The book I have chosen to start with is An Introduction to Multicultural Education by James A. Banks. I will be trying to read a chapter/article a week, but we will see how that goes. Anyway, let's get into it.
Chapter One: Goals and Misconceptions
Banks describes multicultural education(MCE) as encompassing race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, language, exceptionality, and sexual orientation (gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual). MCE is a process, an idea, or a concept, and an educational reform movement. One major component of MCE is that the system might give advantages to certain students while giving disadvantages to students who have different cultural backgrounds, such as race and gender. To implement MCE into schools, there needs to be reform in school policies/politics, school culture and hidden curriculum, teaching styles and strategies, language and dialects of the school, Community participation and input, counseling program, formalized curriculum and course of study, assessment and testing procedures, instructional material, and school staff's attitudes, perceptions, beliefs, and actions. With the multiple aspects of students' lives, this describes intersectionality.
Goals of MCE
Students should receive more teachings from cultures other than mainstream cultures. If students have a better understanding of other people’s culture, then respect should follow.
Anglocentric curricula deny students the vastness of different cultures and their perspectives on music, literature, values, and more. More perspectives can concretize goal one.
Anglocentric curricula often alienate and create hostile environments and overall have a negative effect on students of color. Less anglocentric curricula create safer spaces for Students of color.
Giving students the cultural knowledge to be able to code-switch between predominant cultures in their lives: Personal culture and mainstream culture, instead of complete assimilation of culture. Even with the self-alienation and the forced assimilation, POCs tend to be denied full access to mainstream institutions.
With MCE teachings, it creates motivation for students to learn more and learn better
Misconceptions of MCE
MCE is not just for the “other” students; it’s for every student who has the ability to learn and be in school.
Despite the idea that MCE is inherently against the West, it isn’t; it was born from the West’s expansion and the rise of civil rights movements. MCE theorists believe that students should learn about the truths of the Western expansion, namely the debt of POCs and women, which theorists say should be included in the curriculum. (Banks 2014)
“MCE will divide the nation.” This misconception assumes that the nation is already united. Banks says that the gap between the money in the U.S. has been increasing since 1976, when most, if not all, of the nation’s money sits is held by the top 1 percent. (2014) MCE talks about how to unite a deeply broken nation by being cohesive and “one out of many,” as Banks says. A lot of theorists state that they should participate in subtactive schooling or deculturalization, this meaning complete cultural assimilation. But other theorists view reaching the one out of many statement as a bargaining situation.
There have been some major wins when it comes to MCE and the schooling system. More ethnic content has appeared in numerous curricula compared to 10 or 20 years ago. This involves, but is not solely including, books written by authors of color in language arts classes and social studies classes. With the increase of POCs in the population and languages other than English spoken at home, there is a deep call for and a need for more ethnic content for schools. As African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and women grow in the power stage, textbooks will reflect more of them and their struggles and dreams.
Despite the strides MCE has made, the terrorist attacks have made a huge regression in the movement by creating fear of “other”; it has created a fear of MCE or the standards it holds. This has also created several problems, including the banning of ethnic studies in an Arizona school. Banning Mexican American Studies led to studies being done proving that these ethnic study classes helped students think about their classes differently and think more about their futures, while also lowering the dropout rate of Mexican American students.
Despite ethnic studies helping students, there has been a major debate about teaching “American history” rather than ethnic studies. Despite that claim, ethnic studies are so deeply ingrained in American history. One passage that feels so incredible reads:
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literacy Imagination, Toni Morrison (1992) argues that blacks are present in American literature even when they are not visible because throughout their history in the United States, Whites have defined themselves in opposition to Blacks—Blacks were essential for whites to construct their identities as Americans. (Banks 18)
Seeing the identity of White Americans in this light is truly eye-opening, for me at least, to see that the identity of White Americans so depends on there being an other, or something, or in this case, non-American.
Cites
Banks , J. A. (2018). In Introduction to Multicultural Education (p. 18). essay, Pearson.
