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(Buncombe County)
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For the past 8 years, teachers Jackie Burris and Diane Rutledge have taught a class in multicultural studies at Asheville High School. In addition to learning about the histories of marginalized groups and multicultural issues, students have the opportunity to discuss the prejudices and problems they face in everyday life. Something in Common captures these experiences in vivid detail, chronicling incidents of racial profiling, student-on-student harassment and overt racism throughout this mountain community.
Diane Rutledge
Teacher
"Here we have a lot of Hispanics, a community of Ukrainians, and Asians, of course, African-Americans, and we have a growing number of students who are not only bI-racial but are from 3 or 4 different races, and our students welcome just about everyone."
Jackie Burris
Teacher
"I saw a need for these children to know about people of different backgrounds and different ethnicities and be more tolerant of one another."
"There's just this mindset in certain areas that " I don't want my children learning about different colors, because I don't want my child associating with them, and that's very unfortunate because when these children go out into the real world and have to deal with other types of people, whether it's different colors, different religions, different sexual preferences, they have to learn how to deal with that."
"I feel like what I'm doing is right. And if I step on some toes, then so be it. I really don't mean to step on people's toes. What I mean to do is stomp on them, and if I'm making you feel uncomfortable, then that's all right too. Because I want you to take notice of this. When I have students who leave my room and want to go to another classroom and share what they learned in the multicultural class, and they are not allowed to, I have real problems with that, and I take issue with my colleagues about that. It has gotten better over the years.. They're getting used to me now."
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