Challenges of Multicultural Education

Teaching and Taking Diversity Courses

Norah Peters-Davis, Jeffrey Shultz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317262640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The voices of college students and teachers vividly enlighten readers about the real-world challenges of multicultural education. Courses on diversity abound in American universities today. But open classroom discussion of racial and gender differences can evoke discomfort as much as new understandings. Negotiating these courses takes a toll on both faculty and students as classrooms become filled with emotion. Based on student and teacher experience in a range of American colleges and universities, this book shows how to meet these challenges and create a truly open and beneficial environment. The authors demonstrate pedagogical strategies and new approaches. A vital resource for teachers, students, college administrators, and university libraries. Contents: Introduction. Dialogue on Diversity Teaching. From Silence and Resistance to Tongues Untied. The Racial Experiment. Starting with a Story and Sharing the Discussion Leading. Irritating, Supporting & Representing. Identity Matters in Class. What Lies Beneath. Conclusion.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Pluralism, Power, and Politics: Discourses of Diverse Pedagogies and Pedagogies of Diversity

Sharon M. Ravitch

Arcadia University

Learning to teach requires a journey into the deepest recesses of one’s self-awareness, where failures, fears, and hopes are hidden. (Kagan, 1992)

Across the landscape of higher education in the United States, courses that focus on diversity, race relations, intercultural communication, pluralism, and multicultural education have emerged within several fields and disciplines. These courses, often called diversity, pluralism or multicultural courses, have largely surfaced over the past decade as a response to diversity requirements that have been added to most liberal arts, social science, and teacher education curricula at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. As an outgrowth of the progress made in the areas of multicultural education, diversity awareness, and identity politics during the civil rights movement (Gay, 1990; Laubscher and Powell, 2003), multicultural courses are typically developed within institutions of higher learning that are pushed to become more supportive of diversity by offering courses with multicultural content. While these courses tend to be isolated from, and even marginalized within, their broader institutional contexts, the instructors who teach them have a serious interest in, and passionate concern for, issues of equity and social justice. These educators work from a belief that students from all backgrounds must be provided with structured learning opportunities in which they can develop their knowledge of and perspectives on a diverse range of people, reflect on and challenge their own biases and stereotypes, and hone their skills for communicating, living, and working within an increasingly multicultural and multiracial United States and an everdeveloping global community. Instructors involved in multicultural courses and initiatives also work from an understanding that as we begin the twenty-first century, the neo-conservative political climate in the United States and the backlash against “political correctness” in society generally and college campuses particularly bring with them particular opportunities as well as serious challenges with respect to efforts to increase students’ cultural awareness and sensitivity to issues of oppression and inequality. All of the authors in this book—instructors, graduate and undergraduate students—share their insights, experiences, and reflections on the opportunities and challenges that they face in their processes of teaching and learning in multicultural classrooms in the academy.

To achieve our goals of broadening and deepening students’ awareness of, and ability to critically reflect on and engage in, dialogue about issues of culture, race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, and inequality in American society, instructors design our courses to create learning environments in which students are guided through a focused and critical analysis of the relationship between society, ideology, and policy, as well as individual and group identity and agency. Further, students are challenged to rigorously explore educational and social inequality and how people’s social locations and sociopolitical forces converge to create and sustain the oppression of people of color, women, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, non-European immigrants, people with disabilities, and people living in under-resourced areas. The overarching goal of multicultural courses is to broaden students’ perspectives by exposing them to the experiences and points of view of marginalized groups, as well as to serious interdisciplinary scholarship in the areas of diversity and multiculturalism. Such exposure, it is hoped, will serve to raise their cultural awareness, cultivate their perspective-taking skills, and, ultimately, to help them live in ways that are more inclusive and socially aware as well as less judgmental, deficit-oriented, and territorial. As the future workers, leaders, voters, educators, scholars, parents, and citizens of this country, such learning is essential to the development of a more equitable future.

Critical multicultural courses are expressly designed to facilitate a “critical interrogation” (hooks, 1994) of students’ constructions of their own and others’ identities and processes of socialization.¹ This means that students are challenged to critically reflect on their views on a wide range of people who are different from them, issues of racism and discrimination, and their perspectives on how aspects of identity and social location relate to social realities. Further, these courses are designed to create a structure in which students are challenged to deconstruct and examine their belief systems and in which students are provided with the conceptual tools necessary for them to practice new ways of thinking, doing, and being. In order to fully understand what happens within these courses, it is first necessary to discuss the broader social and ideological contexts in which multicultural education has been developed and shaped. These broader contexts create the ideological, theoretical, and pedagogical foundations of the multicultural teaching and learning that are at the center of this book.

ON CRITICAL MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION: A THEORETICAL CONTEXT

The chapters in this book are written by instructors, graduate instructors, and graduate and undergraduate students who teach, learn, and collaborate in expressly multicultural contexts. While there is incredible range and variation in the structure and content of these courses and collaborations, they all work from a critical multicultural framework. Each chapter describes how teaching and learning happen within the ideological, pedagogical, and political framework of critical multicultural education, as well as how such pedagogy is experienced by both the teachers and learners who are involved in it. Understanding the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of critical multicultural education is crucial to understanding the breadth and depth of multicultural pedagogy as well as why it is a type of pedagogy that, as Nieto (1999a) warns us, “encourages dangerous discourses” (p. 209).

Multiculturalism—the ideologically based intellectual movement that created the foundation for multicultural education—first emerged during the era of the civil rights movement, gained momentum in the late 1960s, and has continued to develop as a response to the cultural, social, and political inequality and hegemony in the United States (Gay, 1990; Sleeter, 1996). Multicultural education—the educational outgrowth of multiculturalism—is a response to the ways in which U.S. schools and social institutions reflect and perpetuate a hegemonic social order (Banks, 1996; Erickson, 2004; Giroux, 1994; Goldberg, 1994; McCarthy, 1993; McLaren, 1994; Nieto, 2004). Goldberg (1994) describes multiculturalism as the emergence of “a new standard … new set of self-understandings, presuppositions, principles, and practice … a new way of thinking about the social and institutional, the intellectual and academic” (p. 9). Building from the ideological framework developed within the broader multiculturalism movement, multicultural education localizes its tenets and goals within the educational realm, placing a primacy on the critical examination and reconstruction of pedagogical practices, educational institutions, and issues of curriculum and resources. This examination is steeped in the systematic critique of the broader social, political, and economic forces that both shape and influence all areas of education. Gorski (2000) provides an overarching framework of multicultural education, describing it as:

a progressive approach for transforming education that holistically critiques and addresses current shortcomings, failings, and discriminatory practices in education. It is grounded in ideals of social justice, education equity, and a dedication to facilitating educational experiences in which all students reach their full potential as learners and as socially aware and active beings, locally, nationally, and globally. Multicultural education acknowledges that schools are essential to laying the foundation for the transformation of society and the elimination of oppression and injustice. The underlying goal of multicultural education is to affect social change. The pathway towards this goal incorporate … 1. the transformation of self; 2. the transformation of schools and schooling; 3. the transformation of society. (p. 2)

As these statements make clear, multiculturalism is an intellectual and political movement that refuses to accept the Eurocentric ideal of American society as natural and, further, that refuses to accept responses to it that do not transform the foundation of American society along cultural, political, social, educational, and institutional lines (Giroux, 1994; Martin, 1995; McCarthy, 1993; McLaren, 1994). Multicultural education is the way that multiculturalism becomes conceptualized and operationalized within and across educational contexts and discourses.

Multicultural education has significantly grown over the past three decades in terms of its definition and the scope of its political and educational articulations (Gay, 1990; Sleeter, 1996; Nieto, 1999a; 2004). Multicultural education has become a discourse that pushes the margins of education and actively works to re-vision American society and to develop pedagogical tools, methods, and theories that operationalize a new social order which reflects the diversity, lifestyles, learning styles, and cultural and economic realities of all Americans. Proponents of multiculturalism and multicultural education view schools, from preschool to graduate school, and the educational policies and discourses surrounding education and schooling, to be essential sites for social transformation (Erickson, 2004; Goldberg, 1994; Levinson and Holland, 1996; Nieto, 2004). From the perspective of multicultural theorists and educators, the modes and philosophies of schooling, which are based in myths of democracy, meritocracy, and equality, are not acceptable given the reality of our nation’s population, which is diverse, multiracial, and multicultural. Therefore these mythical and oppressive systems of pedagogy and education must be critically analyzed, challenged, and, ultimately, transformed.

Anthropologists, sociologists, critical theorists, and educators have contributed theoretical models of multicultural education to the growing body of literature in this area. The pedagogical approaches described in this book represent a range of positions on multicultural education. Each approach is based on distinct assumptions and beliefs about society, culture, power, identity, education and schooling, pluralism, communication, and interaction. The theories underlying these approaches differ in a variety of ways and spring from several disciplines. This range of approaches and disciplinary vantage points holds important implications for the dialogue around, and potential points of development and intervention within, classroom-based multicultural education. Debates in multicultural education, and thus the perspectives, approaches and courses of the authors in this book, are shaped by differences in views about: (1) the relationship between power and social oppression; (2) conceptions of race, social class, gender, culture, sexual orientation and ethnicity and their relationship to issues of oppression; (3) the mobilization of the themes of race, diversity, pluralism, and culture (McCarthy, 1993); and (4) the role of education and schooling in the processes and practices of social transformation. Even given the differences in these focal areas and our different standpoint epistemologies (e.g., feminist, hermeneutic), the authors in this book share the understanding that our current educational, social, and political institutions are fraught with racism, discrimination, and oppression, and, therefore, that they must be transformed. We work towards these transformations by constructing pedagogical roadmaps that lead us, along with our students, to a more equitable and inclusive vision and reality of American society.

Because of its focused agenda of social, political, educational, and institutional change and transformation across activists, educators, policymakers, and civil rights proponents, multicultural education is often discussed as a social movement similar to the civil rights movement (Sleeter, 1996; Laubscher and Powell, 2003). Laubscher and Powell (2003) argue that this perspective on multicultural education results in a guiding conceptualization of “the educational space as a mobilizing site of struggle for social justice” (p. 212). In this sense, those who work toward and agitate for social change through engaging in critical pedagogy are doing work that is situated both between and across borders: between intellectual work and activism, the personal and political, critical theory and real-world practice. Additionally, the educational spaces that we create are intended to precipitate intellectual reflection and social and political movement. These spaces are often viewed as being only of nominal importance in their respective institutions and therefore are most often situated on the margins. Thus, this kind of pedagogy, as you will read throughout each chapter of this book, requires instructors to “teach against the grain” (Cochran-Smith, 1991) of our monocultural, traditional, and conservative institutions of higher learning. As each author in this book documents, this kind of teaching is complex, challenging to both teacher and students, exhilarating and enervating, heartening and disheartening in profound ways. What follows is a discussion of the experiences of instructors who teach these courses, the nature of their collaborations with each other, and their insights into the processes involved in teaching and learning with their students.

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL, THE PEDAGOGICAL IS PERSONAL: ON THE PUSHES AND PULLS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING MULTICULTURALLY IN THE ACADEMY

Multicultural education, in its critical forms, offers no less than a re-visioning of American society and its institutions, trappings, and citizens. In speaking about multicultural education, Giroux (1994) asserts that one of the main objectives of multicultural education is to “reassert the importance of making the pedagogical more political, to analyze how a broader definition of pedagogy can be used to address how the production of knowledge, social identities, and social relations might challenge the racist assumptions and practices that inform a variety of cultural sites, including but not limited to the public and private spheres of schooling” (p. 325).

What this understanding of multicultural education suggests for higher education is that institutions of higher learning must be conceptualized as crucial sites in which the relationship between diversity, democracy, and pluralism should be acknowledged and incorporated into the curriculum. Further, as Giroux (1994) argues, multiculturalism must be utilized as much more than a “critical referent for interrogating the racist representations and practices of the dominant culture, it [must] provide a space in which the criticism of cultural practices is inextricably linked to the production of cultural spaces marked by the formation of new identities and pedagogical practices that offers a powerful challenge to the racist, patriarchal, and sexist principles embedded in American society and schooling” (p. 337). The goals of multicultural education point directly to the spaces in which such identities and pedagogical practices are developed—multicultural classrooms—and conceptualize every classroom as a unique forum for discussing and confronting issues of diversity, inequality, and social justice. Given the opportunities that college campuses provide, namely, an audience of young learners who are poised to try on new ways of thinking, it becomes the responsibility of multicultural educators to create learning opportunities that help to interrupt students’ fears, mistrust, and avoidance of issues of diversity, pluralism, inclusion, power, and privilege. Working within this perspective, instructors become critical pedagogues who teach in ways that have at their core an agenda of social transformation that begins with each individual student and every group of students and works out into the world from there.

So what then, given the ambitious goals for and transformative agenda of multicultural education, and its concomitant critiques of the academy in which such courses are housed, are the experiences of the instructors who teach these courses? Of the students who take them? Of their learning processes together? Given the enormity of the task of teaching against a monocultural and largely conservative grain of higher education and the intense and challenging nature of material that focuses on cultural, social, and institutional discrimination as well as on self-critique and change, how do instructors learn to teach in ways that help them to engage with students in a manner that leads everyone involved on a journey of serious critical reflection, cultural perspective-taking, and systemic critique? How does it feel to continuously teach within these “radical” political contexts? What are the points of connection, disaffiliation, and conflict?

Courses—such as the ones described in this volume—that teach this substantive content within a dialogic style (rather than a dogmatic one) do so by employing alternative, innovative pedagogical practices—practices that rely on the ability to both engage each student where he or she is and to orchestrate a critical and challenging group dialogue that can help move students beyond their typically uncritical and mainstream perspectives on issues of diversity. The instructors of these courses work hard to integrate a variety of curricular materials that invoke the voices of the individual and collective, both those who are in the classroom and who live in the world around it. Throughout this process, these instructors experience a continual push and pull between two forces: on the one hand our courses are intellectually rigorous and teach the kinds of material and critical-thinking skills that are expected at colleges and universities. On the other hand, our courses have at their center content that is politically and ideologically charged and are built upon pedagogical practices that tend to engender anxiety, confusion, fear, resistance, and/or anger on the part of the students (McIntyre, 1997; Tatum, 1992/1996). For the instructors teaching these courses, who are most often, as you will read throughout this book, passionate about and deeply committed to the topics and issues addressed in our courses, our teaching is more than just an intellectual, pedagogical experience, it is deeply personal, moving, emotionally trying, and at times difficult and threatening. Particularly for instructors of color, or instructors who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender, who are immigrants and/or who have disabilities, teaching provocative material from the margins of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• 1. Introduction: Pluralism, Power, and Politics-Discourses of Diverse Pedagogies and Pedagogies of Diversity
• 2. Dialogue on Diversity Teaching: Reflections on Research, Pedagogy, and Passion for Social Justice
• 3. From Silence and Resistance to Tongues Untied: Talking about Race in the College Classroom
• 4. Making Race Matter on Campus: Teaching and Learning about Race in the “Whitest State in the Union”
• 5. The Racial Experiment
• 6. Starting with a Story and Sharing the Discussion Leading: Tools and Tasks That Help in a Classroom Dealing with Diversity—Stumbling into an Affirmation of Feminist Pedagogy
• 7. Irritating, Supporting, and Representing: Reflections of Faculty and Students of Color
• 8. Identity Matters in Class: Conversations in Mixed Company
• 9. Critical Multicultural Teacher Reflections: Counternarratives to Images of the White Male Blockhead
• 10. What Lies Beneath: Critical Dialogue for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
• Epilogue: Where Do We Go from Here?
• Index