Retrieved January 07, This is true in spite of the fact that Hispanic Americans are the largest minority group in the United States today. Most of the seminal scholars in multicultural education Banks, Gay, Sleeter, Nieto, McGee Banks, Grant are persons who earned degrees in other areas of education and developed expertise in multicultural education by devoting their careers to research and writing in this area, multicultural education essay. Research into this pattern suggests that minority students are using this time to create a homogeneous and comfortable space where they can relax in an accepting atmosphere in order to face the rest of the school day. Furthermore, this aspect of multicultural education strengthens constructive contact with members of other cultural groups, multicultural education essay, which decreases discrimination. This form of curricular change, although more far-reaching than monocultural courses, is more difficult to achieve because it requires an entire faculty to be prepared to deliver it instead multicultural education essay just a few specialists.
Embracing Characteristics of Multicultural Education
Searching for writers Place an order. Track the Progress. Receive a Paper. All revisions are for FREE. The modern world is brimming with people belonging from different cultures and countries. It has become quite important the individuals residing from a particular group learn about the cultures and norms of other groups to obtain a global harmony. Since the time of colonization, people have experienced unequal behaviors and various prejudices based on their cultures and races. Previously different cultures were deemed to be superior to some others. This essentially created a master-slave relationship that constituted an unhealthy hierarchy.
However, the modern world is multicultural education essay, and the barriers of different cultures are slowly crumbling. People are getting interested in other cultures and trying to understand how multicultural education essay cultures work. The culture of a learner will be affected by the way he perceives the world around him. The culture of a student will be influenced by the way he experiences, considers, feels, and behaves in the classroom. On the other hand, the culture of an individual man will be reflected by his speech, dress, manners, and various other factors like food habits and choice of designs.
Multicultural education essay thus can be said to be defined by the various distinctiveness and points of view of any particular group of people. Multicultural education multicultural education essay to the use of different strategies to educate and reach students who belong to various cultural backgrounds. These methods have been developed in order to help instructors and teachers so that they can provide better responses to the variety of demographics of the classroom, multicultural education essay. One of the critical benefits of multicultural education is that students belonging to different cultures and backgrounds are taught differently, and due to this diverse way of teaching, the outcome is successful.
Multicultural education can be seen as a kind of strategy of learning that deals with all sorts multicultural education essay concepts like race, ethnicity, language, multicultural education essay, origin, and create an effective technique of teaching where the individuality of every student is encouraged rather than being shamed. Multicultural education generally addresses the various bias and differences of various cultures by providing the same kind of opportunities of education for every type of student, irrespective of their culture and heritage. The main goals of multicultural education are educational fairness, cultural pluralism, cross-cultural competency, particular relation, social reconstruction, and inclusion of studies related to global issues and ethnic groups.
In the USA, multicultural education focuses on enlightening the students in a way so that they get to know about the origins of different cultures and races. Multicultural education also works towards showing the positive side of each kind of culture in order to include it in an educational environment. Such an approach multicultural education essay make sure that there is no bias while providing education to students belonging to different kinds of cultures. As a teacher, it is essential to understand that one should not get angry or disappointed if a particular action does not reflect the same result as expected.
The multicultural education essay should also have the understanding that various comments on different cultures will affect the students belonging from different cultures in different ways. He thus needs to be sensitive to the content he will be teaching in a multicultural class. A multicultural essay incorporates such factors as the differences between various cultures and what makes them all different, multicultural education essay. A multicultural essay also discusses how the concept of multicultural came into being and how it has affected society.
An essay on multiculture should necessarily give the details of certain particular cultures that have broken their barriers and are now working towards knowing each other. It also traces towards how gradually the entire multicultural education essay is accepting the concept of multicultre and working towards making the earth one large village. A multicultural essay also focuses on classrooms that hold students belonging from different cultures and how one should deal with them. In simpler terms, when you are writing a multicultural essay, you need to be well aware of various cultures that have come together through the evolution of time. Robert Slavin mentioned that one of the best ways in multicultural education essay multicultural education can work is by making the students belonging from different cultures respectful and sensitive to other cultures.
The teacher should also be unbiased to any particular culture when he is teaching in a multicultural class. It is also essential for the teacher to have a basic understanding of the background of each type of cultural belonging in the class to refrain from multicultural education essay any comment on any of the cultures that might appear sensitive to the students belonging from that particular culture. The teaching module and syllabus in a multicultural class should focus on the positive side of all cultural groups. It should not stereotype any particular kind of culture in a specific role. It is essential that the course module helps to see all sorts of ethnic groups belonging to the class in a positive light, multicultural education essay.
This would help the students to become friendly to each other and respect the multicultural dimension in the real sense of the term. Racial prejudice and discrimination should be a strict no in a multicultural classroom, and neither the teacher nor any of the students should indulge in it. If the teacher notices any student engaging in such an activity, he should be immediately reported to ensure that the class harmony is maintained. Thusa multicultural essay helps us in a better understanding of the concept of multiculture and how it works in a modern world.
A well written multicultural essay will establish the essence of multiculture in educational classrooms and also in our everyday society as well and provide us ways through which we can become the better preservers of the growing understanding of multiculture. About us Our services Topics Contact. An Insight Into the Multicultural Education Essay Format Multicultural education refers to the use of different strategies to educate and reach students who belong to various cultural backgrounds. Nov 27, Essay Subjects Academic Essay.
African Studies. Analytic Essay. Anthropology Essay. Architecture Essays. Argumentative Essay. Art Essay. Artificial Intelligence. Biology Essay. Biophysics Essay. Business Essay. Chemistry Essay. Common App Essay, multicultural education essay. Comparative Literature. Compare and Contrast Essay. Computer Science Essay. Culture Essay. Data Science. Definition Essay. Descriptive Essay. East Asian Studies. Economics Essay. English Language and Creative Writing Essays. Essays Tips. Ethnographic Studies Essay. Exploratory Essay. Expository Essays. Film Studies Essay. German Studies, multicultural education essay.
Health and Lifestyle Essay. History Essays, multicultural education essay. History of United States. Holidays Essay. Journalism Essay. Latino Studies. Literature Essay. Machine Learning, multicultural education essay. Management Essay. Music Essay. Personal Essay. Philosophy Essay. Politics Essay. Population Studies. Psychology Essay. Reflective Essay. Religion Essay. Scholarship Essay. Science Essay. Sociology Essays. Technology Essays. Thematic Essay.
how to be successful in college essay
This provided a strong basis of the development of multicultural education in the U. This is because all of these groups started to demand their rights promised under the Constitution as well as their individual equal chances of handling and representation. It is evident that education is highly vital in influencing cultural outlooks because of its socializing potential. With regard to this assertion, education can help an individual expand his or her perception concerning cultural plurality. Moreover, through education, an individual can achieve insights through censure and become aware of new cultural viewpoints Kuo, Since there was a widespread appreciation to public education, multicultural education became a primal issue in most of the legislations and movements of the time.
During this time, there was the development of numerous social and academic programs. The main reason of this was that discrimination became a social issue, particularly among marginalized groups, in comparison to the white overriding culture. One of the programs developed was the Head Start program made to offer deprived children a preschool experience prior to entering kindergarten Mwonga, 5. During this period also, there was a concern for teaching leniency and enhancing cross-cultural discourse, which came along with the development of ethnic studies.
It is evident that the post-World War II and interwar years in the US experienced the development of a second stage intercultural education, which came after ethnic studies. In addition, there was the passing of several acts including the Coleman Report of There was realization that discrimination was still rampant in public schools, hence the acts were to address these disparities. Conversely, the proponents of these programs created them in a hurried way, consequently rendering them unproductive at both organizational and systemic levels. This development led to the initiation of multicultural education as an academic option to deal with these social and academic disparities Mwonga, 6. A strong sense of social justice characterized multicultural education just like the already developed ethnic studies.
This form of education corresponds to the s and s uprisings that centered on gender equality, the rights of disabled people and bilingual education. Conversely, the prospects of this education considered particular groups of students as lacking cultural effectiveness and consequently discriminating them. The reason for this is that the major objective of multicultural education was to accommodate everyone in the system. This discrimination the happened in schools was because of civil rights movements. Nevertheless, there was evidence, as noted by researchers that there was significant over-representation of certain groups of students in special education classes and eliminated from normal classrooms and peers.
In an attempt to summon the unplanned outcomes of compensatory education around the country, the pioneering cohort of teacher tutors in the US developed multicultural teacher education curriculums. There was a lot of emphasis from the departments and programs of multiethnic studies nationwide to educate about the histories and cultures of all individuality groups in interaction, not just of single groups in isolation. Multicultural education is an academic approach and substitute, which understands and endeavors to change the inequalities that are present in the education and social sector.
Multicultural education represents an independent form of education that establishes the diversity of contemporary society. In addition, this form of education is an integral part in attempting offer the long time minority groups with adequate public education. This would consequently lead to the development of competent, socially enlightened and active independent citizens. There is however, a significant gap between citizenship education and multicultural education, which signifies the ultimate failure to understand the integration of the majority and minority. In an attempt to encourage nationality education, multicultural education endeavors to unite the parts of majority and minority for the creation of reasonable, complete and fair communities.
On the other hand, multicultural education does not only encompass populations characterized by different backgrounds but it entails citizenship education for all students Mwonga, 4. Birkela argues that there is a sharp distinction between multicultural education and the social institutions of education. This significant disparity rests in the emphasis on the realistic and the theoretical aspects of education. In case of multicultural education, stress rests much on practical aspect while concentrating on improving the learning process in an open and instant manner.
On the other hand, the social foundations of education aim to enhance the learning procedure by examining the content in which the education system occurs in a significant, vital and normative way. In addition, it is evident that the social foundations of education scrutinize the learning system to devise theory, while multicultural education scrutinizes theory to enhance the learning practice This is primarily to demonstrate major perceptions, values, theories and assertions, in the subjects that they teach 5.
Multicultural proponents contend that knowledge mirrors the literary, social, and authority status of individuals within the community since it is both subjective and intentional 7. Moreover, supporting children for selecting black objects lessens White bias and teaching students to distinguish the faces of non-members decreases unfairness. Furthermore, this aspect of multicultural education strengthens constructive contact with members of other cultural groups, which decreases discrimination. Equity pedagogy encompasses approaches and conditions that assist students coming from different cultural, ethnic and racial groups acquire the outlooks, knowledge and skills needed for effective functioning.
This aspect also helps in the creation of a humane and just society, which integrates and considers the rights of all individuals regardless of the differences that might occur 9. The last dimension entails transformation of the adamant structure of the school, which in turn helps to accommodate students from different cultural backgrounds experience fairness and a sense of strength There are various aspects give way or justify the occurrence of multicultural education. In the United States, the population has been changing adamantly. The population of foreign-based persons is very high all over the country. These foreign-based people are from very distinct and diverse cultural and racial backgrounds, which make most of the cities of the U. This has ultimately led to a large number of foreign-based students enrolled in most U.
public schools. The effect of this, is the need for a form of education that would encompass all these diverse cultures, hence the necessity of multicultural education. There are very many goals of multicultural education. Some of them are to lessen bias, to enhance coherent understanding among the different cultural groups living together. Another goal is to accomplish the autonomous ideal of fairness under the act and autonomy of thought and action in instituted law. This form of education also endeavors to shape harmony in diversity through the notion of cultural diversity.
It also aims to found an approval of how the diverse cultures in the same society can make useful contributions. This is because, a culturally diverse society have diverse knowledge and expertise that can positively transforming the society Birkela, Another strong goal of multicultural education is to unify people rather than dividing them along racial, ethnic and gender lines. Multicultural education centers on the system of learning and by this; it seeks to ensure that the process of learning is equitable and helpful to people of all cultures. Concerning this goal, its major apprehension is with the student, the educator, the classroom, and the school Multicultural education presents many benefits to the students, the teachers, the society and the country involved.
This form of education also enhances cognitive and ethical development among all people in their diverse cultures. In addition, due to the diverse outlooks applied to similar problems for resolutions, it improves inventive problem-solving skills. were rare indeed. Carter G. Woodson argued that when African Americans were taught with a curriculum that portrayed them in inferior positions in society, they would find those places and stay in them. When Woodson observed this in , he knew the immense power of an educational system that viewed African Americans as second-class citizens, rationalized that view, and educated them to accept the prevailing social hierarchy of the time.
In the s and s, other African American scholars, such as Allison Davis, followed Woodson and critiqued many of the prevailing views of the nature of intelligence testing and its implications about the abilities of African American students. After devoting a career to studying culture-fair intelligence and achievement tests, Davis observed that racial and ethnic differences in standardized tests were due to the tests themselves. Davis realized that lower average scores posted by African American students were not a result of innate differences, but of differences that arise from discrepancies in experience. Another scholar whose early work influenced multicultural education was George I.
Professor Sanchez, a native New Mexican, devoted his career to removing educational obstacles for Mexican Americans. In , Sanchez published an article attacking the notion that Mexican American children were inherently intellectually inferior to native English-speaking American children. Sanchez argued that environmental and linguistic factors were associated with the IQ scores of Mexican American children. This was not widely recognized at the time. Thus, Sanchez married the fields of Mexican American, African American, bilingual, and rural education. Another group of progressive educators in the s and s concerned with equity issues were those involved in intercultural and intergroup education.
Scholars such as Rachel Davis Du Bois, John Granrud, and Hilda Taba were key figures among intercultural and intergroup educators and promoted programs that linked schooling to the community. Intercultural educators focused more on immigrant cultures and the need to have immigrant children comfortable with their cultures of origin. Intergroup education sprung from race riots that occurred during World War II in Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Beaumont, Texas. The goal of this movement was to increase tolerance in the nation, and intergroup educators enacted prejudice reduction programs in many schools. Although intercultural and intergroup education did not directly convert to multicultural education a few years later, these movements show other concerted efforts to bring about greater equity and social justice in American education.
A goal shared by many of the early scholars was to establish accurate information about ethnic groups and incorporate it into the school curriculum. In doing so, they hoped that this would help to dispel many of the myths and stereotypes that abounded about ethnic minority groups. Although these early scholars may not have exactly envisioned the contemporary field of multicultural education, their ideas of equity and social justice are core concepts of multicultural education today. In the s, the civil rights movement created some changes in American public education.
Many civil rights activists and educators noted that the histories and contributions of American minority groups were largely absent from the mainstream curriculum. In many schools, these pressures resulted in courses focusing on one ethnic group such as African American history or Hispanic literature being added to the curriculum. However, these monoethnic or monocultural courses were almost always regarded as electives to provide an opportunity for students of a particular background to learn about themselves. The incorporation of multicultural content into courses taken by all students did not begin in a significant way for another decade or two.
True multicultural curricular change does not prevent specialized monoethnic or monocultural courses. However, multicultural curricular integration looks closely at the cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender perspectives presented to all students in the required core curriculum. This form of curricular change, although more far-reaching than monocultural courses, is more difficult to achieve because it requires an entire faculty to be prepared to deliver it instead of just a few specialists. It also affects all students, which means that more parents could potentially question curricular changes.
The major dimensions of multicultural education have been defined by James A. Banks, one of the leading contemporary scholars in multicultural education. He provides the following:. Most topics relating to multicultural education may be subsumed under one of these categories. Meaningful integration of multicultural content into the school curriculum is a difficult task. The first problem is that many teachers lack academic backgrounds with a solid multicultural knowledge base. Thus, many high school English teachers have strong grasps of the writing of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Poe, but often lack a similar knowledge base regarding African, Asian, or Hispanic American authors.
Although this situation is improving, there is always the natural tendency for teachers to gravitate toward topics they know best. This is in keeping with the designated months for teaching each of these subjects. A key concept in multicultural curricular change is whether change is occurring at the core or at the periphery of knowledge. Are central concepts in a subject being examined through various cultural, ethnic, and gender perspectives, or is the multicultural material confined to boxed inserts in textbooks? How is multicultural information related to the mainstream narrative?
Using the example of African American troops fighting for the Union in the Civil War, peripheral inclusion is given when teachers or texts mention that President Lincoln approved their use for combat in Lincoln had originally taken the opposite view. Teaching this event as a core concept in the Civil War would explain to students that White reserves for the Union Army were nearly exhausted when President Lincoln changed his mind. This infusion of African American troops bolstered the Union Army to the extent that the preservation of the Union was greatly advanced by Black men in blue. Most teaching about the Civil War does not emphasize the significance of this event.
Many schools include multicultural content in peripheral or cultural additive ways. Occasional heroes and holidays are mentioned in ways that are totally disconnected from the curriculum and certainly from evaluation. A multicultural curriculum guarantees that multiple perspectives will be included in how students see knowledge. This curriculum discourages binary thinking and encourages critical thinking skills. However, multicultural content is rarely found on standardized tests in schools today. Emphasis on standardized tests tends to marginalize any curricular content that is not on the standardized test. Thus, evaluative trends that tend to emphasize skills instead of knowledge create an academic climate where multicultural literacy is devalued.
This could be changed if multicultural literacy became an integral part of basic literacy expected and evaluated in all students. In all societies, the public school curriculum is a sample of the universe of knowledge in each subject. Because it is impossible to teach all students all literature, mathematics, history, or science, it is very important to examine the decision-making process in every society. What determines the information, concepts, and perspectives taught to all students in the public school curriculum, and what facts, concepts, and perspectives are omitted and remain in libraries only to be discovered by the truly curious?
This process is clearly guided by societal values. Often, societies minimize or omit from the public school curriculum knowledge that is not complimentary to a positive societal image. It is understandable that people of any nation do not like to see themselves portrayed in a negative light, but omission from the curriculum of uncomplimentary topics can generate feelings of distrust among students if or when they learn about these matters later in life. The net result of these forces is that the stories of all American ethnic and cultural groups are not included in the narratives shared with all students.
This lack in information about some Americans, while information abounds in the curriculum about others, creates many misconceptions. Information voids are often filled with rumor, innuendo, and misinformation. To bring home this point, ask some people how much they learned about Hispanic Americans from the K—12 school curriculum. If they respond with Spanish explorers or early colonizers, remind them that these individuals were Spaniards, not Hispanic Americans. Four hundred years of the history of Hispanic Americans in the United States is hardly mentioned in the core curriculum.
This is true in spite of the fact that Hispanic Americans are the largest minority group in the United States today. students learn. In the United States, the process of analyzing which knowledge is worthy of being included in the school curriculum is a complex one. This process takes place largely in the political arena. The No Child Left Behind NCLB legislation injected the national government into the curricular process. Prior to NCLB, curriculum, testing, and accountability were largely state and local school board affairs.
Since the law was passed, adequate yearly progress AYP has become the major goal of schools, and those areas of the curriculum that are measured in AYP largely verbal and quantitative skills receive a major share of time, resources, and attention. All states set curricular standards for high school graduation that may be enhanced by local school boards. National publishers, who create the textbooks and materials for nearly all U. students, take this information to create textbooks and other materials for the various markets for K—12 public and private education. John Goodlad, an eminent researcher in education, found that textbooks provide about 90 percent of the curricular content in the average U.
There is little doubt that the values in a society are largely responsible for determining curriculum. As those values change, the curriculum may change to include topics that earlier values may not have supported. The converse may also happen. Values may change and cause a society to delete from the curriculum what was previously taught. American values in the twenty-first century are more receptive to having students achieve multicultural literacy about the United States than the values that were prevalent in the s to support this concept. When educators take on the challenge to present viable multicultural concepts and information throughout the curriculum, they are automatically giving voice to many perspectives that previously were found only outside of formal schooling.
This suggests to students how recent some rights are; how difficult it has been to achieve them; and that citizens need to be vigilant and knowledgeable, but not complacent. A common critique among those who oppose multicultural topics in the curriculum is that this change is injecting a political element into what students learn. This view assumes that the existing curriculum was adopted without any political considerations. This is very rarely the case because the decision of what to include or exclude in the curriculum could be interpreted as a political act. This dimension of multicultural education speaks to what educators do in schools and the degree to which these activities provide maximum opportunities for students to learn. Research in education has shown that the quality of the teacher is a significant variable in how much students learn.
Therefore, which students have access to the highest-quality teachers is of great importance. Some school districts today are paying high-quality teachers bonuses to teach in low-income schools. However, the general pattern is that teacher turnover in low-income schools is much higher than in schools in more affluent communities. This is doubly ironic when one considers that children who start life with considerably less are expected to catch up to those who are more advantaged and to do so with less access to high-quality teachers.
In addition to the overall distribution of high-quality teachers, equity pedagogy also addresses what takes place in the classroom. Wait time, or the time that elapses between a teacher asking a question and recognizing a student for an answer, has been estimated at around one second. In this one second, the average English-language learner in the class is still processing the question, rather than thinking of an answer. Numerous studies on classroom discourse patterns indicate that teachers most of whom are female tend to favor male students over female students in recognizing them to speak in class as well as in giving high-quality feedback. Other studies have shown that teachers prefer middle and upper middle-class students over lower-class students. When courts have had to get involved in the provision of equity pedagogy and equitable learning opportunities for students, they have almost always intervened on behalf of poor or minority students or students with disabilities.
Students in these categories were not able to get appropriate redress through the political process that governs schools, so they resorted to the courts. Cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, Lau v. Nichols, Swann v. CharlotteMecklenburg, and Larry P. Riles illustrate this point. It is important that teacher preparation, as well as teacher in-service activities, focus on elements of classroom practice where the reality falls short of the ideal. Teachers who are engaging in classroom practices that do not fully reach their students, typically do so unintentionally. Teaching is very demanding, and teachers develop habits that may go unexamined without careful reflection and continuing dialogue with students. Multicultural education suggests that issues such as these, which are well documented by research, should be presented in teacher preparation and addressed in the daily operation of schools.
Understanding this dimension of multicultural education is critical in order to improve school climates. As mentioned earlier, during World War II, the intergroup education movement was begun to improve race and intergroup relations through public schools. This affective filter may have two students in the same classroom with widely different notions of how comfortable they are. Likewise, students may experience a variety of academic climates as they change classes or environments during the school day. The fact that a school may have a multicultural student population does not mean that school is integrated. It may simply be desegregated.
No comments:
Post a Comment