Diversity, Transformative Knowledge, and Civic Education

Selected Essays

James A. Banks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000039238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

WINNER 2021 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

The essays collected in this book, by James A. Banks, a foundational figure in the field of multicultural education, illuminate the interconnection between the author's work on knowledge construction and civic education. In pieces both poignant and personal, Banks shares some of his most groundbreaking and innovative work. Diversity, Transformative Knowledge, and Civic Education aims to unpack the "citizenship-education dilemma, " whereby education programs strive to teach students democratic ideals and values within social, economic, political, and educational contexts that contradict justice, equality, and human rights. For change to take place, students need to internalize democratic values, by directly experiencing them in transformative classrooms and schools that are envisioned and described in this book.

Drawn from Banks' formidable canon, this collection highlights the conceptual, curricular, and pedagogical issues related to this dilemma, and signals a fundamental shift toward transformative citizenship education. Students, scholars and educators in the fields of multicultural education, civic education, social studies education, comparative education, and the foundations of education will find this book to be a valuable resource for discussion and discovery.

PART 1

Race, Knowledge Construction, and Transformative Curriculum Reform

Introduction

I grew up on a cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta near the town of Marianna, Arkansas, which is about 60 miles from Memphis, Tennessee. Marianna, like other towns and cities throughout the South, was tightly segregated during the 1950s and 1960s when I came of age. One of my most enduring and bitter memories is of visiting the zoo in Memphis once a year. One of the most anticipated days of the year was when a group of students and teachers from our rural school in Aubrey, Arkansas, took a school field trip to the Memphis zoo. I vividly remember that the trip had to be made on a Thursday because Thursday was “Black day” at the Memphis zoo. This is a painful memory that is evoked each time I think of or visit Memphis, yet I also remember Memphis as the first real city I ever visited and experienced. Consequently, my memories of Memphis are mixed—both nostalgic and hurtful.

Segregation, racism, and White hegemony were institutionalized in Marianna as well as in the other states that made up the Confederacy. A statue of Robert E. Lee was in the center of the town and dominated the landscape. There was a Black movie theatre and a White one. Blacks had to enter the White theatre through an upstairs entrance and view movies in the room in which the movie projector was housed. The clicking sound of the projector made it difficult to hear the actors in the movie. First-run and newly released movies were shown only in the White theatre. A similar situation existed in Black schools, which used old textbooks that had been abandoned by the White schools. Although I was an avid reader, Blacks could not use the public library, for which our taxes helped to support. Racial segregation was a salient part of every aspect of my community, including water fountains, public schools, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, cemeteries, restaurants, and churches. Martin Luther King, Jr., described Sunday morning as the most segregated time and day in the South.

As an elementary school student I often wondered, silently, what caused the inequalities that were salient within my community and school. I wondered, for example, why I had to walk more than five miles to and from school each day while the White students took a bus to school—which often passed us while we were walking to school each morning and splashed mud on us. One of my most powerful memories of school is the images of the happy and loyal slaves in my social studies textbooks. I also remember that there were only three other Blacks in our textbooks: Booker T. Washington, the educator, George Washington Carver, the scientist, and Marian Anderson, the contralto. I wondered why the slaves were pictured as happy in my textbooks and whether there were other Blacks than the three that were depicted who deserved to be in our textbooks. I was especially puzzled about why the slaves in our social studies textbooks were depicted as happy. The Blacks in my community were not happy about the racism and discrimination that we experienced, which made me wonder how the slaves could have been happy.

Knowledge Construction and My Epistemological Journey

The questions that I began to ask as a child in my tightly segregated community and school have led to a lifetime of questioning, research, and exploration first into African American history, then in ethnic studies, multicultural education, global education, citizenship education, and finally to the ways in which knowledge construction and civic education are interrelated in the United States and in other nations. It was not until I was in graduate school at Michigan State that I learned that the historian who created the image of the happy slaves was Ulrich B. Phillips, who was a descendant of Georgia slave owners. His book, American Negro Slavery, published in 1918, described a benign view of slavery that was not seriously challenged by mainstream White historians until the 1950s. However, Phillips’ views of slavery were seriously challenged by African American historians such as W. E. B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson when they were first published (Meier & Rudwick, 1986; Morris, 2015).

My experience growing up in the segregated South and learning about the ways in which White historians outside the African American community had constructed images of Blacks that were institutionalized within the schools and the society writ large initiated an epistemological journey that resulted in my focusing much of my life’s work on uncovering and describing the ways in which the autobiographical journeys of historians and social scientists influence the knowledge they create and how the construction of knowledge is influenced by factors such as race, class, and gender. Feminist scholars call this phenomenon positionality (Tetreault, 1993). I examined the image of African Americans in social studies textbooks in my doctoral dissertation at Michigan State University (Banks, 1969).

Because I had been a fifth-grade teacher and have a lifelong interest in improving teaching in the schools, I have devoted much of my career to research and writing about the implications of knowledge construction for social studies teaching, especially for teaching content about African Americans and other groups of color (Banks, 1970, 2009). A major implication of the way knowledge is constructed for citizenship education is to teach students to identify and describe all types of knowledge, how to construct knowledge themselves, and how to understand the strengths and limitations of the knowledge they encounter in school, in the civic community, and in society writ large.

During the half century of my career, my research and writing have focused on many different and complex aspects of multicultural education and diversity. A book published in 2006 contains a selection of my writings on the comprehensive issues in multicultural education (Banks, 2006). The purpose of this collection is to bring together some of the most influential articles and book chapters that I have written on knowledge construction and civic education, including civic education within a global context.

I had originally intended for this book to focus exclusively on my writings on diversity and civic education. However, as I began to review possible publications to include in this book I realized that my work on knowledge construction and civic education were so tightly connected and interrelated that they could not be logically separated. For example, readers need to understand how I define and conceptualize transformative knowledge in order to comprehend my notion of transformative civic education. Consequently, Part 1 of this book consists of three chapters that discuss in considerable detail my scholarship and publications on knowledge construction. These chapters provide the reader with the knowledge and concepts needed to comprehend the other two parts of this book, which focus on curriculum and pedagogical issues related to diversity and civic education.

The Citizenship Education Dilemma

In nation-states throughout the world, citizenship education programs and curricula are trying to teach students democratic ideals and values within social, economic, political, and educational contexts that contradict democratic ideals such as justice, equality, and human rights (Joshee & Thomas, 2017; Law, 2017). Although some nations are more democratic than others, all are characterized by significant gaps between their ideals and their institutional structures and practices. The democratic ideals taught in citizenship lessons are contradicted by practices such as racism, sexism, social-class stratification, and inequality.

This contradiction creates a citizenship education dilemma because for change to take place and for nation-states to become more democratic, students need to internalize democratic ideas and values. Experiencing democratic living is more significant in helping students to internalize democratic values than reading and hearing about them from teachers. Dewey (1938) in Experience and Education argues that “all genuine education comes about through experience” (p. 13). Democracy needs to be experienced by students in order for them to internalize democratic values and beliefs. In a stratified society, students in the cultural mainstream as well as those on the margins of society are keenly aware of the inequality within their society and know which groups are advantaged as well as those who are victims of problems such as racism and structural inequality.

I hope this collection of my essays on knowledge construction and civic education will advance the conversation about ways that educators can deal effectively with the citizenship dilemma created by the need to teach democratic ideas and values within social, political, economic, and educational contexts that contradict democratic values and beliefs. Students must attain democratic values in school if we ever hope to change the political, social, and economic structures of stratified societies and nation-states because they are the future citizens and leaders of societies and nation-states (Parker, 2003).

My African American teachers tried to teach ethnic pride, patriotism, and democratic ideals in our tightly segregated Black school in Lee County, Arkansas, in the 1950s. Each day in morning exercise we sang the Negro national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and said the Pledge of Allegiance. Our teachers, who maintained a belief in American democratic ideals against great odds, knew that the Unite...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Part 1 Race, Knowledge Construction, and Transformative Curriculum Reform
• Part 2 Cultural Democracy and Civic Education in Diverse Nations
• Part 3 Diversity, Global Migration, and Civic Education
• Selected Publications of James A. Banks
• Index