The Diversity Pick and the Gap Kids
hello
my name is diversity pick now i know
what you’re thinking
why didn’t google list this as a top
grabby girl’s
name for 2003 well that’s because my
parents wanted their first child
born outside of india to maintain a
cultural connection
and so they named me they said they gave
me the name priya
but my name isn’t the only element of
culture that i carry with me
on my first day of school i was walked
in in a dress
that was bought from an indian
supermarket hand stitched
into a sea of children just head to toe
and gap it was from this moment that i
knew i would always be set apart
if not by my height but by my culture
ascap
to culture kids was different than ours
was the occasional run-ins to pay
and now while the food’s delicious it’s
not really an authentic place to get an
experience from a different culture
but what was authentic was the
relationships that we’ve been able to
build
with korea and through other peers that
come from different cultural backgrounds
and what it has taught us is that it’s
so important to
begin to look into different aspects of
culture and what they have to offer
and that is why it’s so important that
we begin to implement global citizenship
education into our curriculum
so like chloe said we’re going to be
talking to you today about global
citizenship and more specifically global
citizenship
education so what is a global citizen a
global citizen
is someone who is actively
engaging in a local active engaging in
local and non-local
communities that are more diverse than
themselves
earlier this year i had the opportunity
to look to
start a study in the tulsa area that
looked at different schools
and global education programs in their
elementary schools
what i found is that students are
actually that schools are actually
wanting to implement global citizenship
education
they’re doing this through the ib
program through the leader in me program
and most commonly through their history
courses and through their world language
courses
however this is really unique to the
area um
as a nation globalization and studies
and humanities are actually out of
decline
the american academy of arts and
sciences found that 80
of students in the united states do not
take world language
like i said this is one of the easiest
ways to implement global citizenship
education
so why are students not doing it they
also found that 58
of middle schools and 25 of elementaries
offer global world language classes
so not only are students not choosing to
take world language courses that
are culturally immersive but schools are
not giving them the opportunity to
so throughout our research we discovered
that global citizenship education as a
whole is not being prioritized in the
united states
we’ve developed a three-part process
plan that will
re-prioritize globalization studies in
the united states
so like emma had mentioned we developed
a three process part process plan to
incorporate
global citizenship within our lives the
first step starts at adolescence and
then the next step goes to early
adulthood teenagers
and the last step is adulthood and
society
so the reason why we’re targeting
adolescents is because within this stage
of their development
they’re very egocentric and while that
may sound self-absorbed
it’s just the normal way it is and so to
kind of combat this we
wanted teachers in the classroom
environment and students specifically to
share about their cultures and their
heritage and their traditions
this way students the other students are
able to gain a more
higher level of exposure outside of
their normal interactions
and then on top of that this process
allows for
students to learn how to explore other
cultures in a way
that celebrates them rather than
appropriates them
we hope that implementing this idea
within a younger age
will allow them to carry these
sentiments on as they develop however it
is
also important to let kids make mistakes
and correct them while they’re
young so they can take on the right
methods of exploring cultures
as they grow up the next part of our
method within adolescents is
incorporating a greater
number of perspectives within a history
curriculum emma chloe and i can all tell
you that
we mainly learned about american history
until high school
where we were finally introduced to
various perspectives through world
history
and this is the case for many students
all over the united states
however once we were able to see
the other perspectives for example with
colonization we understood
that countries were going to do so in
order to advance their economy or
better improve a civilization however we
weren’t necessarily exposed to the
effects of those actions
many of which which has regressed these
uh civilizations
progression today and so by recognizing
these issues we’re able to
see or students are able to see similar
issues within their hometown
and people areas around the world by
working together to come
come up with a solution we’re able to
see that for one problem there can be
various solutions
that can be supplied with various
resources the next
um part of our global citizenship
curriculum
is allowing students to move beyond a
history curriculum and allowing them to
use their intrinsic motivation to go
find
about their cultures on their own will
the result of this is they’re more
likely to reap the benefits of
being exposed to various cultures and
they’re more likely to share it among
their peers
which not only makes them more
culturally aware but also those around
them
however cultural awareness does not stop
at adolescence and it should be
carried on through high school levels
right so like priya said it’s important
that we continue
our globalization education at into
secondary education
um three easy ways we can do this are
through organizations and clubs
and through events and through our
curriculums and our courses
first let’s talk events um one event
that we did here at jinx
was the global village event at global
village we showcased multiple different
regions of the world and within each
region we talked about different
cultural
um we talked about different cultures
that we found in our students here at
jenks
throughout the day students and teachers
and parents could come
and experience these different cultures
and we found that
lots of people got a sense of the
diversity we have in our very own
community
which is one of the main aspects of
global citizenship education
secondly we can talk about
secondly we can implement this through
our programs and through our clubs
one program we have here at jens is the
international scholars program
the international scholars program is
full of students who are
loved to be globally minded and are
actively engaging in global discussion
we talk about current events we talk
about global economics and different
cultures
it’s important that students are given
the opportunity to
actively engage with other people who
are also globally minded
it provides an opportunity for people to
be open-minded
and lastly we talk about
implementing global citizenship
education through our curriculums like
priya said
it’s important to offer many different
perspectives in our history courses
not only are students able to get a
broader scope of history
but again they’re cultivating this idea
of being open-minded
while it’s important to begin to
implement global citizenship
education at an elementary level and
also on a secondary education level
um we are obviously not going to be in
education for the rest of our lives
but we need to find ways to continue to
learn and to continue to grow
in our cultural awareness and so what
this looks like is we need to start
seeing changes within our
media news outlets the entertainment
industry
and also into big brands and large
corporations
and what this looks like is we need to
start small we need to start with our tv
shows
our movies that we watch and the
different books that we read
um a lot of times we start to see that
one cultural background
takes form and takes um the same rules
over and over again
but what we need to see is we need to
see more diversity we need to see more
roles
and more backgrounds being represented
and into these different character roles
to show kids
that you know it doesn’t matter what
background you come from
but instead you can we can all achieve
the same things and it doesn’t matter
another thing that we need to do is we
need to start implementing
um just cultural awareness and this
diversity within the media and the news
that we share
so lots of times the media that we see
in their news outlets and through
magazines
are all usually pulled from one
perspective
however this needs to change we need to
start implementing different
perspectives
into the stories that we share so that
people can feel
that they have a sense of community and
that they have someone to relate to
um a lot of the struggles and triumphs
that different cultural backgrounds go
through
need to be shared and need to be
represented again
people will feel that they have someone
to relate to and it will
build a sense of community um and not
only this but
people who are also not aware and don’t
know much about different cultural
backgrounds
we’ll get an idea of what this looks
like so then we can all learn
orbs backs this stuff and says that we
need more diversity within our media
if we truly want to
decrease the chance of bias and also
start to learn more and become more
inclusive and culturally aware
now the next thing we need to do is we
need to start looking at
creating diverse teams within large
corporations
and companies now i know this is quite a
silly example
but it is a good example of cultural
appropriation and how this lack of
diversity
has affected um our society
so kim kardashian created a brand of
kimonos at first and that was the name
that it was given
but what she didn’t realize was that
this name actually took an
important aspect of japanese culture and
she made it her own
now because she didn’t have the
diversity within her team
and these um her team didn’t have the
awareness that this could have been
offensive to someone else’s culture
they ended up again taking something and
showing basically that
they had no awareness and they lacked
this respect for other people’s culture
now by bringing in people of diverse
backgrounds we will be able to prevent
this from happening and instead
show that each and every person deserves
to be celebrated
and then we can be more inclusive and
aware of the cultures around us
so this leads us to the numerous
benefits that global citizenship
education offers
while i could not admit we don’t really
have enough time for me to go online
about all of them
i can tell you about some of them the
first of which is students are more able
to develop a nuanced form of thinking
by being exposed to multiple people from
various backgrounds we’re able to find
various
solutions to one problem the next
benefit of a global citizenship is
greater amounts of empathy
by creating personal connections with
people with various ethnicities
we’re able to form friendships rather
on a personal level rather than a
stereotype the next one
is um open-mindedness like i said
making those personal connections and
truly learning about a culture
allows us not to judge a stereotypical
event
or make assumptions about a certain
tradition
rather we’re able to respect and truly
cherish what the tradition stands for
and one last but not least is
inclusivity
by allowing more representation of
minority cultures in this majority
culture world
we’re able to give other minorities
greater confidence and be more proud of
their culture
and so within these issues we’re able to
see that
global citizenship and through education
is the best way to break
generational barriers that prevent us
from moving forward
and with all this being said it becomes
clear that change starts with you
change starts with us change starts when
we begin to realize
that global citizenship education is not
a luxury but it’s a necessity
change starts when we begin to be
accepting and open of other people’s
struggles and their hardships through
their stories
only can change start when we begin to
break down these barriers
that divide us and instead educate
ourselves on what it means to be
inclusive and an active global citizen
um their world needs a lot of gap kids
but the world also needs a lot of
diversity picks
because in the end it all gives us
something to celebrate thank you