Multicultural Education, Dimensions of

The dimensions of multicultural education is a conceptual framework developed by James A. Banks to help theorists, researchers, and practitioners to better understand the complexity of the field and to implement multicultural education in ways that will increase its effectiveness. Banks developed the dimensions to respond to comments by classroom teachers who perceived multicultural education as limited to the integration of content about various racial and ethnic groups, such as African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans, into the curriculum. Many science and math teachers with whom Banks interacted in multicultural workshops he conducted in schools stated that they did not envision how they could revise their pedagogy to incorporate multicultural issues because science and math were the same regardless of the ethnic, cultural, and ...