How to Conduct a Study of Education and Cultural Diversity

¶ … students perceive cultural diversity as an issue worth talking about both in and out of school. The purpose of this study is to better understand the climate in which educators seek to implement curricula designed to promote cultural awareness and diversity in schools. The study will show how students approach this subject, whether they embrace, view it skeptically, are concerned about it, think it important or superfluous and what their overall assessment of culture and diversity is when they leave the classroom and engage in the real world.

This will be a phenomenological study that will utilize first-hand interviews with students in middle school and high school from schools around the area where I live. It will be a random sample that will help to show a general view of what children grades 6-12 think about diversity and at what ages in adolescence and young adulthood their views really start to take shape and impact their lives in terms of decisions they make and how they view one another or people who are "different" from themselves.

This is a problem that is worth studying because educators may approach the subject of diversity without really understanding their audience or where their students are coming from -- and it can help the teacher to have a greater impact if he or she has some understanding of what the common student is likely to think about diversity at various levels of education. If this is known beforehand, educators can adjust their curricula accordingly and perhaps emphasize certain areas of development over others at specific age levels in order to reach the educational goal set out in the curriculum.

I plan to approach this problem by reading the available scholarly literature that can be found on online databases such as JSTOR and Proquest and using this literature to broaden and deepen my own understanding about cultural diversity and how it is taught in the classroom. I also plan to use this literature review as an opportunity to see what other researchers have learned by studying students and the impact of cultural diversity classes on them. Following this, I plan to acquaint myself with teachers at the various schools in my area and discuss with them the intention of my research paper and employ their help in conducting interviews or surveys with students in their class. I aim to gain all the necessary permissions from students, teachers and parents before conducting any surveys or interviews and promise to keep all information confidential. From here, I plan to analyze the data and find common themes among the answers to the questions I will ask, such as, "What does culture mean to you?" and "Can you describe an experience you have had in the real world where you have interacted with a person or group of an ethnicity or cultural background different from your own?" These questions and others like them will help me to formulate an understanding of where students are coming from with regards to the issue of cultural diversity.