Multicultural Education Series

Origin of the Series

In 1996, Brian Ellerbeck—senior acquisition editor at Teachers College Press—invited Banks to develop a proposal for a multicultural education series of books that he could present to the editorial board of the press for its consideration. Banks had recently completed editing, with Cherry A. McGee Banks, the first edition of the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, which was published by Macmillan in 1995. Banks decided to accept Ellerbeck's invitation to develop a proposal for the series primarily because he viewed the series as a way to expand the work that he and Cherry A. McGee Banks had undertaken in the handbook—the primary aim of which was to build and strengthen multicultural education as a scholarly discipline and academic field. Banks's plan, which he implemented, was to invite a number of the authors who had written chapters in the handbook to write book manuscripts on similar topics for the series. Banks edited the first book in the series—Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives; he wrote the second book in the series, Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society, which was based on an interrelated group on his articles and book chapters.

Banks believed that in order to enhance and further develop the field of multicultural education, early career scholars and perceptive practitioners as well as established scholars such as those who had written chapters for the handbook should be invited to write books for the series. Banks invited Gary Howard, one of his mentees and colleagues, to write the third book in the series. Based on work in his predominantly White school district in Arlington, in the state of Washington, Howard had developed the REACH Center to help White teachers acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to help students acquire democratic racial attitudes and values. Howard's book, We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools—in first and second editions—became and remained the best-selling book in the series until Linda Darling-Hammond published her second book in the series in 2010, The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. Other best-selling books in the series include those by Geneva Gay, Sonia Nieto, Pedro Noguera, and James Loewen.

Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools by Walter Stephan, and The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities by Sonia Nieto, were the fourth and fifth books in the series, respectively. Mary Dilg, a high school English teacher at the prestigious Frances W. Parker School in Chicago—where, by coincidence, Banks was a fifth-grade teacher in the 1960s—wrote the sixth book in the series, Race and Culture in the Classroom: Teaching and Learning Through Multicultural Education. Dilg published a second book in the series in 2010, Our Worlds in Our Words: Exploring Race, Class, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in Multicultural Classrooms. The series, by publishing scholarly as well as practitioner-oriented books, aims to increase [Page 1558]its influence on theory and research as well as practice.

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