Student Diversity in the Classroom

Another topic that more and more educational psychologists are addressing in their research and practice is the diversity of students in schools today. Psychologists, for more than a century, have been interested in individual differences, but today more attention is being given to how schools can accommodate differences in ability, race, ethnicity, regional origin, family makeup, gender, and sexual orientation so that all students have opportunities to learn.

Developmental contextualism, popularized by Richard Lerner (1991), provides a rationale for recognizing and capitalizing on the richness and diversity of students' backgrounds. It also incorporates recent research relating to cultural constructivism, which means that students use the particular environment around them to construct their own worldview. Developmental contextualism attempts to analyze and understand development in the light of the multiple levels of interactions between individuals and their environments. That is, all students' characteristics, psychological as well as biological, interact with the environment (the context in this theory). Context is an inclusive term that attempts to portray the complexity of students' backgrounds by identifying four major forces of development:

1. The physical settings through which your students move, such as the home, classroom, and workplace.
   
2. Social influences, such as students' families, peers, and significant others.
   
3. The personal characteristics of students, such as physical appearance, temperament, and language fluency.
   
4. The influence of time, that is, change brought about by the sheer chronology of living; to put it simply, the longer we're able to survive, the more changes we experience.

Consequently, the crucial element in learning and development is the changing relationship between the complexity students bring to the classroom and a multilayered context (school, home, peers, etc.). If you think about this deceptively simple statement, you can appreciate the need to study teaching, learning, and development from many different perspectives. For example, consider what's going on with students. The genes provide a blueprint that is passed on to the cells, tissues, and organs of the body, influencing the growth of such widely divergent growth features as brain development and temperament, to name only two. On the other hand, the intricate and involved layers of the context, ranging from family to peers to schools and to the wider social sphere, simultaneously weave their networks of influence. Simple explanations? Hardly. What is needed is a perspective equally as intricate as the behavior it attempts to clarify. As Lerner (1991, p. 31) noted:

The revised understanding of what constitutes the basic process of human development brings to the fore the cutting-edge importance of continued empirical focus on individual differences, on contextual variations, and on changing person-context relations. Nothing short of these emphases can be regarded as involving scientifically adequate developmental analysis of human life.