Ethnic Studies, Integration Into K–12 Curriculum

Many contemporary educators may assume that the incorporation of ethnic content into the K–12 curriculum began in the 1960s as a consequence of the civil rights movement. While there was a strong impetus to integrate ethnic content into the school curriculum during the 1960s, efforts to establish an ethnically diverse curriculum began in the first decades of the 20th century. Historians such as George Washington Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Carter G. Woodson, and psychologist George Sanchez realized much earlier that the U.S. public school curriculum did not accurately present ethnic and cultural diversity in the nation. Woodson and colleagues had established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and in 1926 Woodson began Negro History Week, which eventually evolved into Black History Month. Early African American and Latino scholars tried to present to American students a curriculum that was representative of reality; however, the times in which they lived did not support their versions of school knowledge.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights movement sought equal treatment for all Americans and also pointed to glaring omissions in the school curriculum. Initial efforts to include more ethnic content into the school curriculum involved inserting heroes and holidays into the elementary school curriculum without changing the curriculum in fundamental ways or the perspectives from which concepts, issues, and historical events were taught. James A. Banks refers to this form of content integration as the ethnic additive approach to curricular reform. In the additive approach, students are exposed to famous people such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and classrooms are decorated with posters containing African American themes. Such activities usually took place during February, which is African American History Month. Issues such as the rationale for Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation were generally ignored in additive approaches to curriculum reform.

In high schools, elective classes such as Black history or Black literature were offered in schools that had significant populations of African American students when an ethnic additive approach to school reform was used. Although open to all students, the classes were generally taken by African American students and regarded as an opportunity for them to learn about their heritage. These mono-ethnic classes did not fulfill graduation requirements. Consequently, these courses did not affect what most high school students [Page 841]learned because the standard curriculum taken by all students was changed very little if at all.

After the 1960s, the curriculum underwent a slow and gradual change. Some high schools offered elective classes covering more than one ethnic group, such as classes on the history of U.S. minorities. However, these courses were electives and were taken mostly by students of color. In the decades that followed, the term multiethnic education gradually evolved into multicultural education as the contributions of women, people with disabilities, and other groups were included in the curriculum to make it more representative of the diversity in U.S. life and culture. Multicultural educators argued that, although this was an improvement, these changes did not address fundamental issues of equity in American society, and the major concepts, issues, and events taught in the public school curriculum were fundamentally unchanged.

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