Jordan Spitler

Education 215
Dr. Harris
10/8/12
Diversity Profile Project
Cultural diversity explains the variety of people that exist among a society or community.
Diversity throughout schools consists of language, gender, income, location, and race.
Throughout all schools, there are many students that come from a different cultural background.
As teachers, we need to set expectations to go about learning the different cultural aspects these
students have, and share the information with their peers. Normally, people make up their own
assumptions of how other cultures are portrayed such as language, appearance, and actions. In
the city of Harrisonburg, the cultural diversity is a wide range that stretches from many
differences; such as language and race.
At Keister Elementary School, the race and ethnicity are split between two main groups.
There are 46.53% White students and 42.28% Hispanic that attend the elementary school. These
figures display how diverse the school is and how it is almost equally divided between the two
races. This is surprising, considering I attended the county schools for my entire life. There is
definitely a difference in the amount of Hispanic students in the city versus the amount in the
county. With the two dominant races in Keitser, there are many students that are bilingual with
both English and Spanish. 18.7% of people in Harrisonburg speak a different language other
than English in their household. In my kindergarten classroom that I teach, the majority of
students speak two different languages. There are only a few students that are Caucasian and
only speak English. This is a cultural difference that we need to be aware of as future teachers,
to prepare for the culturally different student that we may be working with in our classrooms.
Keister Elementary School is located in an area that is in the heart of the city of Harrisonburg,
filtering in most of the Hispanic community that live in the local neighborhoods. Most of the

students live in houses and the median household income consists of about thirty-seven thousand
dollars a year. The schools operation budget in one year is about fifty-eight thousand dollars a
year; that gets divided by functions such as instruction, technology, transportation, health, and
operations. I was unaware of how much money it takes to run an average city school. Keister
Elementary School is almost equal in the gender category throughout each grade level. The
information about Keister shows the cultural diversity in many different ways.
Teachers in this school need to create a learning community that reaches the different
cultural statuses of the students. In order to make all the students in a diverse classroom
successful, teachers need to be sure that the material they are covering can be understood by the
students. For example, in a kindergarten class, teach the students how to say colors in English
and in Spanish as a fun activity. A major key to being a culturally diverse teacher is trying not to
be bias towards certain students. Many teachers tend to be bias without even realizing that they
are doing it because of the background they grew up in. In my kindergarten class, my teacher is
a good example of making sure that the students are all actively involved in the lessons that she
is trying to teach. An example of this is reading to students and having them point at the words
and sounding them out to begin the process of reading. All students should feel that they are
accepted and wanted in a classroom full of diversity, and teacher need to make sure that their
classrooms are a community of equality.
The information that I have learned in this project will help my teaching skills by
sustaining a non-bias classroom, and ensuring that students are welcome and willing to learn.
Each student will have the privilege to be open to different learning styles and sharing their
culture with the other students. Every classroom has a dominant and minority set of students;
dominant has the power and minorities feel left out. I now understand that as a teacher in a city
school, there will be a number of students that will speak different languages and come from

various ethnicities. This project has helped me understand the variety of students that I will be
working with in my classroom shows me that I need to have an open mind to the way that
students learn.
Keister Elementary School has helped me recognize the different factors that are noticed
in running a successful school. I feel that once a future teacher understands the basis of students
and how they interact with the way the school is regulated, it will help them gain knowledge
about the students cultural diversity. Race, location, language, and gender are cultural
influences that help build a community, which leads to culturally diverse schools. Harrisonburg
City Schools exemplify the understanding of diversity in schools.