Because the cultural practices of low-income students were viewed as inadequate and inferior, cultural deprivation theorists focused on changing student behavior so that it aligned more closely with mainstream school culture. An equity pedagogy assumes that students from diverse cultures and groups come to school with many strengths.
Multicultural theorists describe how cultural identity, communicative styles, and the social expectations of students from marginalized ethnic and racial groups often conflict with the values, beliefs, and cultural assumptions of teachers. The middle-class mainstream culture of the schools creates a cultural dissonance and disconnect that privileges students who have internalized the school's cultural codes and communication styles. Teachers practice culturally responsive teaching when an equity pedagogy is implemented.
They use instructional materials and practices that incorporate important aspects of the family and community culture of their students.
Culturally responsive teachers also use the "cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them" Gay, p. An empowering school culture. This dimension involves restructuring the culture and organization of the school so that students from diverse racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and language groups experience equality.
Members of the school staff examine and change the culture and social structure of the school. Grouping and labeling practices, sports participation, gaps in achievement among groups, different rates of enrollment in gifted and special education programs among groups, and the interaction of the staff and students across ethnic and racial lines are important variables that are examined and reformed.
An empowering school structure requires the creation of qualitatively different relationships among various groups within schools. Relationships are based on mutual and reciprocal respect for cultural differences that are reflected in school-wide goals, norms, and cultural practices. An empowering school structure facilitates the practice of multicultural education by providing teachers with opportunities for collective planning and instruction, and by creating democratic structures that give teachers, parents, and school staff shared responsibility for school governance.
The Handbook of Research of Multicultural Education comprehensively reviews the research on multicultural education and the effectiveness of various kinds of multicultural curricular interventions. At least three categories of research that describe the effectiveness of multicultural education can be identified: 1 research that describes the effectiveness of multicultural curriculum interventions such as Banks's research review; 2 research on the effects of cooperative learning and interracial contact, such as Robert Slavin's research review; and 3 research on how culturally responsive teaching influences student learning, such as Carol Lee's study and Gloria Ladson-Billings's work.
An extended discussion of studies in the first genre is presented in this entry. Research reviews of the other two genres are found in the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education.
Slavin's research review and Cohen and Lotan's research on cooperative learning and interracial contact activities indicate that these interventions—if they are consistent with Allport's theory of intergroup contact—help students to develop more positive racial attitudes, to make more cross-racial friendships, and have positive effects on the academic achievement of Latino and African-American students.
Lee's research on culturally responsive teaching indicates that when teachers use the cultural characteristics of students in their teaching the academic achievement of students from diverse groups can be enhanced. Research on curriculum materials and interventions. Research indicates that the use of multicultural textbooks, other teaching materials, television, and simulations can help students from different racial and ethnic groups to develop more democratic racial attitudes and perceptions of other groups.
Since the s a number of curriculum interventions studies have been conducted to determine the effects of teaching units and lessons, multicultural textbooks and materials, role playing, and simulation on the racial attitudes and perceptions of students. These studies provide guidelines that can help teachers to improve intergroup relations in their classrooms and schools. One of the earliest curriculum studies was conducted by Helen Trager and Marion Yarrow They found that a democratic, multicultural curriculum had positive effects on the racial attitudes of teachers and on those of first- and second-grade students.
John Litcher and David Johnson found that white, second-grade children developed more positive racial attitudes after using multiethnic readers. Gerry Bogatz and Samuel Ball found that Sesame Street, PBS's multicultural television program, had a positive effect on the racial attitudes of children who watched it for long periods.
In a study by Michael Weiner and Frances Wright , children who themselves experienced discrimination in a simulation developed less prejudiced beliefs and attitudes toward others.
Multicultural social studies materials and related experiences had a positive effect on the racial attitudes of African-American four-year-old children in a study conducted by Thomas Yawkey and Jacqueline Blackwell Research indicates that curriculum interventions such as plays, folk dances, music, role playing, and simulations can have positive effects on the racial attitudes of students.
A curriculum intervention that consisted of folk dances, music, crafts, and role playing positively influenced the racial attitudes of elementary students in a study conducted by M. Ahmed Ijaz and I. Helene Ijaz Four plays about African Americans, Chinese Americans, Jews, and Puerto Ricans increased racial acceptance and cultural knowledge among fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students in a study conducted by Beverly Gimmestad and Edith De Chiara Jossette McGregor used meta-analysis to integrate findings and to examine the effects of role playing and antiracist teaching on reducing prejudice in students.
Twenty-six studies were located and examined. McGregor concluded that role playing and antiracist teaching "significantly reduce racial prejudice, and do not differ from each other in their effectiveness" p. The ethnic, cultural, and language diversity within the United States and its schools is increasing.
The U. Bureau of the Census projects that 47 percent of the U. Between and , 7. Census estimates that more than one million immigrants will enter the United States every year for the fore-seeable future. Thirty-five percent of students enrolled in U. If current demographic trends continue, students of color will comprise approximately 46 percent of the student population in The increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of the U.
Many of the students entering U. The census indicated that 14 percent of the nation's school-age youth lived in homes where the primary language was not English. In addition to increasing ethnic, language, and cultural diversity, a significant and growing percentage of children in the United States, especially children of color, are being raised in poverty. The number of children living in poverty rose from According to the U. Census Bureau, of the Multicultural education theorists believe that the nation's schools should respond to its increasing racial, ethnic, and language diversity.
However, they have different views about how to define the field's boundaries and about which social groups should be included under its umbrella.
Some theorists are concerned that as the field expands to include an increasing number of cultural groups, its initial focus on institutionalized racism and the achievement of students of color might wane. The discussions and debates within multicultural education reflect the vitality and growth of an emerging discipline.
An increasingly low-income and linguistically and culturally diverse student population requires a transformation of the deep structure of schooling in order to experience educational equity and cultural empowerment in the nation's schools. Multicultural education is a process of comprehensive school reform that challenges racism and prejudice by transforming the curriculum and instructional practices of schools, and by changing the relationships among teachers, students, and parents.
A major goal of multicultural education is to help students from diverse cultures learn how to transcend cultural borders and to engage in dialog and civic action in a diverse, democratic society. Multicultural education tries to actualize cultural democracy, and to include the dreams, hopes, and experiences of diverse groups in school knowledge and in a reconstructed and inclusive national identity.
The future of democracy in the United States depends on the willingness and ability of citizens to function within and across cultures. The schools can play a major role in helping students to develop the knowledge and skills needed to cross cultural borders and to perpetuate a democratic and just society. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Teaching Ethnic Studies: Concepts and Strategies. New York: Teachers College Press. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education. Curriculum Guidelines for Multicultural Education. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge.
Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom, 2nd edition. Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation. Status of the American Public School Teacher, — Woodson and the Development of Transformative Scholarship. New York: Harper. The historical roots of multicultural education lie in the civil rights movements of various historically oppressed groups.
Among those institutions specifically targeted were educational institutions, which were among the most oppressive and hostile to the ideals of racial equality. Activists, community leaders, and parents called for curricular reform and insisted on a reexamination of hiring practices.
Both, they demanded, should be more consistent with the racial diversity in the country. In the late s and early s, the women's rights movement joined this push for education reform. Women's rights groups challenged inequities in employment and educational opportunities as well as income, identifying education as a primary contributing factor in institutionalized and systemic sexism.
Feminist scholars and other women activists, like groups of color before them, insisted on curricula more inclusive of their histories and experiences.
They challenged the discrepancy low number of female administrators relative to the percentage of female teachers Banks, Sensing progress -- if only slight -- by groups of color and women in their struggles for human rights and social and educational change into the early s, other traditionally oppressed groups found growing support and energy for their movements.
Through the s, gay and lesbian groups, the elderly, and people with disabilities organized visible and powerful pushes for sociopolitical and human rights. As K schools, universities, and other educational institutions and organizations scrambled to address the concerns of these and other historically marginalized groups, a host of programs, practices, and policies emerged, mostly focused on slight changes or additions to traditional curriculum.
Together, the separate actions of these various groups who were dissatisfied with the inequities of the education system, along with the resulting reaction of educational institutions during the late s and s, defined the earliest conceptualization of multicultural education.
The 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 multicultural education, was among the first multicultural education scholars to examine schools as social systems from a multicultural context By the middle and late s, other K teachers-turned-scholars including Carl Grant, Christine Sleeter, Geneva Gay, and Sonia Nieto provided more scholarship in multicultural education, developing new, deeper frameworks that were grounded in the ideal of equal educational opportunity and a connection between school transformation and social change.
Tracking, culturally oppressive teaching approaches, standardized tests, school funding discrepancies, classroom climate, discriminatory hiring practices, and other symptoms of an ailing and oppressive education system were exposed, discussed, and criticized. Meanwhile, the cultural landscape of the United States continued to become less visibly white Christian and more visibly rich with cultural, racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, underscoring the necessity for everyone to develop a set of skills and knowledge that the present system was failing to provide all students.
These included creative and critical thinking skills, intercultural competence, and social and global awareness. The education system was not only plagued by unequal treatment of traditionally oppressed groups, but was also ill-equipped to prepare even the most highly privileged students to competently participate in an increasingly diverse society. So as the s flowed into the final decade of the twentieth century, multicultural education scholars refocused the struggle on developing new approaches and models of education and learning built on a foundation of social justice, critical thinking, and equal opportunity.
Educators, researchers, and cultural theorists began to further deconstruct traditional models in both the K and higher education arenas from a multicultural framework.
Joel Spring, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, and others contributed to a new body of critical sociocultural criticism of educational institutions within the context of larger societal and global dimensions of power, privilege, and economics, and the intersections of these.
What started as small curricular shifts and additions has become a framework for reexamining both schools and society from a progressive and transformative framework.
For example, Ovando and McLaren , p.
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