Rethinking Multicultural Education for the Next Generation

Rethinking Multicultural Education for the Next Generation

Nadine Dolby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136345920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Rethinking Multicultural Education for the Next Generation builds on the legacy of social justice multicultural education, while recognizing the considerable challenges of reaching today's college students. By drawing on breakthrough research in two fields – neuroscience and animal studies – Nadine Dolby argues that empathy is an underlying element of all living beings. Dolby shows how this commonality can provide a scaffolding for building an exciting new approach to developing multicultural and global consciousness, one that has the potential to transform how our students see and relate to the world around them. This book features classroom vignettes and reflections, discussion of research with pre-service teachers on the concept of empathy, and pedagogical suggestions for fostering the new empathy in students.

Incorporating discussions of animal emotions, sustainability, and our responsibilities to all living creatures and the planet, Dolby challenges multicultural educators to rethink both curriculum and pedagogy and to begin new and bolder conversations about how empathy for humans, animals, and the planet must be part of a new approach to teaching.

1

MULTICULTURAL TEACHER
EDUCATION FOR A NEW
GENERATION

The Challenge of Social Justice and the
Rise of Empathy

… I am concerned about the nature of the change teachers and teacher educators wish to see. If they don't want to see changes, or are slow to engage in the struggle to achieve the change for social justice, then the hope for social justice in schools and teacher education programs is bleak.

(Carl Grant, 2008, p. 655)

Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.

(Cornel West, 1999, p. 12)

Teaching multicultural education is often exhausting work. For those of us who have been teaching in this field for years, even decades, we know how incredibly difficult it can be to reach our students with a message of social justice, equality, and equity. We leave our classrooms and offices every afternoon wondering just how and why students—future teachers—believe what they do and how we might inspire and empower our students to recognize and intervene in social injustices and to see their role in social change. Nina Asher (2007) writes insightfully about this reality: “For all the effort it takes to implement such a pedagogy, the rewards are few and far between” (p. 72).

For those of us who are starting in this field, just surviving from day to day, from one class to the next, can be enough. I received an email not too long ago from one of my graduate students, who is new to multicultural preservice teacher education. A Muslim woman who wears the hijab, she has encountered much prejudice, misunderstanding, and resistance from her students: students whom she is also responsible for teaching. Her email listed her goals for the next semester. Amid the papers to be written, literature to be read, and thesis prospectus to be drafted, she had listed, quite simply: “Survive 285.” 285 is our multicultural education course: I supervise it, she teaches it. For her second semester of teaching, her goal was to get out intact.

This is perhaps not as simple as it looks from the outside. The psychological toll on her and other instructors is often stark. In our weekly meetings, the braver instructors confess to crying on their way home from class and obsessing over student comments for days. I should add that the curriculum for this particular course is fairly moderate and middle of the road by multicultural social justice standards. We do not push students too far or too fast. And yet from our students’ perspectives, we are shaking the very foundation of their lives: asking them to think about and learn about ideas that are far outside of their comfort zone, and to reconsider how gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation (among other identities) have shaped their young lives. Our students are a fairly typical profile of preservice teachers nationwide: white, female, middle class, and Christian. We are located in a small city: one hour from Indianapolis and two from Chicago. Many of our students are from suburban or rural areas and they have limited exposure to the world outside of Indiana. All of my instructors, a diverse representation of peoples from around the globe, struggle daily with the very real challenges of reaching students who, as Carl Grant reflects in the opening epigraph, seem uninterested at best, hostile at worst.

Throughout the field of multicultural teacher education, our expectations for our courses are high because the stakes are high. We know that our undergraduates will be the teachers of the K-12 student population throughout the United States. We know that our largely white, middle-class, and female students have little experience or knowledge about the children and youth many of them will soon teach: poor and working poor, African-American, Latino, second language learners, children who face innumerable obstacles on their road to adulthood. The perspectives and opinions that our students do have are largely formed by cable TV news—and some of them are undoubtedly watching (and believing) everything they hear on Fox News.¹ Or, just as likely, they are skimming the news headlines on Yahoo!, CNN, Google, and MSN (Pew Research Center, 2010). Thus what we do in multicultural teacher education courses matters—not just to us, or our institutions, or for accreditation purposes, or our state standards. For example, it is recognized that the preparation of quality teachers is a central component of creating an equitable future for all American children. As Linda Darling-Hammond (2010) writes:

Teachers who enter teaching without adequate preparation often wind up resenting and stereotyping students whom they do not understand, especially when these teachers’ lack of skills render them less successful. Even decent people who want to do good work can be sabotaged by their lack of knowledge and skill.

(p. 208)

Our preservice students are largely what Darling-Hammond would categorize as “decent people.” They do not mean to do harm. Yet, over and over, decade after decade, they do. They believe that, as one local teacher told me, “I thought talking about difference would just draw attention to it. The children do not mention it. I thought that what I was doing was best for the children.” Their lack of “knowledge and skill” (and experience, I would add) with multicultural education means that unconsciously they recreate the very circumstances most of them would objectively claim they desire to change. They believe statements such as “poor people are lazy,” “girls can't do math,” “African-Americans can't swim, but can play basketball well,” “poor parents don't care about their children's education,” and “illegal immigrants are destroying the United States” because they don't know any better: that is what their diet of largely right-wing media consumption has taught them.

They do not understand the extent of the harm that such beliefs cause. Those beliefs harm them, because it limits their appreciation and knowledge of the world and makes them fearful of ever experiencing anything new or challenging. But more importantly, it irreparably harms the children in their classrooms, who become the victims of their dangerous beliefs and whose lives are ever changed because of these poorly educated teachers. And despite our continued efforts, this reality has persisted for decades. There is little to no research that indicates any change in the attitudes of preservice teachers over the past 35 years, since the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) added “diversity” to its standards in 1976.

For many of us, we are also acutely aware that the only exposure our students will ever have to multicultural issues is in the seats of our classrooms. Some faculty and instructors are fortunate enough to work in teacher education programs in which critical, multicultural, and social justice issues are infused throughout the curriculum. In those programs, students will hear the multicultural message over and over again: from different perspectives, in different contexts, and perhaps not always in ways we would agree with, but they will hear it. That is simply not the reality in many programs. Instead, “multicultural” awareness is often a box to check-off for NCATE reviews and little more. Such realities place enormous pressures on multicultural teacher education classes, as they are likely the first and last exposure our students will have to any forms of critical thinking in teacher education: a problem that is compounded by new standards in many states that require more “content” and less “pedagogy” in teacher education programs.

But those of us who have labored in the multicultural teacher education field for years know that content will never be enough. This is not a book that is against content. A science teacher must know science; a math teacher must be passionate, delighted, and knowledgeable about math. But we are also acutely aware that there is more: that our students’ knowledge, expectations, attitudes, and behaviors will literally shape the future of our country and the planet, and indelibly mark (and in many cases, sadly, limit) the futures of all of our children. This book suggests that there is something beyond content; something much grander and more important that all of our teachers must know. They must understand who they are, who the children in their classroom are, the fundamentals about the world they live in, why the world is in peril, and the possibilities for contributing in positive ways that exist for all of us every day.

This book contends that our current approach to multicultural teacher education is not effective: a claim that comes from my own experience but increasingly is supported by accumulating empirical research. I try to grapple with understanding why it is so difficult to teach multicultural perspectives to our students, why there is so much resistance to social justice paradigms, and how we might go about doing our work differently, so that our pedagogical approach affects not just the select few who quickly understand and accept social justice multiculturalism, but all of our students. For everyone teaching multicultural education, these are real and enduring questions. If students tune us out through their insistence that we are just “politically correct” and/or continue to see multicultural education as just another class on their way to a teaching credential, then those are the teachers we will have in our classrooms in just a few short years. We have literally minutes to make a difference in the lives of our students, and through them, the lives of all schoolchildren in the United States (and beyond). This book argues that we need to rethink what we do with those precious minutes, and find ways to better understand who our students are and how we might reach them.

I argue that the multicultural paradigm itself, as a pedagogical approach, must be rethought. Multicultural education was, and largely still is, a field that stems from the pressing civil rights concerns of the 1960s. Many of those very real issues remain largely (though not wholly) unresolved or they have re-emerged in new and sometimes more pernicious forms. Despite this, the world now faces both old realities— unrelenting poverty, despair, and inequality—made worse by the most daunting threat of all: global warming and the possibility of the extinction of all life on the planet. Such realities existed but were not at the forefront of public (or academic) consciousness in the 1960s. But they are now and we cannot ignore them.

There is much more at stake here than an equitable future for American children or the “competitiveness” of the U.S. economy. If we do not change the way we think and live our lives and do it soon, the future itself is in question. As Lester Milbrath (1989) observed, now more than two decades ago, our current way of life is simply unsustainable. Certainly, the task I describe is bigger than multicultural teacher education alone or teacher education more broadly. But as a field multicultural teacher education has always understood that teachers can and do change the world, and we must take on part of this challenge. Just as critically, multicultural education (of which multicultural teacher education is a subfield) has not been static: it has changed as social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances demand. I argue throughout this book that now is the time for yet another re-envisioning of multicultural teacher education, to transform it into a practice that is more meaningful in the context of today's world.

This book draws on multiple sources to begin to explore new ways of thinking about multicultural teacher education in practice: in the context of real, live classrooms with students who come to us with (in many cases) a difficult combination of limited life history and limited exposure to the world of ideas. The sources I use to spark this discussion include my own experience teaching multicultural education since 1990 and supervising a large (500–600 students per year) multicultural education course for the past five years. The issues and problems that this book attempts to address are at the core of our weekly team meetings. Every Friday from 12 to 1, we meet to support each other, share the stories, enormous struggles, and (as much as possible) fragments of possibilities and hope that eventually emerge in all of our classrooms. I also bring my own experiences and pieces of my story to the book: weaving in what Marshall Ganz (2008) refers to as a “story of self.” Ganz's notion of a “story of self” is one third of his larger pedagogy of “Public Narrative,” which will be discussed in depth in chapter 7. These “stories of self” come from my own undergraduate education and from my more recent involvement in drives to support an orphanage in Haiti, and with volunteer work at a local animal shelter. The book also draws on a survey that was completed by 398 undergraduate students enrolled in EDCI 285 (Multiculturalism and Education) at Purdue University during 2010–11.

The concept of “empathy” as a necessary building block for multicultural and global consciousness is a central tenet of this book. New scholarship in two fields— neuroscience and cognitive ethology (the study of animals’ minds)—has inspired renewed interest in empathy in multiple fields: from political science, to economics, art education, literature, and psychology. As a field, multicultural education (the larger rubric under which multicultural teacher education is one trajectory) has been very wary about concepts such as “empathy.” Given the field's history, this reluctance is understandable. As I discuss in chapter 3, multicultural education separated itself quite distinctly from the “softer” approaches that had come before it which emphasized tolerance and human understanding. Instead, multicultural education was and is largely concerned with the “hard” issues of power, access to resources, inequality, and rights. There is nothing inherently wrong with this: certainly these issues are as real today as they were 40 years ago at the beginning of the contemporary multicultural education movement. But in the interim, there have been paradigmatic shifts in thinking about the nature of all living beings, both animals and humans. It is thus time for the field to consider the implications of these findings for how we think about our students and how we teach them.

I suggest that as teacher educators we must begin by having empathy for our own students. My approach here responds to Karen Lowenstein's (2009) recent critique of the “deficit” approach to multicultural teacher education. As Lowenstein argues, teacher educators strive to ensure that teacher candidates do not use a “deficit” lens when thinking about and preparing to teach K-12 students. William Ayers (2001) has written about the dangers of using deficit theories in teaching. He begins by reviewing some of his own deficits, including his inability to type, to speak French, to fix a car, to play tennis, and to read music. As he observes, he has so many deficits that he could “fill a chalkboard in just a few seconds” (p. 29). Ayers then comments:

As I look at it, the deficiencies list tells you almost nothing about me—about my experiences, needs, dreams, fears, skills, or know-how—and as a teacher it provides you with information of only distant, peripheral value. It doesn't offer you any insights or clues into how you might engage me in a journey of learning, or how you might invite me into your classroom as a student. In short, the list fails to answer the key question: Given what I know now, how shall I teach this person?

(p. 30)

Yet, Lowenstein points to a possible contradiction in the approach multicultural teacher educators take to our own students. She writes, “ … I now ask whether teacher educators contradict the very same principle we supposedly advocate. … We do not take seriously our own theory about the importance of legitimate prior knowledge” (2009, p. 169). I discuss my reflections on Lowenstein's insights in this book by drawing on the example of one of my undergraduate teachers, the late Howard Zinn—the well-known scholar and activist—as a model of an empathic teacher. Though certainly my classmates and I had little real knowledge or understanding of ourselves and our relations to the world around us, Howard refused to use a deficit lens during his decades of teaching undergraduates. His legacy provides a touchstone for my discussion of the empathy we must demonstrate for our students.

While I do discuss some of our students’ “deficits” in chapter 2 within a broader social, political, and cultural context, the majority of the book focuses on what we can build on—what our students bring to our classrooms, and how we can use that to scaffold them to greater understandings. In doing so, I attempt to step away from a “deficit” approach to multicultural education and towards an empathic pedagogy that brings students’ understandings into the classroom. I particularly draw on Deborah Meier's (1996) concept of “informed empathy” as a framework for a revitalized multicultural teacher education, using three areas of focus: empathy for humans, empathy for animals, and empathy for the planet and environment. This book speaks largely to the reality of preservice teacher education in the United States. However, I have lived and worked in both Australia and South Africa and those experiences deeply inform my thinking. There are certainly parallels and continuities between preservice teacher education in the United States, and equivalent education programs/degrees in nations around the world. But there are also important differences, and thus it is critical to be cautious when thinking through the implications of my argument for other contexts.

Because there are rarely national surveys conducted on solely education majors or preservice teachers, I rely on sources throughout the book (particularly in chapter 2) that note trends in larger population groups of which our students are a subset: recent high school graduate and current/recent college students. It is undoubtedly true that there will be some differences between the population at large and the small segment of high school graduates who choose to pursue teaching as a career. There are also clearly regional differences in the experience of teaching multicultural education. Are our classrooms different in rural Kansas and urban Los Angeles? In some ways, the answer is yes: context is always important and a more diverse population of students in a classroom setting will sometimes produce different and stronger conversations than a more homogeneous population: not always, and not always in the way one wants or anticipates. Despite this variation, there is more continuity than discontinuity in our classrooms and teaching experiences. Certainly in teaching multicultural education over the past 20 years in Massachusetts, upstate New York, Melbourne (Australia), Illinois, and Indiana, I have come to recognize and experience more continuity than discontinuity.

Some notes on language and focus. As much as possible, I use the term “student” instead of “preservice teacher.” I argue throughout the book that we need to reconceptualize our students, again following Lowenstein (2009) as learners in the moment: not as “pre” anything. It is true that most of our students are enrolled in preservice teacher education programs and many will be teachers (though of course statistically not for long; see Ingersoll and Merrill, 2010). But in focusing too much on what they will become we have lost sight of who they are now, what they need to learn, and how we can effectively teach them. Thus I use “student” as much as possible when discussing my own practice and research. In my review of the field in chapter 3, I do use “preservice teacher” and “preservice teacher education” as necessary as that is largely how the literature is framed and organized. While at times I use the term “multicultural education” I am in general concerned with the literature on “multicultural teacher education,” which is a specific subset of the broader field. I do bring in more general work on multicultural education at times, particularly in t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• RETHINKING MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION FOR THE NEXT GENERATION
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Multicultural Teacher Education for a New Generation: The Challenge of Social Justice and the Rise of Empathy
• 2 Who Are Our Students?
• 3 Multicultural Teacher Education: Past, Present, and Future
• 4 The New Empathy: Rethinking Human Nature
• 5 Empathy for All: Expanding the Moral Circle
• 6 Reaching Our Students: The Journey to Empathy
• 7 The Road from Empathy to Justice
• 8 A Pedagogy for Erin and Brittany: Towards a New Multicultural Teacher Education
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index