About+This+Project

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This website, Intercultural Dialogue, was created as a sabbatic project in 2012. An intercultural dialogue begins with the recognition of the multiplicity in th e world we live in.
Multiple opinions, viewpoints, and values exist in individual cultures and between cultures. This website provides concrete and useful information on how to improve intercultural interactions. It contains information on @cultural competence, cultural demographics, @language, @religion, and local resources. There are videotaped interviews with teachers, students and families.

This website is a guide for working with linguistically and culturally diverse children who speak languages other than English. However, the information and recommendations found here can also apply to children who, although they speak only English, are from linguistically and culturally diverse families.

**ICSD Middle School Student gives advice to incoming students coming from Burma**
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Project Outcomes
The Ithaca City Schools are committed to improving student performance by building community, improving communication, and increasing family involvement. This is reflected in the Ithaca City School Districts Professional Development Plan: **GOAL 1: SAFE, WELCOMING, RESPECTFUL, AND INCLUSIVE SCHOOL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT **
 * The district will provide staff development to enable school and district staff to provide safe, welcoming, respectful, and inclusive learning environments for all students, staff, and families.
 * All staff will work together and individually to ensure a school learning environment that is safe, respectful, and welcoming to each student and family in a diverse school community.

2011-2012 Board of Education Education Policies
Multicultural education promotes respect and understanding for people of all cultures, ethnicities, languages, physical or mental abilities, genders, sexual orientations, socio-economic classes, races, ages and religions. The District recognizes that diverse backgrounds often lead to deep differences in attitudes, beliefs, and actions. While those differences can create miscommunication, misunderstanding and conflict, the District will work to develop a learning environment that overcomes those potential problems and instead celebrates the benefits that differences allow. To that end we will create a dynamic learning environment, which promotes diverse thinking and learning as well as multiple viewpoints. Multicultural education also supports a safe learning environment, which reflects diverse cultural traditions, experiences, and contributions. Such an environment allows students and staff to develop a broader knowledge base, as well as respect for, and celebration and affirmation of, culturally diverse peoples, their customs and historic legacy. Sexism, homophobia, classism, racism, religious intolerance and other forms of individual and institutional prejudice, and discrimination are inconsistent with the principles of democracy, and lead to a climate of oppression that encourages the counterproductive reasoning that differences are deficiencies. Multicultural education benefits all students and staff and each will be given an opportunity to understand the common humanity underlying all groups; to develop pride in his/her own identity, culture, and heritage; and to understand, respect, and accept the identity, culture, and heritage of others. In addition, students will be given the opportunity to develop the ability to respectfully critique their own culture as well as the culture of others. The Ithaca City School District believes that cultural diversity is a strength that enriches society. It recognizes that all citizens have much to learn from the different cultural experiences of people both within and outside our country.

The Strategic Action Plan to Promote Equity
My sabbatic guide will help the district achieve these goals by promoting an intercultural dialogue. Dialogue reflects a desire to understand and learn from those that do not see the world in the same way as we do. It is an enriching and opening interaction that encourages the respectful sharing of ideas and creates opportunities for broadened and deepened self-knowledge and worldview. Intercultural dialogue identifies differences that define individuals and cultures, and then asks them to relate across those boundaries.
 * Every child needs an advocate to support his or her success in school. Families and community members can be the most effective advocates for children if they are welcomed and engaged by schools, and if they have effective strategies to support student success.
 * Many families are not certain they are welcome in school, especially when they advocate for their children.
 * Families are often uncertain about school policy and practice and their children’s rights and responsibilities in school.
 * Many school staff members are uncertain about how to collaborate successfully with families, especially with families from backgrounds different than their own.

As our schools becoming increasingly international, encountering cultural differences is more common. For example, there are now over 50 students in the ISCD who are refugees from Burma, and at Northeast Elementary School, where I teach, international families form the majority of our families.

This website will help all staff deepen their relationships with students and families, and to foster academic, social, emotional and physical development, by nurturing an understanding for all people in a multi cultural and multi ethnic world.

To ensure that this guide is relevant and useful to ICSD staff, I conducted a needs assessment by interviewing staff members, families, and children. This website is an educational site that all staff members can visit to access information on the cultural demographics of the ICSD, interviews with families and students on cultural experiences, and educational resources on how to create an intercultural dialogue.

[[image:me.jpg width="336" height="252" align="left"]]About Me
I have been a teacher in the Ithaca City school District for twenty years. I am a former Fulbright Exchange Teacher, [|member of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of other Languages], former Equity Mentor, Member of Aceh Relief, and a Sponsor of a Burmese family in Ithaca.

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