Multicultural Education

Historical Development

While the concerns, values, and ideals that inform multicultural education have been emphasized by educational movements across the world, as a formal movement, multicultural education traces its origins in the United States.

During the early decades of the 20th century, increased migration from southern, central, and eastern European countries to the United States, and later the migration of African Americans from the south to north during the mid-20th century, heightened concerns about the integration of those who had different races, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The earliest educational efforts to engage with these differences are found in the work of the intercultural and intergroup educational movements. These movements advocated for and designed curricular interventions, models of schooling, and teacher training programs that sought to engender an appreciation and understanding of incoming cultures as well as produce a sense of pride in the immigrants about their own heritage. Their approaches, however, were later criticized for advocating an assimilationist approach. It was argued that the normative, middle-class, white American culture formed the invisible background against which all incoming cultures were tolerated or appreciated and that these movements simply sought to integrate the immigrants into a predefined norm, thereby reproducing power asymmetries.

The passing of the Immigration Reform Act and the Civil Rights Act during the 1960s created another impetus for migration to the United States. Large numbers of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and South America provoked similar fears around racial purity and normative American values. This time around, however, a different movement called multicultural education sought to address these issues through a multidimensional and multidisciplinary perspective.

Dimensions of Multicultural Education

Multicultural education emerged in response to the limited engagement of earlier educational movements with a difference. It was positioned, according to James Banks, as a more complex and nuanced approach to difference and proposed at least five distinct dimensions: a critical analysis of how knowledge is constructed to investigate implicit cultural and racial assumptions and biases; an evaluation of [Page 886]students’ own attitudes toward those of other races and cultures; an effort to integrate examples from various cultural groups across all subject areas; a commitment by teachers to employ a pedagogy that facilitates learning and achievement of students from diverse backgrounds; and establishment of a school culture that empowers diverse students. Multicultural education, thus, sought to transform not only the experiences of students and teachers but the entire schooling environment.

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