Teachers and professors play a crucial role in our education. From our elementary teachers to our college professors, they all contributed to making our education grow. They serve as leaders and role models, not only teaching students academic matters but also important life lessons. For students to gain more confidence in the academic challenges that they face in school if their educator spreads a positive presence in their education, this encourages students to learn more. However, for the students to feel that encouragement from their educator, it is important to be able to connect, student to educator, as much as possible. An educator should be able to provide students with this empowering presence, and sharing a cultural or racial background with a student increases approachability and enhances student-educator connections.
Students tend to learn through different teaching methods, therefore it is important to include a variety of teaching methods in the academic programs. This can be achieved in the university by including diversity in the faculty. By having diversity in teaching programs, it translates to more methods and approaches to teaching, which ultimately benefits the student. Diversity among the faculty also tends to make the students feel safer and more connected to the educator, by having someone of their same nationality or ethnic background. An educator’s methods of education are an incorporation of cultural background and past educational experiences.
As someone who has been in an international high school, a large majority of the students were from all over the world, and all of the different nationalities. Due to the great amount of diversity among the students, we needed to have the same amount of diversity among the faculty. Students tend to benefit from the presence of educators from a similar cultural background, this gives them familiarity and makes them comprehend the teaching better.
Unfortunately, diversity among faculty in universities is rare to find, including this campus as well. Even though St. John’s University is known to have a great amount of diversity among the students attending it, the main problem is having educators of different ethnicity. Due to the diverse ethnicities among the students, the requests for more educators of different ethnicities increase every day, especially requests for more black educators. I believe that black education is as equally important as any type of education. Students go to school to discover new things about the world that they didn’t know before and so including black education is crucial. Black education, and thus black history, has to be taught not only to black students and others outside of the community as well. Doing so would represent an important towards achieving more equality, independence, and prosperity within the black community. A black education is an open-minded one that students deserve.