Ethnicity Research

Ethnicity denotes membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group and observance of that group's customs, beliefs, and language. One of the earliest considerations of the educational development of ethnic minorities in the United States came in the form of the common school movement, which primarily proposed a curriculum intended to encourage a common sense of citizenship and patriotism among U.S. various ethnic groups. However, there were some ethnic groups, such as those of Native American, African American, Latino/a American, and Asian American descent, who were either excluded or marginalized by the common school movement. Within mainstream curriculum conversations, these groups were often thought to be either biologically inferior or culturally deprived; thus the educational development of these groups was aligned with curricula that sought to Christianize, civilize, and/or prepare them for vocations that would maintain their subservience to the dominant group. Although these ideas were prevalent and guided much of the state and or federally supported education of these groups, they did not go uncontested. Members of subordinated ethnic groups challenged these types of curricula with commentaries and studies that stressed the importance of cultural history and values in the education of minority children. Carter G. Woodson's Miseducation of the Negro, for instance, is a classic example of early ethnicity research that critiqued the viability of the mainstream curriculum for African Americans and in so doing laid an important foundation for future ethnicity research and its importance in interrogating, complicating, and broadening mainstream curriculum discourse. However, the exclusion of these ethnic groups from mainstream curriculum conversations and thus often from curriculum history would remain the case until the late 1960s when African Americans and other ethnic minorities began to call for more representation in U.S. school curricula from elementary school to college.

In the 1960s, there were two key developments that ushered the concerns of ethnic minorities into the field of curriculum studies. First, the curriculum field, which had been focused on issues of development and implementation, began to expand its scope to include a more interdisciplinary perspective that sought to broaden the meaning of curriculum and to study its social, political, and cultural dynamics within the context of school and society. Second, following the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, African Americans began to push for more representation in elementary, secondary, and college curricula. Initially their protests gave rise to Black studies programs in many colleges and universities and later as more ethnic groups—Native, Latino/a, and Asian Pacific Americans followed suit, ethnic studies programs became the basis of one of the most significant movements in U.S. education. Many of the scholars who studied in or were influenced by these programs became key proponents of the multicultural education movement. By the 1970s, multicultural education had gained significant recognition as an important prospect in improving the academic achievement of minority children as well as raising the awareness of the majority population about the cultural history and values of various ethnic groups. Although it began as a call for more minority representation in the curriculum, the multicultural education movement developed into a more complex approach aimed at reforming teaching materials, teaching and learning styles, teacher perceptions and behavior, and school culture. Multicultural education has served as the foundation and/or impetus for much of the ethnicity research that has taken place in the field of curriculum studies.

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