Multicultural Education

Multicultural Education

History/Past Challenges:

One of the major goals of the American school system is to provide all children with equal educational opportunity. However, with regard to minority students, meeting this particular objective has presented a real challenge to educators as they have been confronted with the task of reshaping education in the multilingual, multicultural society that characterizes the United States.

Many significant events contributed to the need of school reform. The Civil Rights movement launched by African Americans in the 1960’s, which resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, triggered major social changes in the direction of equality and justice for all. Consequently, the US Department of Education was charged “…to conduct a survey on availability of equal educational opportunity and to provide technical and financial assistance to school boards in carrying out plans for the desegregation of public schools” (Zephir,1999:136). Changing immigration patterns also occurring since the 1960’s brought educational issues to the forefront of discussion. In 1968, the first Bilingual Education act was passed in an attempt “…to provide short-term help to school districts with high concentrations of students from low income homes who had limited English-speaking ability” (Millward,1999:47). Moreover, in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled in Lau vs. Nichols (a class action suit brought on behalf of Chinese-speaking children in San Francisco) that English-limited children who were being taught in English “…were certain to find their classroom experiences totally incomprehensible and in no way meaningful” (Stevens,1999:108). In consequence, schools were instructed to give special help to non-English-speaking students in order to guarantee their equality under the law with students who spoke English as their first language. In short, the social movement of the 1960’s gave rise to major educational changes; and it was in that context that the concept of ‘multicultural education’ originated. The 1980’s saw the emergence of a body of scholarship on multicultural education by progressive education activists and researchers who refused to allow schools to address their concerns by simply adding token programs and special units on famous women or famous people of color. James Banks, one of the pioneers of multicul...

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...ristics. A list of guidelines have been established by Kellough & Roberts (1998:27-28) for teaching students of diverse backgrounds:

1. Build the learning around the students’ individual learning styles.

2. Communicate positively with every student and with the student’s parent/guardians, learning as much as you can about the student and the student’s culture, and encouraging family members to participate in the student’s learning.

3. Establish a classroom climate in which each student feels he or she can learn and wants to learn.

4. Hold and maintain high expectations for each student

5. Personalize learning for each student; much like is done in the use of the IEP with special needs learners.

6. Plan for and use all learning modalities (visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic).

7. Use cooperative learning.

In summary, multicultural education strives for equity regardless of race, gender, culture, or national origin. Both school and society shape students’ lives. So, in order to be successful, multicultural education encompasses both the effort to create more equitable schools and the involvement of teachers and students in the creation of a more equitable society.