parents from bad societal influences, they also require social support from their teachers and the government to provide policies that set their rights straight within the community. According to the article at