I have been involving myself in a class on Multiculturalism since last semester (2019). At first I was adamant to be in charge of managing this class since it surely required a lot of readings and preparation. But, it turned out to be one of the classes that I love teaching. Indeed it has been a rewarding experience for me personally since I can understand how my students think of the issues and topics of discussion that we covered every week for the whole semester. We talked about wide varieties of multiculturalism-related issues faced by societies around the world. Of course, we just picked some that surely would intrigue the class’ curiosities.
To give an overview of what we covered during this semester, I will highlight about the papers written by the students. Since I did not want to let them unguided as to what topics they could write about, I gave them a wide (really wide) arrays of terms that we covered in the class. There were more than 100 words/terms with initial letter starting from A to W. I asked them to choose at least 12 words with different initial letter from which they could begin writing their paper---based on the words they have chosen. I know it could be a daunting task for them since they had to read all of the 170 more words, understand their meanings, and then pick only 12 of them.
This was a deliberate approach that I used since I really wanted to know what kinds of topics that they were interested in or which one(s) that they had invested themselves into during the whole class. Once again, it could be a difficult thing to begin with since they had to come up with an interesting, sensible, and believable topic that would cover all of the 12 words they picked in the first place. Also, I asked them to make sure that the first paragraph of their paper must be able to lure the readers into buying their arguments.
Here are the list of words/terms that they had to choose from in alphabetical order:
Ableism
Acculturation
Affirmation
Acceptance
Anti Bias
Anti Racism
Anti Semitism