Voices of Diversity: Stories, Activities, and Resoures for the Multicultural Classroom offers 20 engaging, first-person narratives about school experiences by students, teachers, and parents. They focus on race and ethnicity, learning styles, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, linguistic diversity, gender and gender roles, learning abilities and special needs, and physical abilities. Questions, projects, and activities help teachers synthesize these issues in ways meaningful to their own classroom practice
Lori Langer de Ramirez began her career as a teacher of Spanish, French and ESL. She holds a Master's Degree in Applied Linguistics and a Doctorate in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is currently the Chairperson of the ESL and World Language Department for Herricks Public Schools in New York.
Lori is the author of Empower English Language Learners with Tools from the Web (Corwin), Take Action: Lesson Plans for the Multicultural Classroom and Voices of Diversity: Stories, Activities and Resources for the Multicultural Classroom (Pearson), as well as several Spanish-language books and texts (Cuéntame: Folklore y Fábulas, 601 Spanish Verbs, and Mi abuela ya no está). She has contributed to many textbooks and written numerous articles about second language pedagogy and methodology. Her interactive website (www.miscositas.com) offers teachers virtual picturebooks, videos, thematic units and other curricular materials for teaching Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish and Thai.
In the past decade, Lori has presented workshops, staff development trainings, and addresses at local, regional and national conferences and in schools throughout the United States (Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington D.C.) and abroad (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Germany, Spain and Thailand). A short list of presentation topics includes:
* Tell me a Story: Folktales for the Language Classroom
* Identity and Multiculturalism: Creating Diversity Awareness,
* Designing Inquiry Curriculum for the World Language Classroom
* From Sprouts to Blossoms: Growing a Chinese Program from the Ground Up
* ¡Música Maestro! - An Interdisciplinary Approach to World Music and Second Languages.
* The Language of Art: A New Paradigm for Teaching World Language and the Arts
* Best Practices in FLES - an Integration of Language, Culture and Content.
* Authentic Assessment and Portfolios for the Language Classroom.
* Raconte-moi l'Afrique - West African Folklore in the French Classroom.
* Virtual Picturebooks - Using Online Stories to Integrate Language, Culture and Content.
* Turning the Tables: Reconfiguring student/teacher roles through technology
* Sharing the Fun - Interdisciplinary Language Units for the Whole School.
* Long and Strong: Foreign Language Sequences - Why, What and How to do it
She is the recipient of the Nelson Brooks Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Culture, several National Endowment for the Humanities grants for study in Mexico, Colombia and Senegal, and a Fulbright Award to India and Nepal. Her areas of research and curriculum development are multicultural and diversity education, interdisciplinary and content-based language teaching, folktales and authentic materials in the language classroom, and technology in language teaching, with an emphasis on Web 2.0 tools.
