Multicultural Curriculum Research Articles

Teacher training and multiculturalism in a transitional society: the case of the Slovak Republic

The authors explore a number of issues surrounding multicultural education in “societies in transition”, emerging from their experiences during a TEMPUS project that took place in the Slovak Republic. The TEMPUS project entailed the development of a multicultural education curriculum for teacher trainers, as a response to the conditions for entry into the European Union. The paper provides background information on the position of ethnic minorities in Slovakia, in particular the Hungarian and Roma population and the development of policies, especially in education, for combating racism. In examining the challenges to educators in developing a more open system than the command education of the recent past, issues such as the predominance of traditional pedagogies, multiculturalism and antiracism, the problems of “other isms” and of giving voice to minorities are considered.

Clinicians Convene in Anaheim for Schools 2003 Conference

Clinicians Convene in Anaheim for Schools 2003 Conference

Intuition. A critical way of knowing in a multicultural nursing curriculum.

For nurse educators to provide a multiculturally sensitive curriculum for a diverse student population, there needs to be recognition and inclusion of a wide variety of ways of knowing, cultural beliefs, and values. Nurse educators, however, continue to teach from a Western orientation that emphasizes scientific, rational, linear ways of thinking and knowing. Although intuition is a valid and valued way of knowing in nursing practice, it is rarely included in the nursing curricula. This article suggests pedagogical strategies to inculcate intuition as a valued means of knowing in the multicultural curriculum.

Has the Dream Stalled?

Gerald J. Baldasty The creation of a truly multicultural curriculum and environment is stalled in journalism and mass communication education today. Despite substantive efforts by many, multiculturalism hasn't really become central to how we define our programs or teach our students. We talk about multiculturalism a good deal but we do not pursue it with great ardor. Multiculturalism is a broad term, encompassing issues of ethnicity, race, and gender. In this essay, I'll concentrate primarily on race because it illustrates best the issues we've been facing and dodging for the past decade. I base my views on observations from my own university and department and from serving over the past dozen years on accreditation site teams and for seven years on the Accrediting Committee for the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. To be fair, there really has been some progress in this area. Faculty are more racially diverse than a decade ago, race is discussed in courses far more than it once was, and the students in our classes often reflect the racial mosaic of American life. There are some excellent texts and research monographs dealing with media and race; authors confront difficult issues and provide the foundation for integrating diversity issues into the curriculum. Most of this is happening at the margins of journalism and mass communication education, however; it really has not become central to who we are or what we do. The problems are several: * First, white men haven't made diversity a priority; they're content to cede that issue to their female and minority colleagues. While visiting schools on accreditation reviews, I have been struck by the fact that the lead diversity advocate among the faculty is usually a person of color, or occasionally a white woman. I understand the reticence white faculty may have; when I created my department's race and gender course nearly nine years ago, I worried that - as a white male I did not know enough about race to teach a course about it and that I would make horrible mistakes. I didn't know enough; I made mistakes. But none of it was terrible and students were far easier on me than I was. I gained knowledge and confidence with time. * We've ghettoized diversity issues into courses about race and gender. Rather than truly diversifying courses throughout the curriculum, we've often relegated discussions of race to one or two courses, such as an elective class on gender, race and media. This allows both faculty and students to avoid race in virtually all of their classes. This is a serious problem, particularly in skills courses where faculty have an opportunity to help students gain knowledge and confidence about race that will make them sensitive and successful media professionals. One instructor at an accredited journalism program told me not long ago that race wasn't relevant to a reporting class. His class was just about gathering and reporting facts; other kinds of classes should deal with race. Race is very much a part of reporting, as media critics have persuasively demonstrated for more than thirty years. * When race is dealt with, it's usually added to courses rather than integrated broadly throughout the curriculum. When we deal with race outside of the stand-alone gender and race course, we deal with it in an additive fashion. In a course about communication history, for instance, we'll acid a unit on the press. In a writing course, we'll add a unit on covering minority populations. These units aren't integrated into classes; rather they are just tacked on. Although a unit on the in a media history course is better than nothing at all on the subject, that course would be much better if it addressed issues of difference, power, social control and privilege when dealing with all media. Merely adding a unit, for instance, leaves the black press on the margins (as just an alternative to the mainstream media) and also serves to obscure the fact that the mainstream media are closely tied to white culture. …

Culturally responsive teaching in special education for ethnically diverse students: Setting the stage

Two major premises are developed in this discussion. One is that many students of color are disproportionately assigned to special education because educators lack knowledge about or appreciation for their cultural values and socialization, and how these affect learning behaviors. The other premise is that the educational quality of students of color in both special and regular education can be improved significantly by using instructional programs and practices that reflect their cultural heritages, experiences, and perspectives. Several components of this ''culturally responsive teaching'' are explained, along with some research findings about its effects on student achievement. These include critical cultural consciousness of teachers; culturally pluralistic classroom climates; diverse communities of learners; and multicultural curriculum and instruction. The author concludes that without culturally responsive teaching education can never be the best it should be for students who are not part of the majority and mainstream of schools and society.

Designing Multicultural Lesson Plans

The study examined contents, goals, and teaching approaches of multicultural lessons developed by pre-service teachers in a Midwest university. The contents of pre-service teachers' lesson plans included a broad range of multicultural topics such as Native American culture, African American culture, ethnic music, diversity (sameness and difference), and Internet search of cultural information. Regarding multicultural education goals, most lessons (99%) aimed to strengthen cultural consciousness. A large proportion of lessons (96%) emphasized the development of multiple historical perspectives. About 73% of lessons were planned to strengthen intercultural competence. Only small amount of lessons explicitly were related to the goal of combating racism, sexism, and all forms of prejudice (6%) or the goal of building social action skills (6%). To increase awareness of the state of the planet and global dynamics was the least considered goal (3%). In regard to teaching approaches, the "contribution" approach was extensively used (51%). The "additive" approach was also used frequently (49%). The transformation approach was embedded in some lessons (19%), and only a small amount of lessons applied the social action approach (6%). The final section discusses three areas of suggestions for implementing multicultural curriculum with professional sincerity.

Effective Multicultural Curriculum Transformation Across Disciplines

Resistance to multicultural curriculum transformation has long been assumed to be a function solely of faculty racism, sexism, classism, and so forth, especially in the fields of "advanced" mathematics and "hard" sciences. Although this may account for a percentage of that resistance, it is a small percentage. In fact, most faculty are interested in multiculturally transforming their curriculum. The problem is that few know how to go about doing it. Until recently, few, if any, doctoral programs included coursework on how to teach one's discipline, much less how to teach it from a multicultural perspective. Faculty need opportunities to learn how to develop multiculturally oriented curricula content, pedagogical approaches, and methods of evaluating student learning and teaching effectiveness. Faculty also need opportunities to learn how to build positive relationships with increasingly diverse bodies of students, and how to create more supportive educational environments for that interaction to occur. This article provides faculty with an overview of effective approaches to multicultural curriculum transformation, applicable across disciplines vis-á-vis content, pedagogy, evaluation, relationship building, and environment creation.

Action Research and Practical Inquiry: Multicultural Content Integration in Gifted Education: Lessons from the Field

This article describes the attempt of 2 staff-development practitioners to understand—through practical inquiry—elementary and secondary teachers' multicultural goals and implementation experiences with gifted students in a diverse district. An informal survey of teachers participating in an in-service course on gifted education suggested that many of these teachers had goals and experiences related to multicultural curricula for gifted children. Through the survey, teachers also identified obstacles they encountered in implementing multicultural activities and benefits they perceived. Teachers' stories describing their practice were gathered through observations, written reports, and videotapes. Findings offer several implications for guiding teachers' implementation of content related to diversity.

Cultural sensitivity training in Canadian medical schools.

The authors describe the results of a survey they carried out in 2000 to determine the status of cultural sensitivity training in 16 Canadian medical schools using structured telephone interviews of associate and assistant deans or curriculum directors and curriculum coordinators. Their goal was to obtain a descriptive analysis of school-specific objectives, curriculum content, methods, and evaluation formats. The survey was prompted by the growing concern that in culturally diverse societies, medical education has failed to keep pace with the changing composition of the patient population. Only one of the eight schools that integrated cultural sensitivity within their objectives made explicit mention of the topic in its clerkship evaluation form. While seven of the 16 schools did not have any statement on cultural sensitivity in their curricular objectives, they integrated cultural sensitivity in their curricula using various educational methods, with PBL cases, lectures, and small-group discussions being the commonest formats. These educational methods were primarily offered to students in their first and second years. Student participation was required, but program lengths ranged from two to 40 hours. Additional findings for each school are presented. The authors conclude that while progress has been made, lack of adequate resources and a number of obstacles to inclusion of multicultural health content in curricula appear to remain ongoing problems. Further investment in faculty development and administrative staff support for a multicultural curriculum are needed, as is more research on effective curricular components.

Re-naming, re-imagining America: multicultural curriculum as classification struggle

This article analyses conflict over multicultural education in the United States as an example of what Pierre Bourdieu terms ‘classification struggle’. By classification struggles, the author means struggles over those symbolic representations of social divisions that help to construct a hierarchical social order. In particular, following Bourdieu, efforts that ‘aim at retrospectively reconstructing a past fitted to the needs of the present’ are emphasised. Consequently, the author focuses particularly on contests over the reconstruction of United States history. To begin, he asks what is at stake in how a nation and its past are symbolically constructed. He then identifies specific ways in which multiculturalism engages in classification struggle and consider the nature of resistance to those efforts. Next, he illustrates limitations in multiculturalism's success in effecting changes in symbolic classification. Finally, he concludes by suggesting the implications of the analysis for answering the question ‘In what sense, can a curriculum be imagined as a national curriculum?’

Curricular Modifications, Family Outreach, and a Mentoring Program: Impacts on Achievement and Gifted Identification in High-Risk Primary Students

Project Support to Affirm Rising Talent (START) was a collaborative research effort between a university and a large urban school district. While the project had multiple purposes, the focus of this article is to report the efficacy of specific interventions (mentoring, parental involvement, and multicultural curricula) on academic achievement of primary grade students from low-socioeconomic environments who participated in the project. Quantitative results suggest that the interventions had no statistically significant effect on student achievement in any grade. However, by the end of the project, students, typically identified as at-risk, were on grade level.

Multicultural Curriculum and the Web: Transformation and Integration

(2001). Multicultural Curriculum and the Web: Transformation and Integration. Multicultural Perspectives: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 43-50.

The Case of the Failed Diversity Rule: A Multiple Streams Analysis

In 1988 Minnesota passed a Multicultural and Gender Fair Curriculum Rule ("diversity" rule) that held districts accountable through submitting a local inclusive education plan to the state department of education. Compliance was slow; thus, between 1991–1997 the State Board of Education added more "teeth" to the rule. When the revised diversity rule entered the policy arena, it precipitated a contentious battle about multicultural curriculum. Using a multiple streams framework ( Kingdon, 1995 ) and a case study methodology, we sought to understand the events and to test the explanatory power of the framework. Results show that the diversity rule became pitted against a less controversial, resource-rich graduation standards approach in the solution stream. Ultimately, a vitriolic commentary in the Minneapolis Star Tribune resulted in power politics primarily from the governor. The rule was tabled, and in the fallout from the conflict, the legislature eliminated the State Board of Education as part of an omnibus education bill. The framework was helpful in understanding the events of the case but less explanatory about the role of media and power and in determining the "window of opportunity." The outcome of the case raises questions about progress toward multicultural curriculum and the ability to write nonpartisan education policy in an increasingly politicized policymaking environment.

Resisting Corporate Multiculturalism: Mapping Faculty Initiatives and Institutional-Student Harassment in the Classroom

This paper argues that calls for multicultural curricula in universities across the US can be met with strategic curricular interventions that radically confront gendered racisms across regional, national, and international racial formations. Faculty who risk making such interventions should plan for student and institutional resistances. Intersecting consumer and corporate interests desire universities to be socially nonconflictual and economical places of leisure and entertainment, not sites of critical intervention. Accordingly, we theorize how and why faculty committed to oppositional multiculturalism might be cast as transgressive. In so doing, we pay particular attention to how identity politics are quadrangulated through embodiment, performance, time, and place. We additionally discuss ways for systematically working against the grain of gendered racisms and for supporting those who are teaching multiculturalism (critically) or seen to embody it. Working against the grain is particularly important as we enter the 21st century, given the increasing diversification of faculty and student bodies in universities across the US and the attendant risks “diverse” persons take, risks generally not experienced or acknowledged by White Americans.

Honouring social work principles - exploring the connections between anti-racist social work and African-centred worldviews

Social work education has had a chequered history in its attempts to address racism within the profession. The demise of anti-racist social work over the past decade raises important questions concerning its place and future within social work education. This paper re-examines the contours of anti-racist social work to explore the connections between anti-racist social work and African-centred worldviews. The author argues that sources of oppression are not confined to social work institutions and its operations, but also relate to the nature of social work knowledge. The existing parameters of anti-racist social work do not adequately challenge hegemony within social work knowledge itself. Thereby, this incongruity serves to support a hidden source of cultural oppression by negating the legitimacy and validation of alternative worldviews. The inclusion of alternative worldviews enables social work to maximise its ability to actualise humanitarian goals to offer a truly multi-cultural and anti-oppressive curriculum. Moreover, the validation of non-hegemonic ways of knowing ensures the profession's participation in its commitment to equality and social justice.

A framework for infusing multicultural curriculum into gifted education

Gifted education, like all of education, faces critical issues as the nation becomes increasingly diverse. School districts everywhere are challenged to more effectively meet the needs of their gifted and diverse student population, while maintaining high standards. This dilemma epitomizes the ongoing debate between excellence and equity. In particular, our field struggles with finding solutions to the persistent and pervasive under‐representation of minority students in gifted education (Ford, 1996, 1998). And once these students are recruited (i.e., identified and placed), schools are faced with a new set of questions; How do we serve gifted minority students? What are their needs? What are their interests?

Canons, Contexts, and Pedagogy: The Place of World Literature

World Uterature has occupied an ambiguous, contradictory, or perhaps merely flexible position in the decades-long controversies over canon and curriculum. Certainly there is no single canon literature, nor is there likely to be one. As Brandt Corstius has shown in studying canons around the world, different countries always give special weight to their own or famuiar traditions (6). In the American curriculum, literature is both mainstream and marginal: on the one hand, it is part of a firmly situated dominant tradition, its window on the world; on the other, it is a sign ofdefinitive difference from that tradition. CoUege surveys ofWestern literature and Western civilization have flourished since the time ofWorld War I, when they were offered as an introduction to other cultures that also strengthened the common anchor in Western tradition; they were not introductions to global literature (LawaU 8). Modern courses, responding to the discrepancy between the image ofworld and a syUabus Umited to Western tradition, have either broadened their horizons toward global coverage or, retaining their original scope, have reserved the term world Uterature for a second semester that conveys the rest of the to students emerging from the Western survey. In either framework, competing possibilities remain; the same canonical books may be interpreted as world- class, illustrating universal values and common humanity, or as proving, through increased attention to context, an otherness that chaUenges universalist assumptions. Still another academic format—one that focuses on individual and cultural differences, and has an immediate pragmatic aim— presents a range of diverse (usually modern) selections that ulustrate ethnic, social, gender, and class variations. Such courses, also titled world Uterature and situated as part ofthe new multicultural curriculum, are especially popular in modern high schools aware ofthe need to facilitate communication inside a diverse audience (Massachusetts Department ofEducation 76-78). The emphasis on communication through Uterature, rather than on the commemorative study of canonical works, recalls J. W. Goethe's exchange-oriented definition of Uterature. In 1827, the German author coined the term world Uterature to describe a process ofreading across national boundaries that was cultural as much as it was literary. Reading a French review ofhis own work, he was struck by the possibility of seeing one's own image mirrored in another cultural vision and subtly transformed by different habits of mind. Goethe subsequently proposedthat contemporary writers—the Uving, striving men ofletters —write with a transnational audience in mind, read each other's work

AMERICAN RACISM: THE NULL CURRICULUM IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Religious educators, in neglecting to account for race in their theories, have ignored the historical legacy of institutional racism. In fact, religious education has demonstrated an inadequate response to race and racism throughout its history. As evidenced by slavery and immigration history in the United States, race must be seen as a sociohistorical and legal construction. Its influence goes beyond the assimilationist ideology taught in early Methodist curricula. The article suggests that the Bible can be a rich multicultural curriculum resource because of its positive treatment of Africans.

Beyond the Traditional in Art: Facing a Pluralistic Society

content of this book is based on the United States Society through (USSEA) Symposium held in Columbus, Ohio in 1991. According to Peter Smith (1999), some ways the symposium can be seen as a milestone event that showed that education had moved beyond simplistic arguments about self-expression versus discipline-centered education and had begun to realize that educators must function within social and cultural (p. 22). layout of the book suggests that the editor was concerned about the accuracy of the Symposium's content as an historical document. It is divided into five parts: overview of the symposium, general session addresses, specific session papers, evaluation, and one appendix containing the original announcement of the Symposium. Once the reader gets past the overview and some of the general session papers that are transcriptions by note takers, the meaning and purpose of this anthology begins to unfold and the social and cultural realities that affect the study of education become apparent. Included in the back of the book are participant evaluations and impressions of both content and symposium activities and Saunders's reflections as symposium facilitator. Like all handwritten evaluations, a spread of comments range from too bad there was no art (p. 150) to excellent presentations and speakers (p. 151). This part of the book gives the reader a feeling of being present at the Symposium and adds clarity to the chapters. At the end of most chapters, the authors present afterthoughts that contain additional comments and up-dates. reader can experience both the theoretical approach of the first writings and a very practical, realistic and expectant urging in the later chapters that the concepts be put to use for the betterment of humankind. In many instances, time appears to have strengthened the author's resolve to take a position on a topic. This book has several practical chapters that are focused on teacher preparation training; the content of multicultural materials; the political implications of multicultural education, feminism, gender, and age issues; and the importance of child exchanges. Numerous authors and symposium participants offer information useful to educators. Several chapters are notable in directing the reader to think about the implications of the content. They are: Art and Politics in a Chippewa Community: A Beyond the Traditional in Art: Facing a Pluralistic Society Saunders, R. J. (Ed.). (1998). Reston, VA: National Association. 160 pages. (ISBN 1-890160-07-5). Personal Narrative by Wait Bresette; Clarifying Multicultural Terminology by Patsy R. Dunmire, Heinz Klein, and Frances Yates; Strategies for Deciding Which Cultures to Include in a Multicultural Curriculum by Elizabeth Delacruz, Laura Magee, and Teresa Rozewski; and, The Politics of Multicultural Education by Georgia Collins, David B. Pankratz, Renee Sandell, and Peter Smith. Three chapters will be discussed in detail in this review. Ecological Imperative I consider the content of The Ecological Imperative, presented by Suzi Gablik, to be a foundation of one of society's struggles, that of an impending technological and ecological confrontation of major proportions. Gablik argues this passionately: It is increasingly understood that ecological problems are created, not only by the industrial system, but by our attitudes to nature or lack of respect for it. Where other civilizations created Altamira and Stonehenge, ours has produced the shopping mall and the cooling tank. Our culture does not see the earth as a source of spiritual renewal but as a stockpile of raw materials to be exploited and consumed. ...We are bred from birth to be consumers; as a culture, we have failed to generate a vision of the earth that is life enhancing, and without a living cosmology enabling us to hold the sacredness of life in mind, we devastate the land in greed. …

Teaching Values of Tolerance and Peace through a Holistic Multicultural Curriculum

Teaching Values of Tolerance and Peace through a Holistic Multicultural Curriculum