How to create a multicultural, and inclusive classroom.

I found this article very interesting. It is about some tips for teachers and how  to create a diverse, multicultural, and inclusive class environment. I love the suggestions I found in this article. I believe that as a teacher we can empower our students through multicultural education. I am posting part of the article. The whole article if you want to read it, it is found in this link:

  http://www.understandingprejudice.org/teach/elemtips.htm.

Creating an Inclusive Environment

• Make sure that classroom posters, pictures, books, music, toys, dolls, and other materials are diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, age, family situations, disabilities, and so on. Varied representations are not only important for making diverse student populations feel included; they are important for teaching homogeneous student populations about the world beyond their classroom.
• Avoid having only one or two tokens of a particular group, and vary the roles depicted for each group. For example, show women and men doing jobs both inside and outside the home. Likewise, show different family configurations, including single-parent families, extended families, multiracial families, adopted families.
• Make sure your school library, corridors, and other public spaces are also diverse and inclusive, either by buying new materials that show people from a variety of backgrounds and situations, or by adding people to existing materials (e.g., by having students paint them in).
• Try to involve other supportive teachers, administrators, staff members so that you are not the only one modeling a concern for inclusive classrooms and school settings.
• If biased materials remain visible, use them as opportunities to teach children to think about issues of bias. For example, you might ask students to tell you how the item in question would make a target of bias feel, or you might use the item to explain how to identify instances of bias.
• Make a special effort to use language that is unbiased, inclusive, and does not divide students unnecessarily. For example, "Okay everyone..." is less likely to reinforce gender divisions than "Okay, boys and girls..."
• Be careful not to unwittingly contribute to gender discrimination. If girls are complimented on appearance and boys on achievement, girls will soon learn that female achievement is of secondary importance.