Class 6 - week 8

My area has a large refugee population so there are times that I work with a number of families from a very diverse background.  This class has taught me that I need to look beyond surface culture and look deeper into who people are.    I hope to be able to learn from the people I work with and I hope to find ways to include the families and the children. 

My goal is to teach child care providers the importance of diversity.  Also I want to develop training on the anti-bias curriculum.  I believe that child care providers tend to ignore where children's backgrounds.  They do not integrate it their program.

I want to thank everyone who has visited my page and left me great comments!!  It has been a wonderful class and I have learned so much.

Week 6 - class 6

I have a friend, who is also a co-worker, who last year came out as a lesbian.  She started out tell a few people because she was worried how people would react.  As more people found out, there were some who treated her differently.  She is out stationed in another office and works around people who are not part of our office.  She had a very hard time because she was treated horribly.  People made insulting and very discriminating remarks.  It made her very uncomfortable.

She went to her supervisor had was told to “deal with it”.  She was needed in the other office and to ignore them.  She hates going to that other office because she feels so uncomfortable.  They made her feel like she wasn’t normal and they treated her like she was not an equal.

I felt so bad for her because she was so hurt.  I was also upset because everyone deserves to work in a safe environment and she was in an unsafe place.  She was trying to deal with these new feelings she had plus dealing with the hateful remarks.

I believe that the Human Resources departments in both buildings should have been involved in order to make this a safe work environment.  I also believe that all people involved she have been made to participate in a class on diversity.