Diversity In North Carolina

In North Carolina there exists a small rural community college. This community college served the academic needs to six surrounding counties. Its mission was to offer a high-quality, ground-breaking education, and student support that stimulated scholarly achievement, educational excellence, and economic growth. The English as a Second Language (E.S.L.) program fell under the guidance of this mission statement. Diversity was widely accepted and valued in the E.S.L. program and college-wide in all of the other programs. However, when working with multiple cultures, there were tendencies for students to have clashes. Interracial clashes had occurred because there was a lack of experience with other cultures, past negative experiences with other
Referring to Devine (1989), and the study conducted on stereotypes and its association with prejudice, Devine’s data revealed that negative stereotypes and prejudice were strongly correlated and could ignite a psychological impact on other cultures. More specifically, attributes related to prejudice included isolation, being devalued as an individual, being labeled by other ethnic groups, and individuals facing inter-group bias (Tropp, 2003). An outcome based on this literature was to lead and manage a culture of scholarship, which addressed diversity, inclusion, and justice in an educational
There were approximately twenty-two adult students enrolled in the ESL program and twelve students enrolled in the English as a Foreign Language program (EFL) on this campus in North Carolina. There were transition programs that help ESL adult students to shift to regular college classes, but these programs focus on strengthening vocabulary skills or developing conceptual critical thinking skills, none of which addressed multiculturalism (Mathews-Aydinli, 2006). Despite the fact ethnocentrism could be viewed in a positive light in all cultures, adult E.S.L. students were not being acculturated into mainstream society because of negative ethnocentric views, which were holding them back (Spencer & Swanson, 2000; Schumann, 1986). According to Berry (1997), acculturation was a change that occurred within the culture of a group. The issue with negative ethnocentrism was that it was harmfully affecting classroom instruction, communication between the represented cultures, and those behaviors were crossing over into other societal institutions, e.g., student workplaces (LaFromboise, Hardin, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993).One possible factor contributing to this problem was the lack of adult student-focused orientation programs for foreign students enrolled in E.S.L. classes. Younger students who arrived at the United States were placed in ESL programs anywhere from K-12