October is Diversity Awareness Month. The demographic makeup of United States society has changed dramatically in the last 25 years, and it will continue to change. Living and working in our society will require that each of us becomes increasingly aware of the challenge of cultural change. Three powerful trends in our society have made diversity an important issue.

• First, the global market in which U.S. corporations do business became highly competitive.
• Second, the makeup of the U.S. population began changing dramatically.
• Third, individuals began celebrating differences instead of compromising their uniqueness to "fit in."

Traditionally, our society's approach to diversity has been assimilation. The United States has been called the "melting pot" society. Newcomers to this country were expected to adapt their "old world" values and culture to fit the values and lifestyles of the "new world."

Cultural differences were metaphorically placed into a big pot where they were "melted" or blended together. The problem with the "melting pot" approach is that it equates difference with deficiency.

Today, the terms "mosaic" society is replacing the "melting pot" concept. In a "mosaic" society, individuals maintain their own cultural patterns, such as language, lifestyle, and religious practices. Differences are valued and appreciated, as when countless colored stones join together to form a mosaic. As a result, individuals can be proud of their cultural heritage and uniqueness instead of being ashamed of their differences.

Activity: For students to benefit from diversity, they need to learn more about the major factors that constitute diversity: ethnicity, religion, age, and gender being among the most important. ProQuest has created a collection of BookCarts that focus on both ethnicity and religion that teachers can use to create a variety of assignments to help students learn about these differences and how they enrich our "American" culture.

Assign students or groups of students to research and present two- to three-minute oral reports (or PowerPoint) on different aspects of diversity. They should synthesize their reports using at least three selected resources. Students will use a variety of separate ProQuest model BookCarts created for this purpose.

Each BookCart contains essential questions for critical thinking to guide the students and a variety of resources from which to select. Teachers and/or librarians must first copy ProQuest models to their My Local Carts collection.

Pathfinder to related BookCarts: Open eLibrary Teacher Edition (links here) > Click BookCart Admin at the top right > Select the ProQuest Carts tab > Click Ethnic Culture and Interests

Instructions for copying BookCarts can be found here.