Double dose of diversity

The back-to-back presentations on diversity from ASU faculty members Rick Rodriguez and Sharon Bramlett-Solomon brought to light some interesting attempts at recognizing diversity and the need to incorporate it into our classrooms.

I know we have Black and Hispanic History Months because basically every other month is "White History Month" according to the books schools use that were printing in the early 1980s. However, I think it is time to not only cover these events in February or March or whenever these months occur and simply cover issues of non-Whites 12 months a year. There is no need to break out all the Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks stuff one time a year. The events of their lives affect our students year round and when we cover our student population, these will come to the forefront.

I think the discussion starts in our classrooms asking our students: "Does diversity matter?" Let them figure out that it does instead of us telling them that it does. Then we need to do things like Jill said and highlight males and females in the paper, and then take it the next step and look at our own newspapers and see if we are covering our students fairly and accurately. It is something I plan on doing more regularly in my classroom.

Jeff Fencl

Del Norte High School

Albuquerque, N.M.