Multicultural Education

Multicultural education is a progressive movement and framework for educational transformation that holistically critiques and addresses shortcomings, failings, and inequities in schools and schooling. Grounded in ideals of equity, critical pedagogy, and social justice, multicultural education is dedicated to facilitating educational experiences in which all students reach their full potential as learners as well as socially aware and active beings of their local, national, and global societies.

Multicultural education acknowledges that schools are essential for laying the foundation for the elimination of inequity and injustice in these societies. So the underlying goal of the movement is to effect social change through three concurrent strands of transformation. The first is the transformation of self, wherein educators examine the ways in which their biases and prejudices affect their teaching and their students' learning. As they do so, they concurrently help their students think critically about the world around them and the implications of oppression, globalization, capitalism, and other sociopolitical dynamics. The second strand of transformation is that of schools and schooling, rooting inequities out of the form and content of education. The final strand is the transformation of society into one of equity and social justice.

The historical roots of multicultural education lie in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. During that period, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling ended legal segregation in the schools, African American, Native American, and Latina/o students, parents, community leaders, and activists demanded that school curricula and hiring practices better reflect the racial diversity of the United States. The movement expanded as other historically disenfranchised groups, such as other groups of color, women, the lesbian and gay community, people with disabilities, and people in poverty, along with their advocates and allies, mobilized to challenge educational inequities and insist on curricula more inclusive of their histories and experiences.

By the 1970s, a growing collective of diverse movements, from feminism and womanism to disability rights alliances, were coalescing around a new vision for equity and social justice in education. The resulting movement, which aimed at eliminating racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, language discrimination, and other forms of oppression from school policy and practice became known as multicultural education.

As schools, colleges, and other educational organizations began to respond, with varying levels of urgency and commitment, to the curricular and other concerns raised by multicultural education, a host of programs and practices emerged, usually focused on slight changes or additions to traditional curricula, which were still dominated by a white, male, heterosexual, Christian, middle-class, English-speaking perspective. During the 1980s, a growing body of scholarship from educator-activists such as Sonia Nieto, Carl Grant, Christine Sleeter, Jeannie Oakes, and James Banks emerged, challenging this approach by refusing to allow schools to tokenize the experiences and histories of disenfranchised students. Their vision for multicultural education expanded in scope, beyond curriculum and hiring practices, to an insistence upon equity and justice in all aspects of schools and schooling. They argued that every characteristic of education must be examined critically and transformed so that all students have an equitable opportunity to achieve and succeed. Responding to the vision of these critical pioneering voices, multicultural education scholars and [Page 987]practitioners began to take on larger battles within the education milieu, exposing inequitable policy and practice, such as tracking, school funding discrepancies, standardization, the literary canon, and dis-empowering pedagogy, that structurally underlie traditional concepts of education.

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