In contrast, we only have 2 Hispanic employees, both of whom work in food service, and two teachers, one of whom is the ESL teacher, who speak Spanish. If we were to have a diversity-centered recruitment program, these children may find themselves more accurately represented by the teacher population, and would also have more options for expressing themselves clearly and being understood correctly.
The need for training is also clear, though there is some resistance to it among the longer-serving teachers. While all of the teachers have the best intentions to be non-biased and inclusive in their teaching and evaluating, there is a lack of information about cultural differences that sometime hinders them. For instance, Victor Hernandez (2010) of SEDL points out that, while teachers in the U.S. are often trained to provide verbal encouragement for success or progress, many Hispanic cultures do not use verbal praise as encouragement -- instead the ideal is to set high expectations and provide constructive criticism until those expectations are met. As a result, the parents and the teachers of Hispanic students often do not see eye-to-eye on proper responses to success and failure, and the students themselves become confused. Intercultural training would help educate these teachers on how to communicate effectively within the cultural contexts of both the parents and the students.
Because my professional experiences have shown me clearly that the need for diversity promotion and training within the public school system is so deep, but the HR resources available to administrators are so few, I would like in the future to continue researching diversity...
While diversity is a hot topic in higher education research and in human resources research, it has not been developed and applied sufficiently to the k-12 public school setting. In my opinion, this is leading to a vicious cycle in which minorities are underserved by a school system with a largely homogenous teaching staff, and are consequently not inspired to become teachers themselves, making teacher diversity an even harder problem to fix. By developing sufficient HR tools like recruiting programs that promote diversity while still hiring on merit and training programs that provide general principles that can be customized, we can tackle the dual problem of minority underrepresentation in the education labor market and lack of diversity literacy among practicing teachers. This, I believe, is the only way to ensure that students receive the equal access to education to which they are entitled, and that they are prepared and empowered to be successful in a multicultural workplace.
References
Parker, W. (2003) Teaching democracy: unity and diversity in public life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Cole, D. And Ahmadi, S. (March/April 2010) Reconsidering campus diversity: an examination of Muslim students' experiences. The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 81, No. 2, 121-139.
Shudak, N. (Sept 2010) Diversity in teacher education: a double helix. Academic Questions, Vol. 23, Issue 3, 348-355.
Lee, J. (June 2010) Students' perceptions of and satisfaction with faculty diversity. College Student Journal, Vol. 44, Issue 2.
Norton, M.S. (2008) Human Resources Administration for Educational Leaders. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Educating Teachers for Diversity: meeting the challenge. (2010) Report of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. London: OECD Press.
Rodriguez, V. (2000) Diversity training improves intercultural communication skills. SEDL Web site. Retrieved from http://www.sedl.org/pubs/sedletter/v12n02/17.html
