Last Friday, my husband and my two daughters stayed up well past their bedtimes because they were unable to leave the dance floor at our local elementary school's "International Night" event. The evening culminated with a dance party, and my older daughter (DD1) has been gushing all week about how she didn't want to leave because she was having so much fun dancing with her friends. While I, too, have fond memories of school and community dances from my childhood, it is a striking contrast to me that my daughter's school dance party included a Zumba lesson, a Salsa lesson, a traditional continental Indian dance performance, as well as the free form dancing to Top 40 Pop music which I remember fondly from my youth. The dance party was preceded by a communal, pot luck dinner which featured Ethiopian, Moroccan, Croatian, and El Salvadorian dishes. The evening celebrated the cultural pluralism of the school's population, and I marvel that my DD1's kindergarten experience has been, at least in part, an immersion into the world of diversity.
According to the district website school profile, at my daughter's elementary school 49% of students are black, 16.5% are white, and 26.0% are Hispanic. Some 33.5% are English Language Learners, and 60% of students quality for Free and Reduced Lunch. In my daughter's kindergarten class, none of her classmates are white, and more than half of her classmates entered school with limited oral English proficiency because English is not the primary language spoken at home. Many of her classmates who are English Language Learners are the offspring of parents who have recently immigrated (within the last five+ years) to the United States from an array of Central and South American, East, West and North African, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern countries. Because so many of her kindergarten peers are bilingual, my older daughter (DD1) has wondered aloud with me why she, too, is not fluent in another language beyond English, or why her parents don't speak another language with her and each other at home. My DD1 has queried me about if coming from a different country means that the food that the family eats at home is different than what we do, if the church they attend is different than ours, and if they celebrate the same or different holidays as our family does. She has also noticed and inquired about why with many of her classmates we can't schedule a playmate, why they don't belong to our community pool, or why her kindergarten friends can't be signed up to do some of the same after school enrichment or summer camp activities that she will.
My DD1's observations are poignant to me because when we became a part of the cooperative preschool community where my younger daughter is still enrolled, my husband and I congratulated ourselves on the fact that the families who made up the school were so diverse. In our older daughter's class, for example, close to one third of the children were bi-racial because their parents were a mix of two ethnicities, and several of her preschool peers had been adopted from China. In addition to her classmates whose skin color was brown like hers, many other parents at the school represented a blend of cultures and countries of origin, such as South American and American or European and American, or a blend of religion, such as Christian and Jewish. However, what we all shared in common at the preschool was the fact that almost all of us were older parents who had completed many years of higher education before settling down to start our families, and who had had transplanted to the area for work from across the country (and world). And because of the similarities in our soci0-economic situations, with the other children from the preschool my daughter and I came to expect that we would inhabit the world in strikingly similar ways, wherein we dropped in and out of each others' homes and fluidly exchanged tips for which extracurricular activities were favored, which summer camps were enticing, and which community pools had the best swim lesson and swim team programs.
In a 1998 Report published by the Center on Education Policy, it states that "public schools are one of the main institutions that create cohesion among diverse groups of Americans. . . schools are places where children learn social and citizenship skills that help them to live harmoniously and become contributing members of society. In a nation as complex and diverse as the United States, a critical part of becoming a good citizen is learning how to get along with others, especially those whose racial, ethnic, religious, or economic backgrounds are different than our own." Given the profile of the student body at my older daughter's elementary school, it would appear that she has a terrific opportunity to experience and embrace the diversity of the human spectrum, as it is represented in the array of cultures, languages, and religions of her classmates. And perhaps even more importantly, my daughter's foray into the public schools have provided her with a sometimes difficult, but perhaps vitally important opportunity, to engage with peers whose socio-economic circumstances are different from her own. I close this blog by asking my readers: How important is it to you that your children have the opportunity through their schooling to engage with peers whose circumstances are different than their own? And for those of you among my readers who are educators, I ask: What is the role of educators to foster children's capacity to forge connections with peers who are different from one another? And how should the school day and curriculum be structured to engender students' embrace of diversity?
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