Multicultural Curriculum

Multicultural Curriculum Principles

Invariably, curriculum is created in and reflects multiple layers of contextual influences. This reality defies the hopes of some educators that a single multicultural curriculum can be created and transported across all school settings and student populations. Scholars may not speak in a single nomenclature (nor should they be expected to do so), but there is a high level of agreement among them about why multicultural education is important, what are its fundamental substantive components, and how it should be implemented. Together these ideas constitute the foundations for curriculum development for and about ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity.

The conceptual and ideological parameters of multicultural education provide baselines for creating curriculum rationales, goals, and objectives, content, learning experiences, and assessment procedures for students and teachers. One of these emphasizes ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity within the United States, as opposed to global or international settings. This initiative originally grew out of concerns about discrimination and oppression against groups of color in U.S. society and the inequities they suffer in educational institutions. Some advocates extend these constituent concerns to other dimensions of diversity (such as gender, social class, and sexual orientation), but not as the expense of or as proxies for race and ethnicity, and locations of analysis (national and global). As groups, African, Latino, Native, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander Americans [Page 587]have the lowest records of school performance, regardless of the achievement measures or indicators used, level of schooling, or social class of students. Proponents of multicultural education suggest that they are more a function of educational programs, policies, and practices that ignore or demean the cultures, heritages, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically and racially diverse groups than the intellectual abilities, interests, and aspirations of individual students. Interventions that counter these attitudes and related practices may be the best courses of action to pursue for closing achievement gaps among students from majority and underrepresented groups. This is a logical premise to make because race, ethnicity, class, culture, and education are deeply interconnected.

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