Project teaches future educators about diversity

The student-teaching requirement challenges all education majors to tackle the daunting classroom environment, but some IU students are adding to the challenge by choosing a culturally diverse setting for their student teaching.\n"I wanted a challenge," Jill Clark, recent graduate, said. "I wanted to be somewhere where I was a minority."\nIn the 2004 fall semester, Clark entered the School of Education's American Indian Reservation Project, a cultural immersion project that for 25 years has placed willing and able IU education students on Navajo reservations in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah for 17 to 18 weeks of student teaching.\nLaura L. Stachowski, director of the School of Education's three cultural immersion projects, emphasized that students applying to the project should be motivated to step out of the box. \n"The students must have a willingness to take risks and see the world beyond their own," Stachowski said. "For them, the (Navajo setting) is so challenging and unfamiliar ... The experience is really stretching them as a teacher and a person."\nIn the 2004-05 school year, Clark and 19 other education students participated in the project. Before they went, the students met with Navajo representatives and former participants to discuss the host culture, Navajo history and the educational system of American Indians. \n"(The coordinators and professors) really stress putting the best foot forward," Stachowski said. \nWhile conferences and required classes orientated the participants to culturally acceptable teaching methods, Dawn Whitehead, associate instructor of AIRP and also a former participant, noted that classes do not compare to actually teaching in a culturally different setting. \n"Nothing prepares you," Whitehead said.\nClark taught in a dual-language classroom, which weaved in both English and Navajo language, because her students had varied language capabilities and backgrounds.\n"Not all students knew Navajo or spoke it at home," Clark said. "Most of the time, lessons were explained in English and then elaborated in Navajo by (the supervising) teacher. Sometimes, I would ask students who were more fluent in Navajo to provide a Navajo translation."\nIn the end, the AIRP created a mature understanding of cultural pluralism for Clark, and she plans in the future to teach inner-city kids in Chicago or work with a tribally controlled school outside of Seattle.\nWhitehead said a teacher's ability to manage a culturally diverse classroom has become increasingly vital since more and more students come from a cultural, linguistic or ethnic minority and speak English as a second or third language.\n"Diversity is indeed spreading beyond urban city centers and moving into suburban areas," she added. "Teachers face it everywhere."\n-- Contact Staff Writer Alyssa Reed at allreed@indiana.edu.