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Importance Of Inclusive Classroom

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Culture: seven letters, two syllables, and one controversial meaning. The United States has become a large melting pot for all cultures across the globe. One of the main places that these cultures come together is in the classroom. In order to effectively teach all students, an educator must embrace the chaos of changing cultures in the classroom. With different cultures having varying beliefs about simple aspects of everyday life (eye contact, speaking, etc.), an educator must become knowledgeable about all of his or her student’s cultures in order to best serve the students. This can be done through several different methods. In order to create a culturally inclusive classroom, an educator must become educated about culture through the cultural continuum and power distance. In their 2017 article, Response to Cultures Continuum and the Development of Intercultural Responsiveness (IR), authors Kathryn Jones, Jason Mixon, Lula Henry, and Jennifer Butcher define what it means to be culturally competent, and give examples of how teachers can become culturally competent. According to Jones, Mixon, Henry, and Butcher, cultural competence is the “ability to understand diverse perspectives and appropriately interact with members of other cultures in a variety of situations”. The level of immersion in a culture is said to be measured on a cultural continuum, with monocultural being at the far left end, and intercultural being on the far right end, with monocultural being defined

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