Teachers’ perceptions of diversity and ‘others’ in United Arab Emirates (UAE) Schools

This paper seeks to examine and unpack cultural diversity and ‘Others’ in United Arab Emirates schools through the lens of teachers and school leaders as Culturally Responsive Teachers (CRT). Such teachers discursively construct government and private schools, as not just heterogeneous because of students of Emirati and non-Emirati origins, but as very diverse along the overlapping lines of language, race and ethnicities, and socio-economic status. Biliterate and biracial students are discursively constructed as experiencing marginalisation because of their association with non-Emirati identities. For CRT to be genuinely effective and transformative, it is imperative for teachers to locate understandings of diversity and Others within specific configurations of language use, race and ethnicity and socio-economic status. CRT will succeed if teachers look at students as individuals with unique configurations of diversity, with many of them experiencing multiple layers of Othering.