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76 Chapter 4 | Diversity at the Door: understanding Demographic Change in the Classroom In an interview squeezed into the planning period of Leslie, a young African American teacher at Morgan Elementary in southeast Nashville, conversation turned to her increasingly diverse classroom. A seasoned teacher and resident of Antioch, Leslie had lived and worked through the social and demographic changes at the center of this book. In her reflections on her awareness of a growing immigrant population around her neighborhood but not in it, on the “horror” stories she heard about teaching new immigrant students, and on the challenges of explaining the civil rights movement in 1950s Memphis to Latino students who wondered, “Where were the Hispanics?” she discussed the impact of Nashville’s new levels of ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity in the 2000s on her classroom. “I see a fourth-grader trying to learn, and I see their parents wanting them to get their best education that they can get. . . . I don’t see them being Hispanic. I don’t see the negativity that comes across from television.” Seeing but not seeing difference, marking but removing a boundary between school and community, child and parent, and acknowledging but rejecting local and national immigration politics within her classroom, Leslie grappled with the questions facing teachers across Nashville and other new immigrant destinations in the 2000s. How should teachers make sense of and adjust to racial and ethnic changes in the composition of their student bodies? How should they understand the growing differences between their own racial and ethnic identities, life experiences, and cultural frameworks and those of their students?1 How should, and how did, teachers see and respond to these differences? In the new millennium, Nashville teachers became, as Leslie put it, “more aware” of cultural differences among their students, as well as between students and them- Diversity at the Door 77 selves. As they encountered the youngest cohort of Nashville’s immigrant population in their classrooms, teachers also encountered steep learning curves in determining how to relate to students from diverse ethnic, racial , and cultural backgrounds. Amid all these differences in the classrooms of the 2000s, however, “I still got to teach math,” Leslie stressed. “I still have to teach reading. I still have to get these little kids ready for fifth grade.” As she quipped, “You can’t leave it [diversity] at the door, [but] you can’t let it encompass” everything.2 How Nashville teachers understood and described a diversity that could not be ignored but also could not be allowed to take over the classroom is the focus of this chapter. Drawing on ethnographic work in two schools in southeast Nashville, it highlights what many teachers attempted to push aside, if not downplay altogether—the racial, ethnic, linguistic , and cultural diversity embodied in their students and enmeshed in their students’ neighborhoods. The chapter argues, in conjunction with chapter 5, that in the context of immigrant settlement in Nashville in the 2000s, “diversity” became the social and pedagogical norm for many southeast Nashville schools yet at the same time was consistently overlooked by teachers trying to treat students marked as “different” the same. Constituting both what was most obvious to teachers and what they went to great lengths not to see, diversity in the classroom came to define these schools for teachers—as well as for a broader public—even as it went unremarked, but not unmarked, in the school’s day-to-day operations . This chapter develops part of that argument by examining how teachers made sense of and described diversity in their classrooms in the 2000s. I begin by briefly describing the history of Metro Nashville Public Schools, both to situate the schools in this study historically and to sketch the links between the schools and the neighborhoods, past and present, addressed in subsequent chapters. This historical background is central to understanding how Nashville teachers understood diversity in their schools, since they often did so through the lens of their previous teaching experiences . Building on this historical discussion, the chapter then examines teachers’ descriptions of demographic changes in their classrooms. Displaying in concentrated form the racial and ethnic changes associated with immigrant settlement in Nashville in the 2000s, the southeast Nashville classroom became a prime space for sorting out what those wider racial and ethnic changes associated with immigrant settlement meant for understandings of race and social belonging, both in the school and in the city. As the chapter suggests, teachers in southeast Nashville...

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