Here are a few classroom activities and ideas that you can use and adapt to help promote multiculturalism in your school:. You could try different foods, listen to music, play games, learn facts and watch videos. Try and incorporate the theme into each area of the curriculum to reinforce the topic and maintain interest. Avoid resources where stereotypes are used.
Promote debate and discussion by raising current issues and seeing what your students understand about the situation. For example, find a story where someone was fired for being too old — what do your students think about this? How would they challenge it?
Host weekly quizzes on a set theme and learn how much your students know about different cultures, religions, disabilities etc. You could even assign the task of writing the quiz to 2 students each week so that they are involved in doing the research. What do they like or dislike about the foods? How is it different from what they normally have for dinner?
Teach the students the reasons why certain foods are or are not eaten in certain countries. A quick activity you can do at the start of a lesson to introduce the theme of multiculturalism. Ask your students to create a list of everything in their life that comes from a country outside of the UK.
Go through their responses as a class — are they surprised by the results? Go through their answers as a class and see what stereotypes people have. Is it fair that these stereotypes exist? How would they suggest these stereotypes are challenged? Present the class with some facts about people with disabilities, another culture or based on the protected characteristics and ask them to decide whether the facts are true or false.
Are they surprised by the correct answers? Teach your students a few words in French, Spanish, Afrikaans, Chinese etc to raise their awareness of language barriers around the world. If you have students in your class who speak another language, ask them to help. What are the benefits of speaking more than one language? Divide your class into 2 teams. Provide one team with a statement, e.
This team must defend this statement. Ask the other team to give advice and challenge the statement. To put it simply, if your workplace does not appropriately practice diversity and equality in your day-to-day operations, your employees will feel ostracised and leave. They, in turn, will tell their peers that your organisation is discriminatory, and you will not have any minority applicants interested in openings at your company.
Not only is the resultant one-note demographic not at all representative of society at large, but it also means that your pool of ideas and innovation in your industry will stagnate. With no new perspectives, there is no impetus for growth or change within an organisation. In South Africa, a government initiative called BBBEE broad-based black economic empowerment has been instituted to encourage workplace diversity in the wake of decades of forced racial segregation.
By fiscally rewarding businesses that hire a certain quota of previously racially disadvantaged employees, BBBEE works to stimulate the economy in minority communities and enforce integration between groups that were never allowed to interact before. The key to promoting equality and diversity in the workplace involves creating a strategy that should include the following action points:. Identifying the unconscious biases that may exist in your specific workplace and committing to eradicating those biases.
Creating a set of equality and diversity policies based on the biases you identified in the first step. These can range from policies on language use, individualised leave schedules, and dress code allowances to policies that encompass the monitoring of task team formation. Developing objective criteria for workplace merit. Being proactive in your repeated assessment of your equality and diversity strategy.
Initiating mentorship programs led by senior minority employees that are available to junior employees. This will combat ingrained biases within your organisation, and provide minority employees with a sensitive, encouraging space to advance in your organisation. Not being afraid to seek the contracted advice or full-time guidance from a professional. In the UK, the month was founded in to recognise and celebrate the contributions and achievements that Black people have contributed to society in art, music, science and lots more over many generations.
However, due to racial injustice these achievements are often missed out of history books or brushed over in school lessons. Black History Month…. Training is a key component in supporting equality, diversity and inclusion. It helps to raise awareness, providing an understanding of the context and issues across a range of topics. Additionally it can provide the means to deal with sensitive and difficult subjects such as unconscious bias.
It can also facilitate further dialogue on how to improve workplace culture and inclusion. No matter how progressive or open-minded people think they are, bias and unconscious bias is present in everyone. A positive way to tackle unconscious bias is to first acknowledge that you have it then to understand how it affects your attitudes, behaviours and decisions. Once an individual understands their own situation and coping mechanisms this can help them to recognise these traits in others and enable them to challenge any negative biases.
Find out more about identifying and preventing unconscious bias here. At Marshalls we offer Unconscious Bias Training which you can find out the details for here. Ensuring that all your policies and processes are current and compliant with appropriate best practice and the law is absolutely vital. Communicate the location of any relevant documentation to all employees and remind them of its existence via internal communications.
Too often organisations include this information during inductions or on-boarding programmes when people are overloaded with information but do not revisit this through their career. It is important to be transparent in the policies and procedures you have, to demonstrate commitment to provide appropriate accessibility to all employees. Indirect discrimination happens when there is a policy that applies in the same way for everybody but disadvantages a group of people who share a protected characteristic, and you are disadvantaged as part of this group.
If this happens, the person or organisation applying the policy must show that there is a good reason for it. In some cases indirect discrimination can be lawful if there is an objective reason, such as where the health and safety of individuals may be affected or where the service or requirements of the organisation might be adversely affected.
Other justifications can be an occupational requirement or positive action. An example of an occupational requirement could be women only employees in a domestic violence shelter for women.
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