Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Abstract

Essential to continued growth in the field of multicultural education is the documentation of its historical roots and its linkages to the current school reform movement. James Banks demonstrates the ways in which the current multicultural education movement is both connected to and a continuation of earlier movements, both scholarly and activist, designed to promote empowerment, knowledge transformation, liberation, and human freedom in US society. The book's five parts: discuss the types of knowledge, the characteristics of transformative knowledge, the historical roots of multicultural education and its links to transformative teaching; document the historical development of transformative scholarship, surveyed through case studies of individual pioneer scholars and activists in race relations and multicultural education such as Carter G. Woodson, Allison Davis, George I. Sanchez, Franz Boas, Mourning Dove, Ella Deloria, and Robert E. Park; focus on the work of women scholars and activists, and particularly women of colour, who have faced the triple oppressions of race, gender and class; describe the rise and fall of the intergroup education movement and the emergence of research related to prejudice in the 1930s and 1940s; and highlight the school reforms currently needed to promote educational equity and accommodate a culturally diverse and democratic society.