Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Multicultural Education, Approaches to Curriculum Reform

The approaches to multicultural curriculum reform is a conceptualization developed by James A. Banks in 1989 to help teachers integrate their curriculum with ethnic and cultural content at increasingly higher levels of complexity and sophistication. The ultimate aim of the approaches' typology is to help teachers develop a transformative approach to curriculum reform that will help students acquire critical thinking skills and the knowledge, attitudes, and action needed to help their communities, nation, and world become democratic and just. This entry defines and illustrates each of the four levels of the Banks approaches to multicultural curriculum reform.

The Contributions Approach

The contributions approach to integration (Level 1 in Figure 1) is frequently used when a school or district first attempts to integrate multicultural content into the mainstream curriculum. The contributions approach is characterized by the insertion of ethnic heroes/heroines and discrete cultural artifacts into the curriculum, selected using criteria similar to those used to select mainstream heroes/heroines and cultural artifacts. Thus, individuals such as Crispus Attucks, Pocahontas, Martin Luther King, Jr., César Chávez, and Barack Obama are added to the curriculum. They are discussed when mainstream American heroes/heroines such as Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Betsy Ross, and Eleanor Roosevelt are studied in the mainstream curriculum. Discrete cultural elements such as the foods, dances, music, and artifacts of ethnic groups are studied, but little attention is given to their meanings and importance within ethnic communities. The contributions approach may also be referred to as the “Heroes and Holidays” approach.

An important characteristic of the contributions approach is that the mainstream curriculum remains unchanged in its basic structure, goals, and salient characteristics. Prerequisites for the implementation of this approach are minimal. They include basic knowledge about U.S. society and knowledge about ethnic heroes and heroines and their roles and contributions to U.S. society and culture. Individuals who challenged the dominant society's ideologies, values, and conceptions and advocated radical social, political, and economic reform are seldom included in the contributions approach. Thus, Booker T. Washington is more likely to be chosen for study than is W. E. B. Du Bois, and Pocahontas is more likely to be chosen than Geronimo.

The Additive Approach

Another important approach to the integration of ethnic content into the curriculum is the addition of content, concepts, themes, and perspectives to the curriculum without changing its basic structure, purposes, and characteristics. The additive approach (Level 2 in Figure 1) is often accomplished by the addition of a book, a unit, or a course to the curriculum without changing it substantially. Examples of this approach include adding a book such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker to a unit on the 20th century in an English class, the use of the film The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman during a unit on the 1960s, and the addition of a videotape on the internment of the Japanese Americans, such as Rabbit in the Moon, during a study of World War II in a class on U.S. history.

Figure 1 Approaches to Multicultural Education Reform

None
Source: Copyright 2004 by James A. Banks.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution