Children who grow up in New York City have quite an ethnically eclectic upbringing. Growing up in such a diverse community give them access to ideas and culture that other kids will never experience. This may be an advantage in the global community we are developing. After all, a child well versed in the cultures of the world will certainly be able to handle themselves well in an international corporation. However, the multicultural environment also presents challenges. Children in multicultural schools may benefit from their interactions with their peers, but they can make it more difficult to teach. Due to the makeup of today’s teachers, education in multicultural immigrant communities is more difficult than ever, and the results are negatively impacting the kids.
- The Area of the Lower East Side we are covering is both a large immigrant community and very diverse, since the expansion of Chinatown is pushing out the Latino immigrants.
- Sadly, poverty and ethnic diversity tend to go hand in hand, and our schools are in no exception.
- The two schools in the area have fallen below average on the standardized report cards that the city government has passed out.
- Schools with less diverse populations have scored higher.
- Government officials have recognized that multicultural areas tend to need more assistance, and have begun to institute programs to aid students, and they have helped.
- But the problem is still here! You can’t change the students, so maybe its time to look at the teachers.
- 74% of teachers have no experience with urban schools – they are predominantly white females from rural or suburban communities with little to no diversity.
- Most student teaching is done in communities similar to the teacher’s hometown – perpetuating a lack of experience with urban schools.
- They have been shown to have pre-formed ideas that caricature urban schools as dangerous and difficult to teach in.
- There are currently two colleges that implement classes to teach about the process of teaching in urban/multicultural schools.
- Since the students cannot be changed, we must change the ways we train our teachers.
- We need to implement stronger studies of the way multiculturalism impacts students, in hopes of understanding the best ways to train teachers to cross cultural lines.
- Hopefully, when teachers are trained to do the best for their students, urban schools will become more successful not only in teaching – but in preparing them for the global community.
Okay, very good start! I think this is a really interesting topic, and, especially if you can really root it in the neighborhood you chose, I think it will be a great paper.
The central idea does need some refining though.. for example, I’m not entirely sure what you want the main point of the paper to be. Obviously you’re going to have lots of little points along the way, but what’s the big, Voltron point that the little points build up to? (Voltron was a robot from my youth made of several smaller robots.)
I see two candidates for the Voltron point of the paper:
The first is that, although experiencing cosmopolitanism and diversity is probably a good thing for kids in this globalized age, it poses teaching difficulties that outweigh the benefits for students.
The second is that, although diversity (along with poverty) present clear problems for learning if we only look at educational achievement statistics, the answer is proper teaching training, which could turn diversity into a positive experience for students.
In the first one, the main assertion is that diversity poses difficulties for schools. In the second, the main assertion is that the difficulty is about how we prepare teachers. You don’t have to choose one and make it the entire focus of your paper – both points can be in there – but it helps, during the writing process, to know what the ultimate, vital, crucial point is that your paper cannot live without.
The second comment is that I’m not sure where the neighborhood focus is, during the body of the paper. The neighborhood seems to fade into the background, giving way to a more general discussion that is not tied to a specific neighborhood. I could be wrong but that’s the impression I got. I’m not adverse to using your neighborhood as a jumping-off point to explore an interesting topic, but you should be really clear about what the role of the neighborhood specific stuff is from the beginning – is it a neighborhood-based case study of a broader problem in education, or is it a paper about how diversity should be dealt with in the education system, that uses the problems of a specific neighborhood at the beginning of the paper to illustrate the problem that you’re going to suggest a solution to?
Okay, hope this is all clear – let me know if not! I look forward to reading your paper!
Mike