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Diversity Training for Faculty, Staff, and Administrators

Diversity training is generally designed to help participants gain the awareness, knowledge, and skills necessary to work effectively with students, families, and colleagues with disabilities and from diverse racial, ethnic, immigrant, language, economic, religious, gender, and sexual orientation groups. It usually begins with the preparation of teacher candidates in colleges and universities. As the student population becomes more diverse, schools and school districts develop professional learning opportunities for teachers, other school professionals, and staff to develop a better understanding of the communities and students they are serving.

Purpose of Diversity Training

One of the goals of diversity training is to improve the performance of all students by developing inclusive, equitable, and excellent schools. This task can be very challenging when the diversity of the student population is greater than that of their teachers and school administrators. Most teachers in the United States are predominantly White, monolingual, and female, while the percentage of White students is declining and will be less than 50% before 2030. Because many of the new and practicing teachers were raised in communities with limited or no racial or language diversity, they have limited experience with the cultures of groups that are different from their own.

Educators often do not have knowledge of the history and lived experiences of groups other than their own. They are likely not to speak or understand the languages of recently immigrated students. They may have never interacted with a student with a disability that must be accommodated in the classroom. They may think that they do not know a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or queer person and may believe that it is morally wrong for an individual to have such a sexual orientation. When teachers enter a classroom with some or all of this diversity, they may not know the accommodations that are needed to help students learn at high levels. They may not know how to make the content being taught relevant to the experiences of the students. They may have no idea how to teach students who do not speak English or how to begin teaching them English. Diversity training should help educators to be as effective in these classrooms as they are in ones in which all of the students are from the same cultural background as the educators.

Content of Diversity Training

Diversity training became popular in the 1970s and 1980s when the civil rights movement was making it clear that not all students were being served well in the nation's schools. Similar training was also being initiated in many businesses as the workforce became more diverse. The focus of diversity training at that time was often on human, intergroup, and race relations, encouraging tolerance of colleagues and students who were from groups different from the dominant European American, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied, English-speaking, Protestant, and male population. This approach often focused on understanding the similarities and differences among groups. Sometimes this approach focused on the celebration of the foods, holidays, and traditions of groups, but stopped short of exploring the treatment of groups in society and the power relationships among groups that allowed some to benefit much more from societal structures and power relationships than others. The content of diversity training today continues to exist along this continuum, with some trainers focusing on how knowledge about groups will prevent conflicts in schools; other trainers confront issues of power, institutional discrimination, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism.

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