Multicultural Education - Essay Example

Multicultural Education Culturally diverse may find it difficult to talk with their peers and teachers in the room. This imparts the need for schools to develop such programs that increase cooperation among culturally diverse students. Students’ engagement in the studies increases with the integrative measures taken by teachers. TeachHUB.com is a website meant to impart educational guidelines, lessons, and much more for multicultural learners. The website is just as useful for the teachers as it is for the multicultural students as it provides a variety of learning tools, lessons, and methodologies of learning that teachers can use to improve the quality of education in a classroom setting. TeachHUB.com has learning material that caters for the needs of a vast population of multicultural students ranging from preschoolers to graduate level students. Some of the features offered by TeachHUB.com pertinent to multicultural educational setting include lessons and teaching tools designed for culturally diverse student base, culture-related hot tips and topics, platform for intercultural interaction, professional development opportunities, and Real Teacher Blogs. Finding knowledgeable and experienced guest speakers and visitors that are well-informed and masters of their fields is a big way for the schools and educational institutions to improve the knowledge of their students as well as gain a good reputation in the market. It is often difficult for the educational institutions to locate such speakers on their own or to arrange their visits to the institutions because of time and financial constraints. In addition to that, it is difficult to accommodate the needs of students coming from a variety of cultural backgrounds in any site visit or lecture. In this regard, the service provided by TeachHUB.com is remarkable and makes it very convenient for the administrators to regularly and frequently arrange guest speakers. TeachHUB.com also arranges training sessions for teachers upon request of the schools. Schools can take the services of this website to improve the intercultural skills of their teachers and inculcate the skills of teaching in a culturally diverse environment. School principals who have rendered the services of TeachHUB.com in the past have past good remarks about the quality of service they have been provided. One school principal expressed her satisfaction in these words, “When considering professional development for our teachers it is very difficult to find quality Presenters on a specific topic at a reasonable cost. In my case, the K-12 Teachers Alliance (the TeachHUB parent company) produced an expert speaker who provided outstanding training to our teachers. I would not hesitate to reach out to them again in the future and would highly recommend their services to other administrators” (Angelakis cited in TeachHUB, 2014). TeachHUB.com offers excellent lesson plan ideas that accommodate the needs of the learners belonging to all grades. For example, a teacher who is in search of a movie that can be shown to the students in the class so that it can be followed by a quick activity to develop critical thinking skills in the students, TeachHUB.com provides a whole list of movies and lesson plan ideas for them. Moving image is a wonderful way of imparting education in a multicultural setting because students can also understand the context and storyline by watching the moving images even if they have a problem understanding the language in which the movie is shown. Before developing the teaching approach, teachers used motor and perceptual skills to teach the students using direct methods of teaching. The limited ability to perceive on the part of the students limited the effectiveness of these teaching methods. These teaching approaches met with increased challenges with the growing cultural diversity in schools. Different perspectives of the culturally diverse students incorporated the characteristics of uneven levels of skill in the classroom. Alongside, teachers faced the need to adapt their teaching styles to address the needs of the culturally diverse students. In doing so, teachers realized the importance of engaging more with the students in the classroom activities and the benefit this provides over passive methods of teaching. Teaching the students with movies is a potential way of getting actively involved with the culturally diverse students. Real Teacher Blogs is an extremely useful feature of TeachHUB.com. Teachers can use these blogs not only to improve their knowledge about teaching and develop the essential skills required to impart education in a multicultural setting, but can also learn from others’ mistakes to improve their own quality of teaching. Finding out that other teachers are also going through the same problems and issues in the multicultural teaching lends emotional and psychological support to the teachers and guides them on what actions and measures can be taken to make the education more effective for the culturally diverse students. There is a comments’ section at the bottom of each blog where the readers that are mostly teachers and students have shared their insights and opinions about the content of the blog. Reading these blogs and comments promotes understanding of the different cultures and points of views of people belonging to a variety of cultures in the students as well as teachers. These comments are nothing less than a qualitative research that provides insight into the thoughts and opinions of the key stakeholders about the issues related to education in the culturally diverse setting. TeachHUB.com provides guidelines for teachers to use music as a tool to impart learning in a multicultural environment. Teachers can use rap, rock, pop, and other forms of music as a medium to implement multicultural learning. Music can be used as a universal language that is understood by everyone regardless of culture. Students belonging to different cultures can easily relate to the music that appeals to them. Music unites the culturally diverse students and provides the students with a way to interact with each other. Music has special significance in multicultural learning for the teachers who teach students with English as a second language because the combination of storytelling and rhythm enables the students to memorize as well as integrate the new vocabulary in their activities and interaction in the classroom. This type of education benefits everybody. For example, teachers can use the different forms of music to comprehend the way they communicate with students in a better way and to increase the interest and excitement of students in the lesson plans. Music reaches everybody whether or not the teacher communicates with the non-English speaking students. In the article, “Using Rap, Rock & Pop Music as a Teaching & Learning Tool” (TeachHUB, 2014) by Vince Welsh, the author has shared ways and strategies using which teachers can effectively use music as a teaching tool. For example, one of the strategies shared in the article is that teachers can use historical documentaries on music artists, bands, and rock stars to incorporate the historical elements into the lesson plans. Certain topics covered in the documentaries of rock ‘n’ roll cover such topics as business, arts, politics, and history. Since rock documentaries are based on history and storytelling, they provide the students with the opportunity to learn about American culture and history while staying focused and interested in the lessons. TeachHUB.com is a great resource for the teachers wanting to improve their competence in and understanding of other cultures. Teachers should be capable of teaching students not only about their respective cultures but also about the cultures of other students in the class. Teachers need to adapt their teaching style and content to address the needs of students. Teachers play a pivotal role in guiding their students to comprehend and appreciate each other’s cultural differences and making the students behave properly in such settings. Even the teachers who have completed a course in multicultural education, many teachers still grapple with the issues regarding competence in other cultures. TeachHUB.com carries a vast array of articles that teachers can read to better understand cultural competence and identify the direction in which to proceed in order to develop that. One such article is “Navigating Cultural Competence in the Classroom” (TeachHUB, 2011). To conclude, TeachHUB.com is a very well-developed website with a lot of content that is of use and value to the teachers and students in a multicultural setting alike. This is a very big website where the users can develop their own accounts and sign in for customized use and quick access to the content they need. It provides the teachers and students with a platform where they can not only grow intellectually, but also network with other teachers and students from a variety of cultural backgrounds. The programs offered by TeachHUB.com are effective for students belonging to a variety of cultures and grades. TeachHUB.com advises on the ways in which culturally diverse students can plan and do activities without being closely supervised by their teachers. From Real Teacher Blogs to lesson plan ideas and arranging guest speakers for informative lectures customized to the needs of culturally diverse learners, TeachHUB.com covers it all. Teachers can use TeachHUB.com to develop their teaching skills, learn about the issues in the modern multicultural educational environment from a variety of perspectives, and identify solutions to the problems they encounter in the multicultural setting. In the contemporary culturally diverse digital age, websites like TeachHUB.com are nothing less than a blessing. References: TeachHUB. (2011). Navigating Cultural Competence in the Classroom. Retrieved from http://www.teachhub.com/news/article/cat/14/item/613. TeachHUB. (2014). Teaching Strategies to Aid Your Gifted Students. Retrieved from http://teachhub.blogspot.com/2014/10/teaching-strategies-to-aid-your-gifted.html. Read More