Key Points

• Diversity means more than just ethnic and cultural differences. It encompasses a wide range of characteristics, including (among others) gender, linguistic background, socio-economic situation, family life, religion, interests, physical or emotional challenges, skills and abilities, and life experiences.
• Even the most homogenous-appearing group of students reflects wide diversity.
• Diversity is an important contributing factor in the envisionment-building classroom.
• Instruction designed to allow learners to draw on their own circumstances when interacting with texts provides the group with a rich array of personal and unique perspectives.
• For teachers, the diversity present in all classrooms provides both challenges and exciting opportunities for instruction.
• Multiple perspectives in response to a text generate multiple interpretations. In turn, multiple interpretations generate deeper and more thoughtful responses than occur when each student reads in the isolation of his or her own circumstance.
• Envisionment-building teachers make sure students know their unique perspectives are appreciated. Additionally, they may plan activities to foreground or enhance those perspectives in order to enrich discussion and broaden understandings.
• Envisionment-building teachers encourage students to share their various interpretations, explore them, and use them to enrich one another's interpretations of a text. In this way, when students recognize and understand the different viewpoints presented by their classmates, they learn from one another.
• Readers rely on their individual backgrounds as they make meaning from texts. As they share their meanings with others, their initial understandings can be enhanced or reinterpreted.
• Recognizing and exploring multiple perspectives leads students to challenge their existing beliefs and broaden their world views.
• Because it presents a vast array of human experiences, literature provides an excellent avenue for exploring human diversity, particularly in communities with somewhat homogenous backgrounds.
• Diverse texts and students' responses to them can help students discover commonalties between themselves and others who, superficially, may appear very different.
• Because of differing life experiences, everybody has opportunities to connect with texts in different ways. As a result, students working in mixed-ability groups hear many ideas that help them develop their own thinking.
• Inclusion classrooms present teachers with particular challenges as they seek to meet the intellectual, emotional, and physical needs of each student while promoting deeper understandings for every student.
• Many teachers use reading aloud to help all readers understand ways in which texts might be read while enabling them to participate fully in literature discussions.
• Buddy reading, or peer tutoring where two or three students of varying abilities work together, is another tool to blend students into a single community of learners.
• Conversation around a text that includes all students develops a classroom into a community.
• Readers' theater (story theater) is another strategy for supporting struggling readers and enabling their participation in the conversation.
• Reading aloud can help students develop their comprehension.
• Tag reading (also known as jump-in reading, or popcorn reading), allowing students to choose how to share the reading task and when to stop, is a useful way to have students read.
• Envisionment-building classrooms offer learning experiences that are broad enough and thought-provoking enough so that every student can participate and have their own thinking pushed beyond where it was when they came to class.
• Modifying texts for weaker readers is rarely an effective strategy.
• Inclusion classrooms with students with special needs benefit from additional personnel to offer needed support.

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