ED 518

Multicultural Education

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Unit 1

Unit 2

Unit 3

Unit 4

Unit 5

Unit 6

Unit 1 Focus is the advance organizer of ED 618
Why is it necessary to have a course in a teacher education program devoted to issues pertaining to multicultural education and multiple intelligences? This course encompasses two diverse content areas; the multiple intelligences theory that addresses curriculum, assessment, and instruction issues and multicultural education interdisciplinary content that focuses on diversity and cultural issues. Bennett (2001) Recalling Brown decision of 1954 that reversed the “separate but equal clause”, Bennett (2001) writes
A disproportional high numbers of nation’s African American, Native American children, and Latino children and youth were placed in special education for the handicapped or culturally disadvantaged. Others were suspended or expelled for reasons of the teacher discretion or attended schools where teachers and the curriculum reflected primarily Anglo-European American perspectives (p. 171-172)

While legally any child can attend any public school, Orfield (2004) writes, “nationally, only about two-thirds of all students – and only half of all blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans – who enter ninth grade graduate with regular diplomas four years later”
(p. 1).

More than 50 years after Brown and 35 years after civil rights movement, it appears issues pertaining to schooling for minority students remain critical. The main goal of multicultural education is to understand issues related to education and schooling of students outside the dominant culture. Multicultural education framework offers a space to understand their issues more deeply.

Goals of multicultural education:
1. To examine the Eurocentric perspective in school curricular
2. To view middle class culture as culturally problematic for students from other cultures and social economic statuses
3. To analyze “banking concept of education” and its antithesis “critical pedagogy” (Paulo Freire)
4. To unpack sexism, racism, prejudice, ethnocentrism, homophobia and discrimination through stories and narratives

No doubt the ideas in the advance organizer in the multicultural education part of the course are: academic achievement (drop out, alienation); critical pedagogy (identity, agency, personal practical knowledge); social historical contexts and hegemony, culturally responsive teaching, and funds of knowledge

Orfield, G. (2004). Dropouts in America: Confronting the graduation rate crisis. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Education Press.

Balfanz, R. & Legters, N. E. (2004). Locating the dropout crisis: Which high schools produce the nation’s dropouts? In G. Orfield (Ed.) Dropouts in America: Confronting the graduation rate crisis. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Education Press.