For one thing, I am older than they are. I have lots of life experience that they don’t have.  If need be, I think I could write a very long list of the cultural and historical changes I have witnessed in my lifetime that my students take for granted as the way things are and have always been. Technology alone has vastly changed, I’m not sure I can say anything as definitive as “improved,” since my time in college.

In another way, I’m not so different than my students – I am white and so are most of them. I can’t control how much different I am than my students in the sense that I have lived longer and likely experienced more, but I can mitigate for any cultural differences we have. For better or worse, WWU is a very white school, over 70%. In a country growing more diverse, Bellingham is behind the pace. In past places I have worked, I’ve often been the only white person in my classroom. Those multicultural spaces can be more protective for people of color than a setting like Western that is dominated by white people. I only have a few students of color in my class, and so I’m much more aware of their race than I would be if there were not a large white majority.

I’m not sure if these differences are valuable or not. If I were to set up an ideal classroom, there would be a much larger group of minority students in it, that way they would not feel any sense of tokenism or bear the responsibility of speaking for an entire race of people.

I’ve ignored a whole swath of other possible differences, such as gender and sexual orientation, in order to focus on multicultural diversity. If I were to add these other differences, I would certainly start to see more and more students who are not like me. Learning to work with diverse populations is our mandated job as educators, and the more we try to understand our students in terms of their individual personhood, the closer we get to fulfilling our mandate.