Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives

by James A. Banks

The challenges of diversity within recent years were manifested by the persistent conflicts between police officers and communities of color in the United States and by the tragic events in France in January 2015.

the United States is becoming increasingly non‐White because the growth in the population of people of color is outpacing the growth of the non‐Hispanic White population.

from the increasing Latino population. There were approximately 54 million Latinos living in the United States in 2013, which was approximately 17 percent of U.S. residents

Students who speak a language other than English at home are the fastest‐growing segment of the U.S. student population, making up approximately 21 percent of the school‐age population

51 percent of students in U.S. public schools were eligible for free or reduced‐priced lunches in 2013, which means that they lived in low‐ income families.

social identity theory

African Americans

The women’s rights movement

People with disabilities,

senior citizens,

gays and le...

practicing educators use the term multicultural education to describe a wide variety of programs and practices related to educational equity, women, ethnic groups, language minorities, low‐income groups, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people, and people with disabilities.

macroculture;

microcultures.

culture

It is easier to identify the core culture within an isolated premodern society,

“all men are created equal,

it was considered radical. A common belief in the 18th century was that human beings were not born with equal rights—that some people had few rights and others, such as kings, had divine rights given by God.

When the nation’s founding fathers expressed this idea, their conception of men was limited to White males who owned property (Foner, 1998). White men without property, White women, and all African Americans and Indians were not included in their notion...

“cycles of American history.”

Individual success is more important than commitment to family, community, and nation‐state.

An individual is expected to achieve success solely by his/her own efforts.

The belief in individual opportunity has proven tenacious in U.S. society. It remains strong in American culture despite the fact that individuals’ chances for upward social, economic, and educational mobility in the United States are highly related to the social‐class, ethnic, gender, and other ascribed groups to which they belong

Americans—particularly those in the mainstream—are highly individualistic in their value orientations and behaviors.

the desire to conquer or exploit the natural environment,

the focus on materialism and consumption, and the belief in the nation’s inherent superiority, which is often referred to as “American exceptionalism.”

“the American dilemma.”

Most African Americans and Latinos who have not experienced high levels of cultural assimilation into the mainstream culture are much more group oriented than are mainstream Americans. Schools in the United States are highly individualistic in their learning and teaching styles, evaluation procedures, and norms. Many students, particularly African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Hawaiian Americans are group oriented

Most African American and Latino students are socialized within microcultures that differ in significant ways from the U.S. core culture. These students often have not had an equal opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills that are measured in mental ability tests. Consequently, a disproportionate number of African American and Latino students are labeled mentally retarded and are placed in classes for slow learners

A group is a collectivity of persons who share an identity, a feeling of unity.

behavior is shaped by gro...

“Such factors as shared religion, nationality, age, sex, marital status, and education have proved to be important determinants o...

each individual belongs to several groups at...

Even though one’s sex is determined primarily by physical characteristics (genitalia, chromosome patterns, etc.), gender is a social construction created and shaped by the society in which individuals and groups function.

Sexual orientation is often a difficult issue for classroom discussion for both teachers and students. However, if done sensitively, it can help empower gay and lesbian students and enable them to experience social equality in the classroom.

Race is a socially determined category that is related to physical characteristics in a complex way

There is a saying in Puerto Rico that “money lightens,” which means that upward social mobility considerably enhances an individual’s opportunity to be classified as White.

The highly disproportionate number of African Americans, Latinos, and particularly males classified as learning disabled by the school indicates the extent to which exceptionality is a social category

some students who are classified as gifted by school districts merely have parents with the knowledge, political skills, and power to force the school to classify their children as gifted, a classification that will provide them with special instruction and educational enrichment

Content integration deals with the extent to which teachers use examples and content from a variety of cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts, principles, generalizations, and theories in their subject area or discipline.

The knowledge construction process relates to the extent to which teachers help students to understand, investigate, and determine how the implicit cultural assumptions, frames of reference, perspectives, and biases within a discipline influence the ways in which knowledge is constructed within it

the Native American cultures that had existed in the Americas for about 40,000 years before the Europeans arrived.

Prejudice reduction describes lessons and activities teachers use to help students develop positive attitudes toward different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups.

An equity pedagogy exists when teachers modify their teaching in ways that will facilitate the academic achievement of students from diverse racial, cultural, gender, and social‐class groups.

a school culture and organization that promote gender, racial, and social‐class equity.

The manifest curriculum consists of such factors as guides, textbooks, bulletin boards, and lesson plans.

The latent curriculum has been defined as the one that no teacher explicitly teaches but that all students learn.

transmission approach,

many teachers automatically link culture to ethnic or racial identity and fail to understand that “every individual participates in many cultures” that are not necessarily tied to ethnic or racial group membership

the idea of culture was associated with the late 19th‐ and early 20th‐century ideas about the progression of evolutionary stages that ranked racial groups in terms of levels of intelligence or development. In this Eurocentric view, there were civilized and primitive people. The civilized were those who had developed higher levels of culture, while the primitives had either little or no culture.