Diverse Society - Diverse Classrooms. Critical, Creative, Cooperative and interculturally competent learners and teachers – ready for the 21st century
Our classrooms are multicultural, even where there are no learners from minority ethnic backgrounds. All of our learners have different cultures: class, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, health and other factors contribute to these differences. We continue to find learners for whom traditional teaching approaches don't work - so we need to provide active, creative learning environments and methods to reach all learners and give them an equal chance to thrive and learn.
Traditional methods - where learners are supposed to sit, listen and remember whilst the teacher talks suits only a minority of learners and effectively excludes others from the learning process. This book is supposed to be a practical toolkit for teachers, trainee teachers and others active in the field of education. The main focus is on the application of a range of cooperative learning approaches and how to use them with diverse groups of learners.
In this book I try to combine my specialisation in two areas, sociology and intercultural education as well as my own teaching experiences. The book is supposed to be a practical book rather than theoretical, for teachers, teaching students and others active in the field of education. The main focus is on different cooperative learning approaches and how they can especially be used in diverse groups of learners. While reading you will recognise already known and well-researched methods but sometimes with some adaptations and changes so that they better reach the aims of intercultural education. What I hope that this book can do, is to support and encourage teachers to try out some new approaches in their teaching, enabling a diverse group of learners to learn to their full potential, enjoy the process of learning new things and enjoy their time with their school brothers and sisters in the classroom. To teachers who are motivated to make changes I just want to remind them that you don’t have to turn over the whole school system or even the structures of your school on your own. You can make so much difference to individual learners and your group in your own classroom. No teaching method is so good that it suits all learners all the time, so this book is just meant to bring a few more ideas into the pool of good ideas that already exists and that you, dear teachers, are without doubt already using in your everyday teaching.