America has all the time been referred to as a melting pot, but ideally, it's a place where we strive to request every person to celebrate exactly who they are. As the Us citizen is becoming increasingly diverse and technology makes the world feel increasingly smaller, it is time to make every classroom a multicultural classroom.
What is Multicultural Education?
Multicultural schooling is more than celebrating Cinco de Mayo with tacos and piñatas or reading the newest biography of Martin Luther King Jr. It is an educational movement built on basic American values such as freedom, justice, opportunity, and equality. It is a set of strategies aimed to address the diverse challenges experienced by rapidly changing U.S. Demographics. And it is a beginning step to shifting the balance of power and privilege within the schooling system.
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The goals of multicultural schooling include:
- Creating a safe, accepting and thriving studying environment for all
- expanding awareness of global issues
- Strengthening cultural consciousness
- Strengthening intercultural awareness
- Teaching students that there are manifold historical perspectives
- Encouraging needful thinking - Preventing prejudice and discrimination
Advantages of Multicultural Education
According to the National relationship for Multicultural schooling (Name), multicultural education:
- Helps students develop inescapable self-image.
- Offers students an equitable educational opportunity.
- Allows manifold perspectives and ways of thinking.
- Combats stereotypes and prejudicial behavior.
- Teaches students to critique society in the interest of group justice.
Road Blocks to Implementing Multicultural schooling
Contrary to favorite belief, multicultural schooling is more than cultural awareness, but rather an initiative to encompass all under-represented groups (people of color, women, citizen with disabilities, etc) and to ensure curriculum and content along with such groups is exact and complete.
Unfortunately, multicultural schooling is not as easy as a annual inheritance celebration or supplemental unit here and there. Rather, it requires schools to reform original curriculum.
Too often, students are misinformed and misguided. Not all textbooks gift historical content fully and accurately. For instance, Christopher Columbus is notable as the American hero who discovered America. This take on history fully ignores the pre-European history of Native Americans and the devastation that colonization had on them. Some history books are being revised, but often, it's much easier to teach that "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."
Most curriculums also focus more on North America and Europe than any other region. Most students have learned about genocide straight through stories of the Holocaust, but do they know that hundreds of thousands of citizen are being killed in places like Darfur and Rwanda? Despite our close nearnessy to Latin America, American schools typically spend dinky time reading Latin American literature or studying about the culture and history?
Thus, multicultural schooling is most thriving when implemented as a schoolwide approach with reconstruction of not only curriculum, but also organizational and institutional policy.
Unfortunately most educational institutions are not prepared to implement multicultural schooling in their classrooms. Multicultural schooling requires a staff that is not only diverse, but also culturally competent. Educators must be aware, responsive and embracing of the diverse beliefs, perspectives and experiences. They must also be willing and ready to address issues of controversy. These issues include, but are not dinky to, racism, sexism, religious intolerance, classism, ageism, etc.
What You Can Do in Your Classroom
Just because we're facing an uphill battle doesn't mean we shouldn't take those first steps. To integrate multicultural schooling in your classroom and your school, you can:
- integrate a diverse reading list that demonstrates the universal human feel across cultures
- Encourage society participation and group activism
- Go beyond the textbook
- By supplementing your curriculum with current events and news stories covering the textbook, you can draw parallels in the middle of the distant experiences of the past and the world today.
- Creating multicultural projects that wish students to choose a background covering of their own - suggest that your school host an in-service professional development on multi-cultural schooling in the classroom
Favorite Lessons in Multicultural Education
Analyze issues of racism straight through pop culture.
Example: Study the affects of Wwii for Japanese Americans straight through political cartoons, movies, photography, etc.
Analyze issues of socioeconomic class straight through planning and development.
Example: develop a development project with solutions to the needs of those living in poverty stricken communities.
Analyze issues of sexism straight through media.
Example: Make a scrapbook of stereotypical portrayals of both men and women. Correlate both inescapable and negative stereotypes and conclude the struggles they face as a effect of these stereotypes.
Recommended Resources
Books:
Becoming Multicultural Educators by Geneva Gay
Beyond Heros and Holidays by Enid Lee
Lies My Teachers Told Me: everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen
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