Teaching Academically Diverse Students

One of the primary challenges faced by educators today is to make schools work for students from diverse backgrounds so that they all have equal access to success. Multicultural education is a term that has been used in educational literature starting from the late 1970s to describe an all-inclusive educational approach adopted to confront this challenge. This approach was defined by Pamela Tiedt in Multicultural Teaching, first published in 1979, as a teaching and learning process that involves all students in the education process, developing their self-esteem and empathy for people from different cultural backgrounds and providing them with equitable opportunities to reach [Page 1500]their full potential. The latter was emphasized as early as 1902 by John Dewey, indicating that the primary mission of education ...