Multiculturalism and Anti-Racist Curriculum

Multicultural and Anti-Racist Curriculum


Agenda• Introduction, Group Activity, Discussion Questions• Mind Map, Weak Multiculturalism, Critical Multiculturalism • Summary, Conclusion, Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions1. How do you think multiculturalism (including race, gender, sexuality,

class) is best integrated into the classroom?2. What are the roles played by different institutions to engage in critical

multiculturalism? 3. What are some methods to shift from weak multiculturalism to critical

multiculturalism?


Mind Map

Weak

MulticulturalismCritical

Multiculturalism Other

• Binary (Us vs. Other)• Fixed Culture • Subtle Racism• Liberal

Multiculturalismo “Diversity”o “Tolerance”o “Respect”

• In Schools (Gay)o Foodo Danceo Holiday

• Transformative• Revolutionary

(Giroux)• Socio-Political• Decolonizing (Asher)• Empowering • Knowledge

Production• Important For ALL• Social Justice• Self-Reflexivity

• Anti-Racist Curriculum

• Critical Pedagogy• Black Curriculum

Theory

The importance of multicultural education – Geneva Gay

• Geneva Gay’s article focuses on students of color within class/school settings• Immigration have implications for developing instructional programs• Two Parts:1) Conceptions of multicultural education

• Multicultural education includes, “policy, learning climate, instructional delivery, leadership and evaluation” (Gay, 31)

• Steps to integrate multicultural curriculumo Developing social justice concernso Including ethnic groups and giving examples on a rotating basis o Content that intersects with subject specific curriculum

2) Multiculturalism and Curriculum Development • Reality/Representation – all cultural groups should be represented • Relevance – use teaching techniques that are culturally responsive

Overview


``Classroom teachers and educators must provide students from all ethnic groups with the education they deserve`` (Gay, 31)


``Multicultural education is integral to improving the academic success of students of color…”

(Gay, 30)


Comparison to Main Articles• Geneva Gay• Nina Asher• Fixating on the other vs. Self-reflexivity

Gay AsherFixating on the Other vs. Self-reflexivity

Gay’s tone: “Us” vs. “Other”?

“These unfamiliar groups, cultures, traditions, and languages can produce anxieties, hostilities, prejudices, and racist behaviors among those who do not understand the newcomers or who perceive them as threats to their safety and security” (Gay, 315)

“It is such a culture of fixating on the other or elsewhere in lieu of self-interrogation and the right here that shapes a multicultural practice that is limited to defining “diverse others.” In its other-focusedness, then, such a multiculturalism is actually self(ishly)- centered.” (Cited: Pinar) (Asher, 71)



Gay Sleeter & McLarenCurriculum Development vs. Critical Multicultural Education

Gay`s focus: curriculum development

“School curriculums need to include equitable representations of diversity” (Gay, 318)

“Making explicit connections between multicultural education and subject- and skill-based curriculum and instruction is imperative” (Gay, 317)

“We need to struggle towards a critical multiculturalism which can speak to the universal values of freedom and justice without such values becoming totalizing and which permit particular groups to articulate their own struggles” (Sleeter & McLaren, 25)



Gay Dei & DoyleThe Role of Educators

Teachers’ roles: classroom instruction

“Educators should create relevance by teaching content about the cultures and contributions of ethnic groups, and use culturally responsive teaching techniques to engage different ethnic learning styles” (Gay, 319)

“Educators must support local communities” (Dei, 153)

“Educators apply their agency in classrooms” (Dei, 165)

“Educators to transform and transcend the status quo” (Dei, 178)


Comparison to Class Themes

Gay GrumetSelf-Reflexivity

• Gay overlooks praxis

• Critical questions o What knowledge and who

decides?o How is identity generated?o What lens are we viewing the

world through?

• “Our identities are perpetuated in the epistemologies and social relations of schooling” (Grumet, 14)

• “What we know becomes incorporated into our identities. It is connected to what we can do and who we are” (Grumet, 14)



Gay WalshawPower and Politics

• In her talks about multicultural infused curriculum, Gay does not discuss issues of power and the politicization of education

• She overlooks the work of Freire (theory that liberates from oppression), Dewey (reconstructing society), Apple and Giroux (who decides what is worthwhile)

"In the classrooms strands of power entangle everyone governing, regulating, and discipline teachers as well as students. Power does its work through the classroom's traditions; although it's material, discursive, and technological forms; through its mathematical enactments; and through its discourses that relate to categories of class, gender, ethnicity, and other social determinations" (Walshaw, 78)



Gay SonuSocial Justice vs. Neoliberalism

• Using multicultural curriculum integration will shift education to a level of “significance, complexity, and connectedness” (Gay, 32)

• How can she be sure without looking at political ideologies

"Teachers and students play an intricate dance with ideology” (Sonu, 241)

Hidden transcripts are critical sites of agency

Destiny has thrown the Negro and the Filopino under the tutelage of America – Roland Sintos Coloma

• Roland Coloma’s article draws on the history of education in the Philippines under U.S. rule in early 1900s

• Filipinos are represented as “wild devil children” who need White guidance and supervision

• Analyzes discourse about the colonized as culturally, intellectually and physically underdeveloped and inferior

• Looks at how those in power racialize and colonize others, permanently shapes the type of education provided to them

• A culture of dependency was created• The use of political cartoons are “small yet influential spaces that convey

racial images to promote imperialist justifications for conquest and governance” (Coloma, 500)

Overview


School Begins (Puck, 1899)“Now, children, you’ve got to learn these lessons whether you want to or not! But just take a look at the class

ahead of you, and remember that in a little while, you will be as glad to be here as they are!”


“The pupils get to know that by honest labor, no matter how insignificant it may be, one may get a profitable gain; they learn the dignity of labor; their hands are

trained to work in harmony with their brains; and they get to know how to turn materials that otherwise

would be useless into useful and marketable articles” (Coloma, 512)


Comparison to Main ArticlesThe colonial pedagogy and racialization as experienced by Filipino/as provides a basis

for comparison with the contents of the required readings though the lenses of identity construction, historical comparison, and racialized asymmetrical relationships

to power

Coloma Asher

Identity Construction: Depiction of and dialogue around the “Other”“…the figure of the Filipino/as as primitive, atavistic savages provided and bolstered White supremacist and paternalistic rationalities that underpinned U.S colonial educational policy and curriculum in the Philippines” (Coloma, 496)

“Such a multiculturalism [that engages the intersecting tensions of race, culture, gender, and sexuality in critical, dialogical, and self-reflexive ways] breaks silences; offers ways of rethinking the oppressive binaries of self and other, queer and straight, here and there; and can open up spaces for the emergence of new hybrid identities and cultures” (Asher, 71)


Comparison to Main ArticlesThe The colonial pedagogy and racialization as experienced by Filipino/as provides a

basis for comparison with the contents of the required readings though the lenses of identity construction, historical comparison, and racialized asymmetrical

relationships to power

Coloma Sleeter & McLarenHistorical Comparison: White supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal legacy in America

and the Philippines“the transnational elaboration and implementation of the curriculum for African Americans toward Filipino/as produced a strikingly similar result: the production of a two-tiered educational program for different segments and different destinies” (Coloma, 514)“The push for a manual-industrial curriculum…ultimately belied a seemingly benevolent yet deeply insidious agenda to keep [racialized and colonized communities] at the mercy of those who held the reigns of power” (Coloma, 511)

“A proliferation of political and economic disparities among groups gave rise to multicultural education and critical pedagogy during the late 1960’s” (Sleeter & McLaren, 6)“The motor force of capitalist domination rests on the tacit collusion of the oppressed in their own lived subordination; oppressed and oppressors alike are conditioned to accept the current economic and racial tensions as inevitable“ (Ibid, 9)


Comparison to Main ArticlesThe colonial pedagogy and racialization as experienced by Filipino/as provides a basis

for comparison with the contents of the required readings though the lenses of identity construction, historical comparison, and racialized asymmetrical

relationships to power

Coloma Dei

Racialized Asymmetrical Relationships to Power: Contemporary and historical; black, white, and brown.

“African Americans who came to the Philippines, for the most part, expressed racial sympathy toward and solidarity with Filipino/as” (Coloma, 503)“African Americans played an important yet unacknowledged part in ‘modernizing’ a ‘crude’ Philippines, inevitably position African Americans alongside White officials and educators in their collective mission as Americans to civilize and educate the colonized” (Coloma, 504)

“…the long-endured systemic marginalization of minoritized peoples has constituted the two most powerful poisons crippling our school systems today, namely those of race and poverty” (Dei, 152)“Cultural difference is conceptualized as an exoticized, fixed entity, devoid of heterogeneity, history, agency, and power, and one that is tacked on to the white norm. The ‘multicultural’ in this sense becomes a code for the non-white and results in ghettoization.” (Dei, 161)



Coloma Freire

“The White Man’s Burden” & “Banking” concept of education“…called upon the colonizers to take responsibility for the supervision and advancement of the colonized toward modernity and civilization.” (Coloma, 496)

“In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing…, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression,” (Freire, 1)



Coloma Bobbitt

CurriculumThe U.S. policy for colonial education =“benevolent assimilation” (Coloma, 506) “colonized to attain developmental maturity in the Western teleology of civilization” (Coloma, 501)

“Bureau’s courses for teachers shifted to manual-industrial training as the curricular focal point.” (Coloma, 509)“marginalized the development of high-status professionals who would potentially contest the debilitating political, economic, and scientific conditions of the empire” (Coloma, 511)

“Human life, however, varied, consists in the performance of specific activities. Education that prepares for life is one that prepares definitely and adequately for these specific activities. However numerous and diverse they may be for any social class, they can be discovered” (Bobbitt, 42)

“The curriculum may {refer to} the entire range of experiences, both undirected and directed, concerned in unfolding the abilities of the individual” (Bobbitt, 43)“… arrived at through one’s general experiences without taking thought as to the training” (Bobbitt, 44)



Coloma Leonardo

“Approaching whiteness”“African Americans were sympathetic toward Filipino/as in their shared racial oppression, but at times asserted their modernity and superiority as Americans in their self-assessment, inevitably reinforcing White hegemonic depictions of Filipino/as as primitive, atavistic savages” (Coloma, 514)

Whiteness “must accommodate subjects previously marked as Other in order to preserve its group power. In other words, for it to remain dominant, whiteness has to seduce allies, convince them of the advantages of such an alliance, and sometimes be able to forsake immediate advantages for long-term goals of domination” (Leonardo, 41)


Discussion Questions1. How do you think multiculturalism (including race, gender, sexuality, class) is

best integrated into the classroom?2. What are the roles played by different institutions to engage in critical

multiculturalism? 3. What are some methods to shift from weak multiculturalism to critical

multiculturalism?

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Multiculturalism and Anti-Racist Curriculum

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