Multicultural Education/Curriculum

The education philosophy and methodology aiming to replace a dominant cultural paradigm in the classroom with a multiplicity of views reflecting the students' cultural backgrounds.

Multicultural education is essentially an effort to translate a pluralistic world view into educational practices and theories. Thus, a multicultural curriculum, unlike traditional programs, strives to present more than one perspective of a historical event or a cultural phenomenon. For example, Christopher Columbus's expedition to America, defined as "discovery" in traditional textbooks with a Eurocentric bias, appears in a different light to the "discovered" populations. Responding to criticism that pluralism in education may impoverish the current curriculum, multiculturalists have argued that multicultural education actually enriches the curriculum. James A. Banks writes: "Rather than excluding Western civilization from the curriculum, multiculturalists want a more truthful, complex, and diverse version of the West taught in the schools. They want the curriculum to describe the way in which African, Asian, and indigenous cultures have influenced and interacted with Western civilization."

The presence of multiculturalism in American education is undeniable, but it is still a minority movement. With the growing awareness of the multi-ethnic nature of American society, educators have challenged the "melting-pot" principle, observing that the traditional concept of "Americanization" really means conformity to a white, Eurocentric cultural model. Yet, while multicultural education seems appropriate for a multi-ethnic society, many obstacles have hindered the development of formal multicultural educational programs. Chief among them is the opinion that multicultural education would do away with the classics of art and literature, impoverishing the curriculum, and depriving the students of essential knowledge. However, others have argued for the benefits of multicultural education as an active approach to learning, which encourages the learner to construct his or her own knowledge.

Multiculturalism is not a new phenomenon, emerging after World War II, in part as a reaction to Nazi ideas of racial, ethnic, and cultural supremacy. However, as Banks notes, multicultural "education itself is a product of the West"—which implies that the idea of cultural pluralism and tolerance is woven into the founding ideals of Western education, which include freedom, equality, and humanism. In the 1960s, multicultural education as a movement strongly benefitted from society's growing awareness that the monocultural paradigm was not working. According to Thomas J. La Belle and Christopher R. Ward, four factors contributed to the rise of multicultural education in the 1960s, namely, "the civil rights movement, a rise in ethnic consciousness, a more critical analysis of textbooks and other materials, and the loss of belief in theories of cultural deprivation." While theories of cultural deprivation defined minority cultures as failing to conform to a standard, multicultural theory in the 1960s embraced the idea of difference, eliminating the concepts of superiority and inferiority. Enjoying significant government support in the late 1970s, multicultural education faced funding problems in the 1980s, and funding continues to be the principal challenge in the 1990s.

In designing multicultural curricula, educators have often favored an approach whereby the traditional curriculum is enriched and modified by new elements. Banks advocates a gradual, four-stage transformation of the curriculum. The first, the contributions approach, focuses on a particular minority culture's heroes and holidays; the second level, known as the additive approach, introduces new concepts and themes without changing the curriculum's essential structure; the third level, called the transformative approach, enables students to view issues and events from a minority culture's point of view; and the fourth level, the social action approach, encourages students to address social problems caused by a one-dimensional perception of culture. For example, a teacher can, using the transformative approach when presenting a unit in American history, ask her students to describe the "Westward Movement" from the point of the Lakota Sioux, whose homeland was invaded by white settlers. In addition, the study of folklore provides the teacher with numerous lessons in multiculturalism that can be used in the classroom. In a class exercise suggested by Bette Bosma, students read two or three stories from different cultural traditions in which the same theme is developed. If the theme is laziness, the elementary school teacher can introduce The Lazies: Tales of the People of Russia by the Russian-American translator and storyteller Mirra Ginsburg, and ask the students to compare a particular story with a similar tale from a non-European source. By focusing on the similarity, students realize that literature, including oral and written traditions, contains motifs and ideas which are shared by more than one culture. Furthermore, in higher grades, it may suffice to study the profound and pervasive influence of a work such as The Arabian Nights on Western literature to realize that even national literatures are best approached from a multicultural point of view.

Multicultural Education/Curriculum

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