Transcription
Hello, and welcome to Teachings in Education: Multicultural Education—Teaching to Diverse Students for Equality. Please take no offense at the images used below. Now, let's begin this video with a quick overview of multicultural education.
The first thing that comes to mind is the perspectives and biases of the current curriculum. This type of education aims to make meaningful changes to curriculum; it attempts to reform educational institutions in a way that empowers individuals from diverse cultures and backgrounds. The data is out there: achievement gaps exist throughout various cultural groups. A multicultural education should highlight cultural diversity and ethnic backgrounds. You want to make sure students from diverse backgrounds feel welcome at home in their schools.
Now, let's take a look at a framework for multicultural education and give credit to James Banks, who put this together. His first dimension of the framework is content integration. Content integration looks to naturally infuse content relevant to the cultures and backgrounds of your students into the curriculum. Here, you can emphasize content from different cultures from around the world and infuse cultural content into various subjects. Students can perform culture studies on their personal heritage after interviewing their parents. Allow the students to present and discuss their cultures with the rest of the classroom.
The next dimension is knowledge construction. In this dimension, educators discuss and analyze the cultural frames of reference, biases, generalizations, and assumptions. One example of different perspectives on historical events would be the voyage of Christopher Columbus and the founding of the Americas. Explore how different cultures might view this event; that can lead to an open discussion. What would the Europeans think, and what would Native Americans think?
The third dimension of the framework is prejudice reduction. Students will develop appreciation and understanding of other cultures by recognizing negative stereotypes. Banks urges teachers to create full lessons and units devoted to exposing prejudice and working towards ways to reduce prejudice in the world. Give examples of misconceptions about different cultural groups. Be sure to offer positive examples of accomplishments of each culture.
On to the last dimension: equity pedagogy. Here, you should see teachers planning their lessons using various instructional strategies that are beneficial to diverse cultures. Teachers should vary their presentations and activities; insert kinesthetic learning activities. Teachers can also vary their assessment by incorporating performance-based assessments. It doesn't have to be traditional standardized tests that most teachers force onto their students. Allow for presentations as well.
For the remainder of the video, we will focus on multicultural curriculum reform approaches, also credit to James Banks. Now, there are four types of approaches. The first one being the contributions approach: cultural heroes and ethnic artifacts are added to the curriculum during holidays and specific lessons. During a Mexican holiday, for example, teachers might bring up a little history on the holiday and allow students to bring in culturally relevant food. Teachers might place a spotlight on important inventors and scientists. However, this approach is very limited, and students don't really get a chance to learn the full story.
The next approach is additive. In-depth content, themes, and perspectives are added to the curriculum without making changes. It may be necessary to add a unit on the history of Africa in literature class; add specific books that touch upon under-represented cultures. Just as African history and culture are often neglected, so too is Japanese culture and history. There is much that students can learn from this beautiful culture.
The third curriculum approach is transformative. This curriculum is changed—transformed—in a way that focuses on the perspective of diverse cultures. Schools must present a curriculum that allows students to see and understand the different ways that certain cultural groups have benefitted while other cultural groups have been harmed. Have students consider the viewpoints of different countries in terms of the United States.
The last approach is social action. Here, the curriculum allows for students to recognize vital social issues and take action to solve these issues. As students study specific examples of bigotry and discrimination, from there, students can cooperatively work to identify prejudice within their personal lives and the school system. Students should then search for relevant data related to social issues that they're looking to take on in their lives. Allow for students to have productive, open discussions.
Right now, I just want to say thank you for your time. Please subscribe to the channel and don't forget to like and share this video. See you soon. [Music]