Teaching students from diverse backgrounds

Texts that focus on inclusion and diversity often present us with 'a walk through the park'. They look at disabled students, and then at Indigenous students, and then at LGBTQI+, and so on, as if there is a checklist of inclusions (and exclusions). But
such an approach to inclusion does a disservice to these students insofar as they become 'objects of our gaze'. We make them 'stand out'. We make them different. And then 'we' sometimes reject that difference!

This chapter is about the teacher being open and the student feeling seen. The need for the teacher to be open and supportive and for the student to feel seen in the classroom is raised time and again in the case studies presented in this chapter. Inclusivity is less about the teacher knowing a lot, or having a bank of strategies to support inclusion, and more about those qualities that need to be present in the classroom to help
students feel included.

Our first key point is that the teacher must be recognised by students to be explicitly supportive of gender and sexual differences, different abilities, different accents and
different ways of thinking. In other words, the student's engagement is dependent on the teacher being perceived by the student to be explicitly supportive and open only then will the student be prepared to come out of the 'closet', as Caleb suggests in his case study later in the chapter. And only then will the Indigenous student be prepared to talk about their Indigenous background. As in life, inclusion is about trust
and honouring our sensitivities. It is about who we are as people.

As Jolene Stockman discusses in her TEDx talk (2018), including autism is about honouring sensitivities and changing a lot of things in our life so that others can be in it. Inclusion, for Jolene, is being open to others. She says, 'I don't have autism,
I do not suffer from autism, I am an autistic person'. (You '11 find a link to Jolene's TEDx talk, as well as a list of other useful videos and resources, at the end of the chapter.)

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