It can become quite hard to find an organization of education that is not diverse with respect to students (and often teachers also), especially in urban sectors. Let that be college or university, school or tutorials, everywhere we can expect to find at least some extent of diversification. So there remain not many options to avoid this. And perhaps there ain’t any need also. 

Today we can embrace diversifications more readily than before. There has been a lot of evolution and mutation in the areas of social acceptance and tolerance. But just superficial changes in views would not give us much benefit. We also need to explore the pros and cons of this system, like we do in many other systems or sectors. This system also has its own positives and negatives. 

What is Diversity in Education or Classroom

Before moving further into discussion, we need to know what we are actually to understand when we say about diversity in education, and sometimes also say something like diversity in the classroom. Often both essentially mean the same thing and hence are synonymous. 

So what is diversity in education? It starts from inclusive classrooms and spans to diversified pedagogy and learning (both learning methods and experiences). Let’s first see the cause behind the inclusive classroom concept. 

Classrooms are now filled with diverse types of students. Differences can be on variables like race, culture, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic backgrounds. These are some basic differentiable variables, most generally found, and there can be more in some cases. We will center our discussion on those basic variables for now. 

Gender diversity is the most common one we found in almost every educational setup. It has its own pros and cons most certainly but we need to work on the adaptability due to the need of today. Any further in-depth studies on such diversities would require a different knowledge transfer setup than what we can have in this blog area, as it will be more intensely on psychology and evolution biology. 

Inter-racial, intercultural and diverse ethinic living are becoming more relevant nowadays mainly due to development in transport and telecommunication areas. People more readily and easily travel far distances for the search of job or living and thus often settle down to a distant land with family. We can even find many hybrid families where diverses are unified very closely. 

Education is one of the most important individual as well as social components just like food and medicine. One cannot ignore it or do without it. Wherever we live, we need schools and colleges which will be environment-wise and language-wise compatible. And exactly this is what we try to develop in educational diversity, in an inclusive classroom. 

Though educational diversity is not exactly what we should understand by an inclusive classroom, still both are highly related. Educational diversity or diversity in education encompasses a much broader spectrum than that covered by inclusive classrooms. Rather we can most often find that the inclusive classroom becomes one of the most emphasized and prominent implementations as well as complementation of educational diversity. 

So let us first understand the concept of an inclusive classroom. As it goes by the name, it includes. But it includes what? It includes the diversities. How is that so? 

Nowadays most of the classes of urban regions are full of different diversities. Before a few decades also, gender diversities were used to be very minimal, but now most of the educational organizations are co-educational. This can be one case of an inclusive classroom, as it includes gender diversity, facilitating healthy distribution of resources and a healthy level of tolerance. 

Other high degrees of diversities are found on the basis of race, culture and ethnicity. With developed transport systems and telecommunication mediums, long distance residential stays are very common nowadays. With that inter-racial and inter-cultural classrooms are what we can see very frequently, especially in premium schools and colleges. 

Inclusive Classrooms

As by the name, the classroom that includes it is an inclusive classroom. But it includes what? All diversities in the domain of education. Deversities we were discussing above are more usual and simple ones. There are other very complex diversities, like the diversities of abilities. 

Every classroom contains a variety of abilities. The pedagogy of any standard education method is usually able to make such diversities work better. But there can be other diversities like the special abilities can become very challenging. Special abilities are also having a lot of varieties, under two broad categories of physical special abilities and mental special abilities. 

It can become excessively challenging to include many specially abled students with other normal students and especially with above normal achievers and performers. Very special pedagogy design and tutor capabilities are required to handle such levels of diversities. 

In our current article, I would discuss more about the other educational diversities other than the special diversities. 

Diversities are Good or Bad?

This is a very deep and complex question to answer in one shot. Still many will say that it is good. But it is not always that easy if we take education to priority. 

Obviously there are certain social skills and soft skills that invariably get benefited and improved through diversities in the education setup and classroom. 

To explain this point, I would like to discuss a case. 

We can find various categories of students in high school science. 

There are students who are likely to just pass the exam, there are students who will score better, there are students who think much beyond just scoring in high school results. They are aspiring engineering and medical students. In that also there are divisions of the quality category. All are not aspiring for the premium top quality institutes.

Everyone in the above case would like to get a good education. Good school, good college, good tutorial and so on. Now the question that arises is can a single class cater the needs of all the categories of students. I have almost never seen something like this. I have seen that students need to choose their classes. 

Intelligent and highly inspiring students usually will choose the best classes where they will try to solve and experiment with the problems.

Not so intelligent students will like easier classes where they can solve and get confident on simpler and average problems. Those who are too weak will hardly concentrate. 

If this is the level of diversities, then how to include them all in a single class? 

If the teacher will give his or her attention to the weaker students, then ultimately the intelligent and highly aspiring students will lose their interest and motivation. They would suffer.

On the other hand if the teacher emphasizes them then the weaker students will find it hard to continue and thus suffer a lot. They will do even worse in the exam. On the other hand it will be very illogical to expect that a teacher will be able to teach students almost individually according to their position in diversity in a classroom of 30 students or often even much more.