Gender Diversity In Education, By Cesar Chavez

Esteemed civil rights leader, Cesar Chavez, once said, “We need to help students and parents cherish and preserve the ethnic and cultural diversity that nourishes and strengthens this community - and this nation.” An unwavering activist of equality and acceptance, Chavez worked to achieve equity for farm workers and Latinos in America. The farm worker’s battle for justice became a moral cause and Chavez was seen as a just and righteous civil rights activist. His formidable words reminded America of the principles that the country was brought upon: liberty and equality. He believed diversity—the variety of people—brought new ideas and cultures which bolstered the strength of a community. Schools are the semblance of their communities, and are

As any student can attest, female and male teachers often have different teaching styles. According to one study, “There are significant gender differences (p = .0001) with regard to virtually all techniques reportedly used in the majority of courses taught. The preceding findings relating to gender differences are echoed later in similar findings relating to ethnic/racial differences in reported pedagogical use. They lend substantial support to policies promoting faculty diversity, suggesting that a diverse faculty is more likely on average to utilize pedagogical approaches that capitalize on the diversity in their classrooms and that lead to favorable learning outcomes” (Hurtado 193). Different techniques are decisively found in different genders (p= .0001 implies the data has an extremely low chance of supporting the null hypothesis). Differences in teaching methods are what prompt greater gender diversity within teacher composition. Everyone learns differently and having a variety of teaching techniques utilizes the range of students’ methods. Similarly, women of color also promote different teaching techniques, “Several investigators found that women and faculty of color more frequently employed active learning in the classroom, encouraged student input, and included perspectives of women and minorities in their coursework” (Fine and

When questioned, “Do you believe racial/ethnic diversity affects your academic performance?” a large majority (62.2%) answered “No” and another 18.9% answering “I don’t know.” These answers and their corresponding explanations in question two suggest that the majority of students at Mount Vernon High School do not believe racial/ethnic diversity affects their academic performance. A very small minority, however, believed that racial diversity did affect them. In addition, Mount Vernon High School has little racial diversity which may result in race not being as influential as a school with more diversity. An explanation for the responses of students who answered that racial/ethnic diversity did affect them may be because they themselves are a minority within the high school and are therefore more affected or conscious of the racial diversity around them. When the question, “When working in groups, how are you affected by the gender composition of your group?” was prompted, an overwhelming majority responded that gender diversity did not affect them. This may be because the honors students that took the survey might be more mature than other students and can work well with both genders. Similarly, when asked what gender composition of a group they would rather work in, almost everyone responded