My upbringing in school has shaped how I view the world in many ways. In school, the books I was told to read were mainly of a white decent and taught a lot about white culture. Majority of these books would be written by white male writers as well. There were very few readings or novels where it talked about diversity and the importance of it. During school I was really only taught the stereotypical facts about race and gender, nothing more. This made me grow up to understand that there is only one way to interpret how someone may be and that is not true. The lack of diversity in my books was unfortunate. Growing up with only the stereotypical facts about people of colour made me have very little knowledge of who they are. including diversity in my teaching and books especially will be very important for me as a teacher. I want to provide my students with the right material to understand and know cultural diversity, at a young age.
Looking back at my years in high school a lot of our readings came from Shakespeare. Every time we would begin to read a new book or at the start of a new semester the teacher would pull out Shakespeare. It was so repetitive and uneventful at this point. Reading novels from the same writer each year with different storylines but the same language was beginning to be bland. Our teachers never went out of the comfort zone to give us something different to read that may also cover the lesson in a different way. Adventuring out to different novels would be a good way for students to learn more about different writers, poems, novels and overall have a better learning experience when it is something they are interested in. Being exposed to different novels, writers and topics would be a good way for the students to learn in a more diverse way. We are limiting our knowledge and our students from learning about different cultures by sticking to one way of teaching.