Transcript Multicultural Education: What, Why and How?

THE MULTICULTURAL CURRICULUM:
Children can and will learn important
concepts while incorporating cultural
diversity into daily lessons and the overall
curriculum
A multiculturally-oriented curriculum
•
Enrich courses in the social studies by including multiple perspectives
on American culture and history, reflecting various viewpoints of
different groups of Americans;
•
Use comparisons in describing and analyzing traditions, events, and
institutions to help students know and appreciate similarities and
differences among various ethnic groups;
•
Communicate to students of various ethnic identities that they are
valued members of the school community;
•
Provide opportunities for students to have positive interpersonal
relations with individuals of various ethnic groups;
A multiculturally-oriented curriculum…..
• Reaches beyond the textbook to use community resources
on ethnic diversity;
• Strives to expand students' knowledge of ethnic groups in
American history and contemporary society through reading
programs that expose students to books of fiction, biography,
and history, and to magazine and newspaper articles about
ethnic diversity;
• Stresses values of ethnic diversity and national unity.
Culturally responsive teaching…
•
Acknowledges the legitimacy of the cultural heritages of different
ethnic groups…that affect students’ dispositions, attitudes, and
approaches to learning and as worthy content to be taught in the
formal curriculum;
•
Builds bridges of meaningfulness between home and school
experiences…and lived sociocultural realities;
•
Uses a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to
different learning styles;
•
Encourages students to know and praise their own and each others’
cultural heritages;
•
Incorporates multicultural information, resources, and materials in all
the subjects and skills routinely taught in schools;
•
Has high expectations for all group of students alike.
Key Concepts in
Multicultural Education
What must be considered first?
• Multicultural curricula is organized around concepts/themes
dealing with history, culture, contemporary experiences of
ethnic groups in US life, contributions of ethnic groups to the
mainstream culture, expressions such as immigration,
discrimination, protest and resistance, cultural assimilation
and acculturation, etc.
• Attention must be given to the developmental level of the
students, e.g. in the primary grade curriculum, the focus must
be given to concrete concepts such as examples, similarities
and differences, historical facts and evens and not to
abstract concepts such as “results of constitutionalized
racism on the lives of minorities.”
Types of concepts
•
Curricula in any subject area can profit from multidisciplinary,
multicultural concepts from different disciplines such as history or
math and expressions such Art, music, dance, languages and
literature, etc.
•
Interdisciplinary concepts include:
•
Culture, ethnicity and related concepts: culture, ethnic group, ethnic
diversity, minorities
•
Socialization and related concepts: prejudice, discrimination, racism,
values
•
Intercultural communication and related concepts: intercultural
communication, perception
•
Power and relations and related concepts: power, protest and resistance
•
Migration and immigration
Culture, ethnicity and related concepts
Macrocultural group> microcultural group>ethnic group>ethnic
minority
• Culture: behavioral patterns, symbols, institutions, values and
other human-made components of society; an ethnic group
is a type of cultural group
• Macroculture: US culture
• Microcultures, smaller groups within the macroculture:
• Appalachian culture, Southern culture, Western culture
• gay culture (voluntary group)
• various ethnic groups
• Ethnic group:
• Anglo-Saxon, Italian Americans, Mexican-American
• involuntary microcultural groups with which individuals may or may not
identify
• group has a historic origin, shared heritage and ancestral tradition
• members (may) share orientation, values, behavioral patterns, and often
political and economic interests;
• individuals may be members of many different groups: religious kinship
(association, relationship), economic groups
• Ethnic identification or ethnicity may not be important to highly assimilated
or upper socio-economic class members
• Ethnic minority group:
• People of color--African Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Hispanics
• Distinguished on the basis of religious characteristics: Muslims, Jewish
Americans
• involuntary microcultural groups with a historic origin, heritage and ancestral
tradition; shared orientation, values, behavioral patterns, and often political
and economic interests;
• minority in number, and political and economic power
CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: Study the experiences of ethnic groups in the US from
the point of view of (a) shared identity of peoplehood and ethnic identity,
(b) shared values and symbols that resulted from ethnic institutions created
as a response to discrimination or from their social class position. Study the
ethnic institutions that have resulted in response to discrimination and
segregation.
• Ethnic diversity vs. cultural assimilation (melting pot--true
assimilation)
• The mainstream culture and ethnic minority groups incorporate
concepts from each culture and are transformed as they interact;
• Ethnic individuals may be bicultural, especially members in ethnic
minorities;
• Upper social classes and upwardly mobile member are less ethnic than
lower-class members, i.e., they tend to conform to the dominant
culture’s norms and language;
• Acceptance to upper classes and possibility of upward mobility
requires assimilation to the mainstream culture: speech, behavior,
values
•
Mainstream culture has the economic and socio-political power and
control of institutions
Goal: ethnic diversity and acculturation, not assimilation,
encapsulation.
Schools should help release students from cultural and ethnic
encapsulation and participate of ethnic diversity
• Cultural assimilation:
•
process by which an individual or group acquires the cultural traits of a
different ethnic or cultural group, mainly for social mobility
• culturally assimilated groups, especially color groups, may still be victims of
discrimination;
•
Types:
voluntary –need of upward mobility
involuntary –forced assimilation such native migrants
culture.
(native Americans) or forced immigrants (African Americans)
who were forcedly integrated to the mainstream
• Acculturation:
•
process by which the mainstream culture incorporates components of ethnic minority
cultures: ethnic foods, artifacts
• Cultural encapsulation:
• process by which ethnic minority groups form cultural enclaves;
• Reverse cultural encapsulation: ethnic minority groups, in order to
attain social and economic mobility, are usually forced out of
their ethnic encapsulation—e.g. youths of color tend to devaluate
their ethnic cultures to gain acceptance from peers;
• Mainstream culture groups show strong forms of encapsulation as
they deny cultural values of other groups;
CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: Examine shared values among ethnic groups: values,
sense of identity, common history; examine the different perspectives in the
way a certain value is interpreted by different ethnic groups. Study the
influence of ethnic minority cultures on the mainstream culture; the extent
of assimilation to the mainstream culture of minority ethnic groups.
Intercultural communication and related
concepts
The wider the differences in cultures or microcultures between individuals,
the more ineffective communication is likely to be
Communication often fails across cultures because the message producer
and the receiver have few shared symbols and have been socialized
within environments in which the same symbols are interpreted differently
• Perception:
•
“process by which people select, organize, and interpret sensory stimulation
into a meaningful and coherent picture of the world” (Berelson & Steiner, 1964)
•
Factors that may influence perception:
• level of identification with a group,
• culture, ethnicity, and race are strong factors in The United States, a country
characterized by inequality, high levels of ethnic discrimination and stratification along
racial, social class, and ethnic lines
Power and related concepts
Struggle for power among competing groups (Anglo Saxon Protestants)
has played a considerable role in shaping American history
Almost every decision is made by those in power to enhance, legitimize
and reinforce their power
People in power make socio-political and economic decisions, laws, and
determine which traits and characteristics are necessary for
admittance to society and full participation
Social protest emerges within ethnic communities to protest social
conditions, political policies, and economic practices that attempt
against their integrity as humans
CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: Study about power relationships in American society –
hypothesize about how we can make our nation an open society, one more
consistent with our national ideology. Propose several movements organized by
ethnic groups and study the causes and consequences –Black movement of the
1960’s,Chinese parents in CA fighting equality in education in the 1970’s, etc.
Movement and related concepts
• Migration: movement of natives or citizens within the same
country
• American Indians, Eskimos, Native Hawaiians, Aleuts
• Puerto Ricans are migrants to the mainland; not considered
immigrants as they became citizens with the passage of the
Congressional Jones Acts of 1917.
• Immigration: individuals or groups who have settled in the US
culture from a foreign country; legal, illegal, political asylum,
etc.
CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: Examine the origins and immigration patterns
of an ethnic group in the US; recreate the chronology of immigration
waves to the US; compare and contrast reasons why groups have
immigrated; study the ‘forced’ immigration of African Americans;
investigate the cultural assimilation of European immigrants in
metropolis such as New York Boston, Chicago.
Socialization And Related Concepts:
Attitudes, Beliefs, Values
A person’s beliefs, attitudes and values may be
viewed together as an integrated system and
together they result in shaping a person’s behavior
with respect to the other
Attitude
relatively stable organization of interrelated beliefs that
describe, evaluate, and advocate action with respect to a
person, object or situation
An attitude has three components:
idea or thought,
feeling or emotion
readiness to respond or predisposition to action
Value
beliefs about how one ought or ought not to behave, or
about some end state of existence worth or not worth
attaining
Values are abstract ideals, positive or negative, that
represent a person’s beliefs about ideal modes of conduct
and ideal terminal goals
Belief
opinion, expectation, or judgment that a person accepts
as true
Religion
system of social coherence based on a common group of
beliefs or attitudes concerning an object, person, unseen
being, or system of thought considered to be supernatural,
sacred, divine or highest truth, and the moral codes, practices,
values, institutions, and rituals associated with such belief or
system of thought. It is sometimes used interchangeably with
"faith" or "belief system", but is more socially defined than that
of personal convictions
Socialization And Related Concepts:
Stereotype, prejudice, racism,
discrimination
Stereotype
• mental category based on exaggerated and inaccurate
generalization used to describe all members of a group
(Bennett, 1995);
• erroneous beliefs, either favorable or unfavorable, that are
applied universally and without exception (Bennett, 1995);
•
stereotypes become truths:
• African Americans are violent and sexually promiscuous,
• Mexicans are illegal, hard-workers;
• athletes are dumb and fat people are lazy,;
• Jews are stingy
Discrimination
• differential treatment of individuals considered to belong to
particular groups or social categories (Rose, 1974).
Prejudice
•
set of rigid and unfavorable attitudes toward a particular
group or groups that are formed in disregard of facts
• individualized attitude (behavior);
• leads to discrimination.
Racism
• belief that human groups can be grouped on the basis of their
biological traits; these identifiable groups inherit certain mental,
personality, and cultural characteristics that determine their
behavior;
• extension of an attitude into an action. In a racist society, the
political, economic, and social systems reflect and perpetuate
racism; thus, racism is institutionalized (Gay, 1973);
• related to the idea of race,
• Race: human or biological traits of a group
• practiced when a group has the power to enforce laws,
institutions, and norms based on its beliefs that oppress and
dehumanize another group.
• Prejudice is an individualized attitude while racism is an
institutionalized concept/belief;
Ethnocentrism
• feeling of superiority of a culture over another culture; culture is
defined by our values;
• important to comprehend the complex dimensions of American
racism and the separatist movements that have emerged
within ethnic minority groups.