Hillary Janks article on Domination, Access, Diversity and Design: a synthesis for critical literacy education made me think of multicultural education in the United States. As I understand it, there continues to be a struggle in the implementation of multicultural education curriculum in our public schools, and I think it is due to the domination of the "American Culture" aka as "white culture." It's also a question of access as Janks points out "If we provide students with access to dominant forms, this contributes to maintaining their dominance. If, on the other hand, we deny students access, we perpetuate their marginalization in a society that continues to recognize the value and importance of these forms (p.176)." I see this happening with the text books in U.S. public schools. There is really one side that is presented in text books, especially history books that perpetuate the domination of the white culture and only now are they trying to superficially speak to a more culturally diverse audience. I read this great book called Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. It really does a great job in pointing out the myriad of inaccuracies in the history text books we read in high school. More importantly he shows how historical conflicts can be connected to modern day life. Something that most text books fail at and instead neatly package and compartmentalize the information into neat chapters.
Multicultural education also is able to appeal to a more diverse student population naturally, but it has the design or redesign component that Janks speaks to as well. Unfortunately, academic politics continues to get in the way. I liked her quote on "Knowledge cannot advance without contestation and movement." For without a critical discourse, how can we hear other voices?
3 comments:
The Dead White Men. As a history teacher i both love and hate them. but i feel with books like lies my teacher told me and the work being done by ronald takaki and howard zinn, we can begin to teach all backgrounds. We need to be aware that text books focus on the white men with a few token minorities. it seems almost impossible to teach everything, so where do you draw the line? THat is the question I am struggling with these days.
I think what Loewen's books do is make visible the ways in which texts, broadly construed, that dot the American landscape, are written/constructed/produced, from particular perspective with particular intentions. What this does is to highlight the sorts of ways in which we as readers of that landscape are positioned in particular ways.
Congratulations again on becoming a new mommy of a gorgeous little one!
Thanks K.
vivian
lots of times, people think of multicultural education as teaching that goes on in places where the population is extremely diverse culturally. this makes sense; teaching in a multicultural manner would reach the majority of students from such a community. it heightens the sense of value that students feel for their background.
on the other side of the tracks are the communities in america that are not so diverse culturally. due to the increasingly connected global society in which we live, no town/city/region is an island unto itself. multicultural education makes sense, then, in these monochromatic communities because it educates them about the world and people with whom they may be interacting with in the future. such an educational approach will show these students that their are other cultures worthy of value and respect besides their own.
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