Cultural Diversity Instructional Challenges Faced by Junior High School Teachers in Calgary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many Canadian children under the age of 15 were born to at least one foreign-born parent, representing 37.5% or 2.2 million children of the total population of children. Although this cultural diversity provides opportunities for teachers to use as a strength, it also poses instructional challenges. Much research has focused on cultural diversity challenges, yet it is not known whether specific cultural diversity instructional challenges have been overcome or how. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to investigate specific cultural diversity instructional challenges faced by junior high school teachers and explore how teachers use Gay’s culturally responsive teaching (CRT) to overcome such challenges. In addition to Gay’s pedagogy, the conceptual framework included elements of the Ladson-Billings’s culturally relevant pedagogy. The research questions focused on understanding the cultural diversity instructional challenges and exploring how teachers use CRT to overcome such challenges. Purposeful sampling was used to select eight teachers in highly culturally diverse junior high schools in Calgary. Data were collected through interviews, followed by transcription and analysis to identify themes. Findings revealed that teachers face cultural diversity instructional challenges including the lack of resources, language barriers, lack of student motivation, and gaps in student learning. Teachers gave examples of self-developed CRT strategies they use to overcome the challenges, featuring intentional lesson planning amongst other strategies. All teachers also expressed their thirst for training on CRT. Insights from this study can help stakeholders in education identify and implement professional development sessions that promote effective strategies needed for a culturally diverse classroom.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".