Diversity is a wonderful tool that you can use in your classroom when it is present. With multiple perspectives present in your classroom, children are able to share their diverse experiences and bring new ideas forward to their fellow classmates. In many urban areas, the presence of diversity is assumed, while in more rural or suburban areas, the lack of diversity is assumed, but it is important to asses the diversity of your classroom yourself before jumping to conclusions. There are many activities and exercises you can guide your students through in order to figure out the levels and types of diversity in your classroom. You could have your students write an autobiography, a poem about themselves, or you could have them simply fill out a survey. In many situations, it would be appropriate to have your students share their final works with their classmates. This gives children a chance to express who they are, and discover who their classmates are. These types of activities can boost the confidence of children, and set the foundation for a deeply rooted classroom community.
Once you have discovered the types and levels of diversity in your classroom, you can cater your lessons to take advantage of this diversity. For example, if you know one of your students speaks Spanish, you can encourage him or her to help you in pronouncing Spanish words that might come up in literature, or when discussing certain holidays. You can also ask students to share their unique experiences regarding various aspects of life that other students may not have had as much experience with. Students can learn a great deal from each other, and tapping into your classroom diversity will only allow you to encourage student-to-student teaching.
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There was something you wrote in your post the really caught my attention. It was when you said that diversity in ubran schools in assumed and the lack of diversity in suburban school is assumed. I never really thought about it in that way but you are completely right. It is so easy for teachers to notice diversity because of the different skin colors in a classroom, but recognizing that diversity is not skin deep is crucial. Even though I have the same color skin as many of my classmates does not mean that we are the same. In fact, I was quite different from most of my classmates growing up in my white, no diversity school district. What teachers also have to notice though is that even in ethnically diverse districts, the students are also culturally diverse and it is very dangerous to make assumptions without ground to stand on. Some students can take assumptions incredibly personally which can knock down the trust that you need to create in the classroom.
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