Diversifying Your Image Searches

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. Culturally Responsive Teaching. If you work in Adult Education, you’ve probably seen these terms being applied and explored more and more frequently— and rightly so!

However, as a teacher of literacy and beginner level ESOL students, these conversations with fellow teachers have often been challenging and made me feel left out. Over the past two years I’ve been teaching remotely with traditional 4-skills thematic unit ESOL textbooks. Like so many adult English classes, our focus is on working with basic vocabulary, phonics, simple texts and tenses. What do diversity and inclusion mean in that context? How can a beginner level ESOL class be made more culturally responsive, when the content and skills we need to cover seem so basic?

I realized that in order to embody the values that our field aspires to hold, I needed to figure out how to make them real and tangible in my classroom. This school year, that mission became my primary focus. I’d like to share some of my thoughts and takeaways from my journey so far.

Sometime in late September 2021, I came across a catchy DEI slogan making the rounds on the Internet. So, I did what educators do and put it on a post-it on my computer monitor:

Diversity is a fact.

Inclusion is an act.

Equity is the goal.

The simple definitions of diversity and inclusion hit me particularly hard.

Diversity is a fact. A quick glance down one of my class lists shows an incredible variety of experiences: students from 11 countries, a handful of languages, a few religions, a wide spread of education and income levels, different gender and sexual identities, and ages from 19 to 72. Fact: I don’t need to manufacture diversity. It’s already right there in front of me.

Inclusion is an act. Representation is a choice and it matters. As a teacher, I can create instructional materials that represent the diversity of my students, and reflect it back to them. I believe that every student deserves to see themselves represented in our class content. What does that mean in a beginner ESOL classroom? For me, it’s all about the visuals.

What I’ve learned this year is that the work of diversity and inclusion happens, in part, through small intentional shifts: little changes we incorporate into our practices over time. The hope is that we’ll be building equity all along the way.

About the Author:

Ash Aliengena (they/them) is a Literacy Specialist who teaches beginner ESOL classes for Holyoke Community College at the Ludlow Area Adult Learning Center, located in Western Massachusetts: hcc.edu/esol.