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Home  Featured Blogs Christians Teaching in Multicultural Environments
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Christians Teaching in Multicultural Environments |
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Written by Roger Gibbons
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Thursday, 29 October 2009 |
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Teaching in a diverse multicultural setting as a Christian will most likely be a learning opportunity as well as a challenging experience. Having to instruct students who will be of different races, backgrounds, cultures, and belief system can be enriching experience for the teacher, and can also provide an opportunity to exercise one’s faith and belief in one of several ways.
There are some common characteristics in regards to being a Christian and being a teacher. Teachers need to be patient, kind, understanding, and many times intuitive and good active listeners. Being a Christian involves the same attributes which one can transfer into the teaching role. Based on fruits of the spirit, a Christian should exhibit love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control and exhibit intuitiveness based on wisdom. These are the same attributes that a teacher must convey in their role of teaching.
Ideally, when dealing with students of various beliefs, backgrounds and learning styles, the teacher should convey these characteristics. For the sake of the student, a teacher as well as a Christian should display a love for the student, love of teaching the student, a genuine positive attitude towards the content and the students, as well as show patience when dealing with difficult material and assisting a student with challenges that he/she may face when it comes to learning.
In certain public school multicultural environment a teacher may have many feelings of apprehension and anxiety when confronted with challenges of differences in faith from not only students but possibly other teachers and staff members. This difference in faith is a difference in life philosophy which can be manifested in teaching style and attitude. For example some teachers may have different views when it comes to social issues like poverty, teen pregnancy, drugs, violence in schools, and other issues that affect students and those in educational institutions.
In many academic environments today a teacher faces the challenge of taking on a role of counselor, a politician, a psychologist and basically have to take on the biblical approach of being all things to all men, but in a school setting being all things to all students, parents, and staff. This could bring about fears of making the wrong decisions in regards to addressing student behavioral issues and learning disabilities a teacher may encounter, and having to deal with difficult parents as well. This is where the Christian teacher would turn to his/her faith for answers to these issues.
In a multicultural environment one most likely encounter students of various faiths as well as racial and cultural make up. The faith or belief system of the teacher may or may not clash on a conceptual level with that of the students on the classroom, depending on the level of the students as well as the course topic and content, or sometimes behavior. This would be an opportunity for the Christian teacher to rely on his/her faith and scriptural references for wisdom in how to deal with difficult challenges that arise with the clash of faith and/or belief systems. This would not seem to be as big an issue in a multicultural Christian school, being that many Christian schools base their curriculum on a Christian world view and the possibilities of clashing belief systems would most likely be minimal compared to a public school, even if a staff member or student had a faith different from that of the school. I feel that Christian teachers should embrace teaching in multicultural non Christian environments as opportunities for them as teachers to learn and grow in their faith. This challenge of being out of one’s comfort zone could help a Christian teacher in their development and foster wisdom when confronted with challenging circumstances. Experiences like this could just as important for the teacher’s development as well as the students. In such a case the teacher also becomes the student as he/she should be. For example, a teacher wrote a blog about Christian teachers teaching in non Christian schools on the Christianteacherforum.wordpress.com. The blog explained how the teacher had made a decision to go from teaching in a Christian school to a job teaching in an Orthodox Jewish school. He knew he would not have the same support system as in his previous job and would have concerns about offending some of his new Jewish coworkers. This teacher understood it as an opportunity for inward growth and a chance to display fruits of the spirit as a Christian who is teaching. Although leaving his comfort zone and an environment that facilitates prayer and leading students to salvation, he saw it as an opportunity to grow as a teacher and as a Christian. Given the Orthodox Jewish school is not a diverse environment, this teacher’s same view or perspective can be applied in a multicultural setting, due to the fact that the environment will provide daily challenges to the teacher’s Christian faith.
The verse "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6) would apply to the Christian teacher as well as the parent of the child. A teacher interacting with a student on a consistent basis should be observant and help guide the student on their journey that he/she should not. The teacher is in a position to know the student as well as their parents would know them. This way in which the child or student may need to be trained, may not always be in regard to the students behavior, but in relation to helping the student find their calling. Helping someone else find their way in life would bring joy and satisfaction to anyone, Christian and non Christian. Finding happiness in helping someone else their calling and happiness is one of the many God given gifts.
The multicultural environment for a Christian teacher can provide many challenges to overcome but with those challenges come opportunities for spiritual and professional development.
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