Venturing Into the Marketplace: Teacher Experiences of Developing a Curriculum for Students of Diverse Backgrounds

• In Event: The Diverse Lives of Others

Abstract

We examine complications and challenges that middle-school-level teachers encountered as they developed and implemented a culturally-sensitive and culturally-relevant curriculum for their students of diverse ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. We offer the metaphor of venturing into a market to describe how teachers might learn to develop curriculum for their diverse students. We highlight how a willingness to learn and to consider initially foreign experiences might result in possibilities for new approaches and ways of being. This process might be offered as an approach to learning to meet the needs of students whose cultural backgrounds, and expectations of schooling, may differ significantly from that of teachers.

Authors

• Elaine Chan, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Candace M. Schlein, University of Missouri - Kansas City