Race, Culture, and Education

The Selected Works of James A. Banks

James A. Banks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134151097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Considered the father of multicultural education in the US and known throughout the world as one of the field's most important founder, theorist and researcher, James A. Banks has collected here twenty-one of his most important and best works from across the span of his career. Drawing out the major themes that have shaped the field of multicultural education as well as outlining the development of Banks' own career, these articles, chapters and papers focus on eight key issues:

• black studies and the teaching of history
• research and research issues
• teaching ethnic studies
• teaching social studies for decision-making and citizen action
• multiethnic education and school reform
• multicultural education and knowledge construction
• the global dimensions of multicultural education
• democracy, diversity and citizenship education.

The last part of the book consists of a selected bibliography of all Banks' publications over his forty-year career, as a source of further reading on each of these pivotal ideas.

PART 1

BLACK STUDIES, THE TEACHING OF HISTORY, AND RESEARCH

CHAPTER 1

TEACHING BLACK HISTORY WITH A FOCUS ON DECISION-MAKING

Social Education, 1971, 35, 740–745, ff. 820–821

With the emergence of the Black revolt of the 1960s, Black people began to shape and perpetuate a new identity. “Black Power” and “Black is Beautiful” were rally cries of this identity search. Blacks rejected many of the components of the dominant White culture and searched for elements out of which a new identity could be formed. Such elements include intensified racial pride and cohesiveness, a search for power, and an attempt to identify cultural roots in Africa. African dashikis, tikis, Afro hairstyles, and Swahilian phases emerged as new cultural components.

Written history is an important part of a people’s heritage. As the Black revolt gained momentous, Blacks demanded that history be rewritten so that the role played by them in shaping America’s destiny would be more favorably and realistically portrayed. Organized interest groups pressured school districts to ban lily-white history books from the schools. When the pressure on school districts mounted, they encouraged publishers to include more Blacks in schoolbooks.

In response to Black demands for Black history and Black studies, educational institutions at all levels made some attempts to institute Black Studies programs. Publishers, seeking quick profits, have responded to the Black history movement by producing a flood of textbooks, trade books, and multimedia “kits,” many of dubious values. Most of the “integrated” materials now on the market are little more than old wine in new bottles and contain White characters painted brown and the success of stories of “safe” Blacks such as Crispus Attucks and Booker T. Washington. The problems that powerless ethnic groups experience in America are deemphasized or ignored (Banks, 1969).

Despite the recent attempts to implement Black history programs, few of them are sound because the goals of Black Studies remain confused, ambiguous, and conflicting. Many Black Studies programs have been structured without careful planning and clear rationales. Experts of many different persuasions and ideologies often voice diverse goals for Black history programs. Larry Cuban (1971), a leader in ethnic education, argues that “the only legitimate goals for ethnic content [in the public schools] . . . are to offer a balanced view of the American past and present.” (p. 318) (emphasis added). Nathan Hare (1969), another innovator in ethnic studies, believes that Black history should be taught from a Black perspective and emphasize the struggles and aspirations of Black people.

Many young Black activists feel that the main goal of Black history should be to equip Black students with an ideology that is imperative for their liberation. Some Blacks who belong to the over-thirty generation, such as Martin Kilson and Bayard Ruskin, think education which is designed to develop a commitment to a fixed ideology is antithetical to sound scholarship and has no place in public institutions. Writes Kilson:

I don’t believe it is the proper or most useful function of a [school] to train ideological or political organizers of whatever persuasion. A [school’s] primarily function is to impart skills, techniques, and special habits of learning to its students. The student must be free to decide himself on the ideological application of his training.

(1969, p. 4)

The disagreement over the proper goals for Black Studies reflects the widespread racial tension and polarization within American society.

Classroom teachers are puzzled about strategies to use in teaching Black history and have serious questions about who can teach Black Studies because of the disagreement over goals among curriculum experts and social scientists. Effective teaching strategies and criteria for judging materials cannot be formulated until goals are identified and explicitly stated. In the past, most social studies teachers emphasized the mastery of factual information and tired to develop a blind commitment to “democracy” as practiced in the Untied States. Unless a sound rationale for Black Studies programs can be stated, and new approaches to the teaching of Black history implemented, students will get just as sick and tired of Black history as they have become with White chauvinistic schoolbook history. Some students already feel that Black history has been “oversold.” Many teachers who teach Black history use new materials but traditional strategies because multiethnic materials, although necessary for sound social studies programs, do not in themselves solve the classroom teacher’s pedagogical problems.

Without both new goals and novel strategies, Black history will become just another fleeting fad. Isolated facts about Chrispus Attucks do not stimulate the intellectual any more than isolated facts about Abraham Lincoln. In this article, I offer a rationale for Black Studies programs for the reader’s consideration, attempt to resolve the question, Black history for what? and illustrate how Black history can be taught as an integral part of a modern social studies curriculum which is spiral, conceptual, and interdisciplinary, and which emphasizes decision-making and social action skills.

The purpose of Black history instruction

The goal of Black history teaching should be the same as the objective of the total social studies program: to help students develop the ability to make intelligent decisions so that they can resolve personal problems, and through social action, influence public policy, and develop a sense of political efficacy. Like all areas of ethnic studies, Black history can and should make a unique contribution to the development of students’ decision-making and social action skills. Poverty, political powerlessness, low self-esteem, consumer exploitation, racism, and alienation are personal and social problems that many Americans experience. Marginalized ethnic minorities – such as Blacks, Mexican Americans, American Indians, and Puerto Rican Americans – experience these problems in an especially acute form.

The school should help all students, and especially US marginalized ethnic minorities, to develop the ability to make sound decisions so that they can resolve these kinds of problems through effective social action. It is especially important for teachers to help students to make intelligent decisions and to participate in social action in these times when rhetoric is often substituted for reason and when simplistic solutions are frequently proposed as answers to complicated social problems. Wanton destruction is often the only response that many of our youth can make when archaic institutions stubbornly resist their just demands for change. I will illustrate how Black history, as an integral part of an inquiry-conceptual social studies curriculum, can help students to develop skills in decision-making and social action.

Essential components of decision-making

Knowledge is one essential component of the decision-making process. Decisions can be no better than the knowledge on which they are based. To make an effective decision, students must master the most powerful and predictive forms of knowledge. We can delineate at least four categories of knowledge: facts, concepts, generalizations, and theories. Factual knowledge has the least predictive value, although facts are necessary for deriving other levels of knowledge. Concepts are words or phases which enable us to classify data and to reduce the complexity of our environment. Generalizations, empirical statements that show how concepts are related, are highly valuable for making decisions. Theory consists of a system of interrelated generations and is the highest form of knowledge. However, the study of theory is more appropriate for advanced high school and college students than for most students in the public schools. Key concepts and their related generalizations are necessary and sufficient to help students make sound decisions on social problems.

Students must not only master higher levels of knowledge in order to make sound decisions, they must also learn to view human behavior from the perspectives of all of the social sciences. A social studies curriculum which focuses on decision-making must be interdisciplinary; it should incorporate key concepts from several disciplines. Knowledge from any one discipline is insufficient to help us make decisions on complex issues such as poverty, racism, and war. To take intelligent action on a social issue such as racism, students must view it from the perspectives of history, sociology, economics, political science, psychology, and anthropology.

While higher-level interdisciplinary knowledge is necessary to make sound decisions, it is not sufficient. Students must also be able to identify, clarify, and analyze their values. Value inquiry and clarification are essential components of a sound social studies curriculum which incorporates the Black experience. Students should also be taught how to relate the concepts and generalizations which they derive to their values and thus to make decisions. Decision-making consists essentially of affirming a course of action after synthesizing knowledge and clarified values. Students should also be provided opportunities whereby they can act on some of the decisions they make. It would be neither possible nor desirable for students to act on all of the decisions which they make in social studies classes. However, “under no circumstances should the school, deliberately or by default, continue to maintain the barriers between itself and the other elements of society” (NCSS Task Force, 1979, p. 17). Social action and participation activities are necessary components of a conceptually oriented, decision-making social studies curriculum which incorporates the Black experience.

The structure of history

Teachers must identify the key concepts within the disciplines and their related generalizations to plan a curriculum that focuses on decision-making and incorporates the Black experience. Identifying the key concepts within history poses special problems. While the behavioral sciences use unique conceptual frameworks to view human behavior, history’s uniqueness stems from the fact that it views behavior which has taken place in the past, is interested in the totality of the human experience, and uses a modified mode of scientific inquiry. While the sociologist and the political scientist are primarily interested in socialization and power respectively, the historian may be and sometimes is interested in how each of these concepts is exemplified in the past behavior of humans. History, then, is an interdisciplinary field since historians, in principle, are interested in all aspects of the human past. It is difficult to speak about unique historical concepts. Every discipline makes use of historical perspectives and has historical components. When sociologists study norms and sanctions during a historical period such as slavery, and economists describe how the slaves produced goods and services, they are studying history.

While history, in principle, is concerned with the totality of the human past, in practice history is largely political because most of the concepts which it uses, such as revolution, government, war, and nationalism, belong to political science. History as it is usually written focuses on great political events and leaders and largely ignores the experiences of common people, non-Western people, ethnic groups, and key concepts from most of the other social sciences, except geography. However, since history, in principle, is concerned with the totality of the human experience, it is potentially the most interdisciplinary of all of the social disciplines and for that reason can serve as an excellent framework for incorporating the Black experience into the curriculum from an interdisciplinary perspective, as illustrated in Table 1.1

Although historians have largely ignored concepts from most of the behavioral sciences, and the struggles and aspirations of common people and people of color, a modern program in historical studies should incorporate these knowledge components. In recent years, historians have become acutely aware of how limited and parochial written history is and have taken steps – but still inadequate ones – to include both the contributions and struggles of ethnic groups in their accounts and to use more concepts from the behavioral sciences. Stanley M. Elkins (1963), in his classic study of slavery, uses a number of psychological concepts and theories to explain the behavior of the slave and master. The trend toward more highly interdisciplinary history will undoubtedly continue as historians become more familiar with behavioral science concepts.

Table 1.1 Studying the Black experience from an interdisciplinary perspective within a historical framework

Incorporating the Black experience into a conceptual curriculum

To illustrate how a program in historical studies can be both interdisciplinary and incorporate the experiences of Black Americans, I have identified seven key concepts from the various disciplines which can be taught within a historical framework and related organizing generalizations and sub-generalizations related to Black history. While the sub-generalizations in the examples related exclusively to the Black experience, a sound social studies program should include content samples that are related to the total human past, including the experiences of American...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: My Epistemological Journey
• Part 1: Black Studies, the Teaching of History, and Research
• Part 2: Teaching Ethnic Studies
• Part 3: Teaching Social Studies for Decision-Making and Citizen Action
• Part 4: Multiethnic Education and School Reform
• Part 5: Multicultural Education and Knowledge Construction
• Part 6: The Global Dimensions of Multicultural Education
• Part 7: Democracy, Diversity, and Citizenship Education
• Selected Bibliography