Top Resources to Teach About Cultural Diversity In The Classroom

In this highly diverse world, teaching young children to respect and celebrate differences among all is essential. 

Teaching them about different cultures and traditions can help them realize that we are all humans, despite differences in appearance, dress, or what we eat or celebrate. We can include various games, activities, or learning resources that offer a fun way for young learners to learn about differences and similarities and introduce diversity. 

In this article, we present you with a list of top resources to teach cultural diversity to students.

Awesome Library 

The website contains more than 14,000 teaching materials. You can quickly get your hands-on lesson plans, field trips, photos, maps, and online videos. This is an excellent and well-organized website.

Critical Multicultural Pavilion

This is a fantastic website with unique resources and links. It contains resources about children’s literature, historical documents, tribal documents and famous speeches of popular leaders like Martin Luther King, Mandela and others. The platform also includes a teacher’s toolbox comprising a photo gallery and a multicultural song index. There are also good links to multicultural learning resources.

Digital History

The digital story is rich with resources; from the history of first America to colonial ruler, from the Civil War to world war, from world war II to the 21st century, the platform has a history of all. It includes Asian American, Enslaved, Mexican American and Native American Voices, as well as instructional materials, active learning, multimedia and more. Digital history also includes documents about Supreme Court cases, key documents, speeches and digital stories to make learning fun.

Worldmapper 

As the name suggests, Worldmapper has a vast collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. There are now approximately 700 maps.

ePals Classroom Exchange

Designed for Kindergarten to Grade 12 students, ePals Classroom Exchange is one of the world’s largest networks of electronic correspondence. Close to a million students from 108 countries have enrolled in ePals. The platform provides an excellent way to connect with children abroad, learn and practise new language skills.

International Journal of Multicultural Education 

International Journal of Multicultural Education (IJME) is an open-access journal intended for researchers, practitioners and students of multicultural education. It is committed to promoting educational equity for diverse students, intercultural understanding and global justice for marginalized people at all levels of education, including leadership and politics. IJME’s got a collection of qualitative research studies that explicitly address multicultural educational issues, conceptual and theoretical articles, typically grounded on in-depth literature review, which advance theories and scholarship of multicultural education; and praxis articles that discuss successful multicultural education practices grounded on sound theories and literature.

EDSITEment

EDSITEment has many course plans and online resources in literary and language arts, foreign languages, art and culture, history and social sciences. It is has a collection of content from all over the Web, and National Endowment for the Humanities has vetted all the links for quality; it also connected Common Core standards to everything on the site.

The website includes robust functionality to access NEH-funded projects that are of particular relevance to educators. It also allows users to search for content by type, domain, or status standard.

Facing History and Ourselves 

Rich in resources for teaching about and combating hatred and bigotry, the Facing History is a free website. It has free lesson plans, units, resource collections, videos, and podcasts. There are curricula on various topics, including the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, Civil Rights, Darfur, and Bullying. Facing history also offers several professional development opportunities for educators, including webinars; the provided materials are interdisciplinary and Common Core-aligned.

The website charges an amount for most professional development programs; however, some free webinars are available, and financial assistance is offered.

Learning for Justice

Learning for justice is an activism and social justice program designed for schools, in particular. The website contains a variety of materials supporting equity and discrimination reduction in schools. Teachers can bring the site’s educational resources, professional development materials and blog, and a host of other resources to teach children about diversity. Learning for justice also provides lesson plans, and film kits adorn various topics, such as social justice, school integration, anti-bullying, and gender equity.

Teachers can use the website for their professional development; they can regularly read the website’s blog containing magazine articles and presentations.

For classroom use, ready-made lessons and film kits could be used to implement the anti-bias program. Educators may begin Mix It Up activities for school communities to break divisions and promote new relationships between students.  

Google Arts & Culture

Google Arts & Culture offers free access to artistic, cultural and historic collections worldwide. It is a well-organized site that is easy to navigate. Through Google Arts & Culture, students can explore collections or museum-specific topics. They may also filter resources by movement, artist, historical event, historical person, medium and more. Some resources can be searched by geographical location on a map, by dominant colour, or chronology, allowing students to easily compare works of the same period.

From Impressionism to civil rights to fossils, the website facilitates tours to famous sites and landmarks and visits outdoor art installations and non-art locations, such as CERN. Besides that, it includes the latest news related to museums, collections and events, and places to visit in person. The website has layers of resources, from visual artefact media to virtual visits to ‘stories’, which provide written context to a series of artefacts.   

Culture and diversity worksheet

The website includes a range of cultural and diversity worksheets. It aims to teach students to respect differences among people in their community and worldwide by using the resources or worksheets for elementary, intermediate, or high school students. Artistic, reading and writing activities will help students learn about the history and traditions of different religions and ethnic groups.

The Center for Applied Linguistics 

It is a private, not-for-profit agency based in Washington DC. CAL’s mission is to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate resources to enhance communication skills. Their work aims to improve language education, resolve cultural conflicts, conduct research that merges language with culture, also provide resources that demonstrate the importance of cultural understanding in communication.

It includes information on adult ESL, bilingual education, immigrant education, heritage languages, protected education and other topics that promote cultural competence in education.

The Toolkit for Cross-Cultural Collaboration

This kit contains research on collaborative styles from a variety of ethnic and cultural groups. It offers resources that help discuss barriers to cross-cultural collaboration and provides methods to assess and improve communication patterns and cultural competence. The resources comprise of Stages of Intercultural Sensitivity, How to Use Comparisons of Cultural Patterns, Communication Patterns and Assumptions, Summary of Normative Communication Styles and Values, and Ten Myths That Prevent Collaboration Across Cultures.  

Why Teach About Cultural Diversity in the Classroom? 

We live in a world of mixed cultural beliefs and traditions; we must be culturally aware and respect differences. 

In addition, the teaching of diversity to students has exposed them to various cultural and social groups that can serve them now and in the long term.

Other benefits

More Empathetic

By promoting awareness and personally connecting with different cultures in the classroom, students can become more empathic. It may help keep students from developing prejudices later in life. Moreover, it allows them to sympathize with people different from themselves because they are more aware of the experiences of someone of another race or cultural group. 

Better understand the lessons and individuals

When working and learning with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures in the classroom, students gain a more comprehensive understanding of the topic. It also teaches students about using their strengths and perspectives to contribute to a diverse work environment. 

More Open-Minded

Exposure to a diverse range of opinions, thoughts and cultural backgrounds may encourage students to be more open-minded later in life. Not only that, but it will make them open to new ideas and attain a greater understanding of a topic by taking different points of view.

Increased confidence and security

Students who know different cultures are more comfortable and more secure with these differences later in life. It enables them to interact across a broader range of social groups and feel more confident in themselves and their interactions with others.

Better prepared for a diversified work environment

With the rise of globalization, working with people from different cultures and social groups is more essential. Exposing students to diversity and learning cultural awareness in the classroom will help them flourish in the workforce.

About the Author

Author: Saniya Khan

I am Saniya Khan, Copy-Editor at EdTechReview – India’s leading edtech media. As a part of the group, my aim is to spread awareness on the growing edtech market by guiding all educational stakeholders on latest and quality news, information and resources. A voraciously curious writer with a dedication to excellence creates interesting yet informational pieces, playing with words since 2016.

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