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Location: Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand

Monday 4 April 2011

Access and Equity,Diversity and Inclusivity

Definitions of Access,Diversity,Inclusivity and Equity
"Access means findings ways of 'bypassing 'barriers to learning. There are many characteristics that can be considered as barriers to learning oreducation :income, gender, race, ethnicity, power, status, age, religion, physical or mental disability or other characteristic."
Diversity - The concept of diversity encompasses acceptance and respect. It means understanding that each individual is unique and recognizing our individual differences. There can be along the dimensions of race ,gender, sexual orientation, age,  physical ability etc. It is the exploration of these differences in a safe,positive and nurturing environment.
Inclusivity - to be inclusive (provide  access to learning to all students) the uniqueness of the students must be considered.
Equity - It is a complex process which means equality in economic, social, cultural or political areas.

As we know every child have different intellectual level. They have  different socially,emotionally,intellectually background. I observe some classes in the Otago Polytechnic about Time Management and ESOL. In these
class i saw teacher is aware about the diversity of the students also. First of all,teacher wrote the content on the whiteboard so that students can understand that what they have to cover in the particular period. In this way, content will be more clear to the students. In the ESOL class i saw students came from different countries and educational backgrounds. Teacher took their test  of difficult  English words. She explained  the difficult words with the help of making sentences and gave some examples from their personal life.

Teacher also used PowerPoint Presentations to make the lesson more interested and easily understand by them. There was proper interaction between the students and teachers. Every child wants to learn in the different learning styles and preferences. For example:-reading, writing, audio, visual method, kinaesthetic. Teacher should know the different methods of learning styles according to the interest of the students.

In this class, there was diversity in the students but the ways of teaching was very interesting and advance technology was used to attract the attention of the students. The topics was about the Grammer and paragraph  of Helen Keller. She gave homework to the students  also.

I observe in one class that students were not taking interest in the studies and they were playing when the teacher was teaching them. First of all teacher gave them the topics of the reasons of the stress and said the students to give the answers of the questions. Some students were taking interest in the topic and trying to find the reasons. but some students were playing on the ipod and chatting on the facebook and some others were making diagrams on the notebook. No doubt teacher want to attract them by asking the questions but these students were very sharp-minded they were stop playing when the teacher came to their group. I think teacher could try different methods of teaching. She could use  whiteboard and draw some pictures to make visual learners more interested in the topic. Even she can use PowerPoint and the Internet which was students use for playing so that they took more interest in learning.

Learning environment should be Universal Design so that it will be access to all the students regardless of disability or health or learning preferences. Some students have no computers at home, Even some students donot know how to use the computers, some students live far away from the institutions, some cannot attend the classes regularly  so the access of the study material is difficult to everyone through Online. So universal design of learning environment is good for everyone.
Diversity in learning is very common thing in every classroom. So teacher could understand the students mental level and teach them according to their mental level and they could use different learning styles.

1 Comments:

Blogger Bronwyn hegarty said...

Excellent to see the definitions of Access, Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity we discussed in class, captured here. This is a very good description about the Time Management and ESOL classes you observed, and the methods used in class. I like the way you have suggested where some different strategies could have been useful to engage the students and make them more interested in the subject. "I think teacher could try different methods of teaching. She could use whiteboard and draw some pictures to make visual learners more interested in the topic. Even she can use PowerPoint and the Internet which was students use for playing so that they took more interest in learning."

12 June 2011 at 20:53  

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