Diversity

 

Diversity

A School represented by more than 22 countries amongst the students and the teachers, Cedar Hill Preparatory provides a heterogeneous environment that encourages tolerance towards all ethnic, cultural, and religious groups. With a goal to embrace multiculturalism, we prepare our students for life to live and succeed in a real pluralistic environment.

  • Content Integration – Our curriculum is upgraded to reflect the diverse communities across the globe
  • Knowledge Construction Process – Our teachers are well-equipped to help the students understand, investigate and determine the implicit cultural assumptions and develop a tolerance for diverse cultures.
  • Prejudice Reduction – We ensure an environment that helps to reduce prejudice towards different groups in the classroom.
  • Equity Pedagogy – Our faculty adopts a wide range of teaching strategies that encourage cooperative learning.
  • An Empowering School Culture and Social Culture – We promote a school culture that empowers equity among everyone within the school.

Quoting Kofi Annan, Former Secretary-General of the United States

“Tolerance, inter-cultural dialogue, and respect for diversity are more essential than ever in a world where people are becoming more and more closely interconnected.”

“People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. WE can love what we are, without hating what and who we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.”

At Cedar Hill Preparatory School, our motto is to practice what we preach that of being one cohesive community. We are fortunate to have a team of administrators, teachers, and parents who support and work towards it.

Teacher Perspective

We have been successful in creating a school community, well-equipped with a house system, an active PTO, and administration all working towards fostering a positive and nurturing environment. We at CHP strive to be “culturally responsive” by valuing each student through a positive environment.

Acknowledging the cultural differences among students is the key to addressing their learning needs. We make sure the cultural differences do not get in the way of our teaching by embracing these differences and making them an integral part of our classroom. The right way of ensuring this is to understand the major differences between our own culturally-based beliefs, values, and biases and the ones of our students. Our teaching methods are modified in a way that helps to foster positive classroom relationships and encourage structured learning that enables students to make real-world connections between themselves, their classroom, and the subject matter. We constantly upgrade our policies and processes to address the new challenges we encounter time and again. For instance, students having problems with the English language are addressed in a proper way by understanding their learning needs and thereby making necessary modifications.

At Cedar Hill Prep, diversity encompasses acceptance and respect. Each individual person is unique and within our diverse culture, there are dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, physical abilities, religious beliefs, and ideologies. The exploration of these differences is in a safe, positive, and nurturing environment. We embrace and celebrate the rich dimensions of diversity contained within each individual.

Our students embrace and enjoy all learning. Our curriculum content and teaching strategies consider the age span of children, individual differences in learning styles, and diverse backgrounds, and cultural differences.

Beginning in preschool, our students are given Cooperative and collaborative learning activities that foster social skills, social acquisition, and concept development. However, it was difficult for some of my kindergarten children to understand that when learning about Thanksgiving and referring to Native Americans as Indians, we weren’t talking about Indians from India.

We have a well-balanced literacy program with curriculum content that is integrated across traditional subject areas especially for communication skills speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Our students are happy and excited about learning. They look forward to what will happen next. I think the best way to learn is to make the topic enjoyable and to create an environment in which students can have a good time while they learn.

Ruth Sulitzer – Kindergarten Teacher/Director of Admissions

We enjoy sharing & celebrating our different traditions and delight in realizing how similar many of them are. We also gain strength and comfort from the knowledge that although our cultural traditions may be different, our basic human values are so similar. The students operate as one close-knit extended family. I am always so impressed with their ability to reach out to one another in time of need; their ability to work cooperatively; their desire to share their thoughts and experiences. There is no apparent division based upon ethnicity. Actually, now that I am thinking about it, I have never taught in an environment that did not have a diverse ethnic base!

Karen Yurman – 4th-Grade Teacher