Presentation multicultural and anti-racist curriculum - jill, corlynn, stephanie, devi

WEEK 8: Multicultural and Anti-Racist
Curriculum
By: Jill, Carolynn, Stephanie, and Devi
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Sleeter, Christine. (2005). Multicultural
curriculum, democracy and visionary
pragmatism. Ch 9 in Un-standardizing
curriculum (pp. 167-182). New York:
Teachers College Press.
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Sleeter (2005)
Introduction
This chapter presents the tensions that exist between
curriculum as framed by the standards movement and by
multicultural movements (Sleeter, 2005, p.168). In addition,
participatory democracy and content standards are viewed
through the experience of a sixth-grade teacher named
Terri. Her point of view and beliefs are expressed in relation
to those two principles and four central questions.

Sleeter (2005)
What does the standards movement entail?
• Makes the U.S economically competitive globally by making sure
students have the skills to contribute to the economy
• Curriculum built by ‘experts’
• Standards selected via a traditional perspective
– This support Gay’s (2003-4) argument that “Multicultural education has not yet
become a central part of the curriculum regularly offered to all students” (p. 316)
since only one view is used.
• Children are empty vessels to be filled with knowledge and there are
‘best ways to do that for all across the country
• Worthwhile knowledge is measured on standardized tests
• Criterion-referenced standardized testing
• Schools and teachers accountable to the state and parents

Sleeter (2005)
Role of the teacher
• “They are not supposed to think or question, but rather
act as clerks, checking to make sure that the requisite
topics have been covered” (Sleeter, 2005,p.170)
• Produce results or else they can be blamed for school
shutdown
• Follow the standards set out in the curriculum
• Autonomy and creativity becomes non-existent

Sleeter (2005)
• However, the standards movement is tricking us to
believe that equity can be achieved but the reality is
showing us something completely different (Sleeter,
2005).
• “Yet the economy, particularly at the upper levels, does
not have room for everyone, and there is no evidence
that closing achievement gaps will close opportunity
gaps that have been widening for reasons unrelated to
student achievement”(Sleeter, 2005, p.168)

Sleeter (2005)
What does the Multicultural/Democratic movement
entail?
• Social improvement and educating citizens for participation in
multicultural democracy
• Challenge deficit perspective by building on students’ community,
language and culture
• Curriculum decision making should include bottom-up input
– Dei and Doyle-Wood question whose voice is assigned legitimacy or illegitimacy
and it becomes clear that only one voice dominants curriculum
• Accountability to communities
– This connects to Dei and Doyle-Woods idea of presenting the challenges of
inequity as a community wide discussion.
• Evaluation should capture what students really know and can do
• Supporting democracy and justice
• Value equity in student academic achievement

Sleeter (2005)
What key ideas are at stake in regards to the standards-
based reform?
Teacher autonomy
• Prescribing what teachers should teach means the rejection of
freedom and creativity for both teachers and students
Students’ achievement
• Based only on the standards
Goals of education
• To prepare students so that they can participate in the global
economy
• Results driven so that teachers are held accountable and therefore
must adhere to the standards

Sleeter (2005)
Understanding Participatory Democracy Versus
Content Standards through Terri’s experience
The following four questions will be answered through Terri’s point of
view and beliefs.
1. What purpose should curriculum serve?
2. How should knowledge be selected, who decides what knowledge is most
worth teaching and learning, and what is the relationship between those in the
classroom and the knowledge selection process?
3. What is the nature of students and the learning process, and how does it
suggest organizing learning experiences and relationships?
4. How should curriculum be evaluated? How should learning be evaluated? To
whom is curriculum evaluation accountable?

Sleeter (2005)
What purpose should curriculum serve?
• There should be importance placed on both academic
learning and preparing for democracy
• Helping students to develop skills such as: the ability to
speak up, debate, listen and think
• Lead students to understand their environment
• Engage students in personally relevant subject matter and
to make connections to history

Sleeter (2005)
How should knowledge be selected, who decides what knowledge is
most worth teaching and learning, and what is the relationship between
those in the classroom and the knowledge selection process?
• Knowledge should be selected in a way that helps students learn to
hear and understand multiple perspectives (Sleeter, 2005.p.175)
• Knowledge should come, in part, from the students themselves and
therefore teachers can learn from students and vice versa

Sleeter (2005)
What is the nature of students and the learning process, and how does
it suggest organizing learning experiences and relationships?
• Students are inquirers who make can make meaning out of their
learning, however the quantity of content presented to the standards
limits students from exploring more in depth questions they might have
• Terri begins to see that inquiry becomes minimized in the classroom

Sleeter (2005)
How should curriculum be evaluated? How should learning be
evaluated? To whom is curriculum evaluation accountable?
•Using written work to evaluate their learning
•Unfortunately, helping students become better people is not seen as
important in schools and therefore not evaluated
•Terri knew that it was her responsibility to teach the standards and
make sure her students learned that material, however, she made time
during lunch, before and after school to help students solve their
problems.

Sleeter (2005)
Administrative support
• Principals also face the pressure of making sure
their teachers are adhering to the standards
• Some administrators either turn to resources to
assist their teachers with learning how to
effectively teach the students they have or they
hire outside education consultants.

Sleeter (2005)
Visionary Pragmatism in a Time of Standardization
•Teachers finding space to use the agency they still have, and using it
with a sense of vision (Sleeter, 2005, p.167)
–This idea is also seen in Dei and Doyle- Wood’s (2006) article. They state , “The possibilities of pedagogy
include educators being bold to acknowledge and respond to difference and diversity within the schooling
population; this means ensuring that curriculum, pedagogy, and texts reflect the diverse knowledges,
experiences, and accounts of history, ideas, and lived experiences and struggles” (p.164).
• “Visionary pragmatists reach for what may seem unattainable,
seeking ways to turn the impossible into the possible” (Sleeter, 2005,
p.182)
• Visualizing exciting curricula that engage their students in important
questions
• However, their vision is interrupted when teachers are expected to
only teach the standards and therefore there is very little time to help
students prepare for a democratic life

Sleeter (2005)
Conclusion
• Teachers are caught between choosing between content standards
and a democratic curriculum
• Content standards curriculum emphasizes on results, standardized
testing and accountability
• Multicultural/Democratic education emphasizes on supporting
democracy and justice by taking into account the importance of
learning various perspectives and is geared towards recognizing
student knowledge
• Sleeter (2005) suggests that “Ethically teachers need to decide what
is in the best interests of the students they teach, the students’
communities, and the larger society” (p.182)

Dei, George J. Sefa & Doyle-Wood,
Stanley. (2006). Is We Who Haffi Ride
Di Staam: Critical knowledge/Multiple
knowings – Possibilities, challenges and
resistance in curriculum/cultural contexts.
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Dei & Doyle-Wood (2006)
Introduction
Dei and Doyle-Wood provide an analysis of education and
curriculum as it applies to social inequity and exclusionary
practices. They maintain that an asymmetrical relationship of
power has enabled inequities to be reproduced, as a result of
an imposition of school knowledge discourses that make
claims to supremacy, normalcy, and legitimacy. Their analysis
challenges Western cultural knowledge and offers
suggestions regarding how to challenge this predominant
knowledge within curriculum and education by focusing on the
indigenous knowledge and spirituality of marginalized people
and communities. Their solution to the marginalization of
these people and communities are encompassed by the idea
of anticolonial agency.

Key Questions
The authors address issues of difference, pedagogy,
curriculum as cultural practice, and the roles of educators in
bringing about educational change by focusing on key
questions:
1) What do we see as the role that educators can play in the
creation of a socially cohesive society?
2) What do we see as the crisis of public education today?
3) How do we allow our schools to do what they do best?
4) How do we achieve the characteristics of a healthy school
system?
5) Do we believe that we have some consensus on what we see
as the urgent and most enduring task of public education?

• Race, gender, class, dis/ability, sexuality and other
difference must be central to the discussion of these
answers
• Openly confronting the challenges that these differences
pose for educators, learners, policymakers, and
organizations is the only way to ensure the success of
public school systems
• We must engage in these conversations as a community
that includes educators, parents, families, and social
workers

Anticolonialism
Educational projects must strive to include students at the ‘margins’, or in other
words, those who do not fit into traditional definitions of success and excellence,
which are based on a conventional, Western sense of academic scores. The authors
stress the need to adopt a broader view of education that includes personal
satisfaction, achievement, significance, and happiness. Our educational spaces
should be places where everyone, including those from disadvantaged groups have
the opportunity to realize their goals and dreams.
Coloma’s article (2009) describes the situation that exists in reality. The diversity of
Filipino/as were not acknowledged by the Americans and instead, they were all
labeled as “negros”, fitting one description. Once this label was given, the school
system priorities shifted to use a manual-industrialized curriculum for the Filipinos/as
based on the curriculum for the African Americans. Goals and dreams of the students
were not acknowledged, only the goals for the colonizing Americans who wanted to
cultivate dependency of the Filipino/as on the dominant Americans for their own
benefit.

White and Eurocentric dominance is
normalized through the institution of
schooling. This projects understandings of
what is culturally acceptable and what is
not onto students. Furthermore, it creates
an understanding of what is seen as valid
knowledge. Minoritized students are
constrained to the expectations of
normalcy adopted by the dominant group.

Views of Multicultural Education
“… we would suggest that it is precisely the dominant
conceptualization of ‘multicultural’ that lends itself to the
acculmulation of oppression and/or repression that is
experienced by minoritized students.” (Dei and Doyle-
Woods 2006, pg. 161)
Culturally diverse spaces do not necessarily promote the
expression of cultural difference. Educators cannot be misled
into thinking that creating these spaces is ameliorating the
problem at hand. It would be more beneficial for educators to
look at colonial practices that continue to marginzalize certain
groups of students as a result of their values and ideas not
fitting within the normalized system.

Differences
• Difference refers to both personal identity and asymmetrical power relations
based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and other forms of social difference
• Differences amongst students are based on indigenous or local knowledge,
as well as lived experiences. These differences cannot be separated from
the learning process
• Using difference in anticolonial work means challenging what has
traditionally been perceived as normal
• Critical education is highlighted in the discussion of including these
differences in curriculum and instruction
-We see an example of a critical educator, Terri, in the Sleeter (2005) article
describe her own teaching focus on cultivating citizen participation.
Ultimately she tries to develop a classroom in which students are supported
in speaking up, debating, thinking, and listening without putting forth her
own point of view. Through her creative and innovative teaching methods,
she aims to help students find autonomy in becoming problem solvers of
“institutional inequality.”

Anticolonial Agency and Indigenous
Knowledge
Anticolonialism focuses on the negative impacts
of asymmetrical power relations in the
interactions between the colonizer and the
colonized
• Education has been a way instituionalize the
colonized to the social order of colonizers in the
Carribean, Africa, and Latin America
• Much of the Canadian curriculum places white
and European normative middle-class values at
the forefront, thereby excluding other knowledge

• Agency is seen as a way to liberate marginalized
individuals and to help them resist systemic
oppression
• Anticolonial agency stresses the fact that power
is held and sustained through practice in social
spaces to maintain the colonial and colonizing
encounters
• An emphasis is placed on opposing these
traditional encounters by focusing on indigenous
concepts, analytical systems, and cultural
frames of reference

• Indigenous knowledge is a body of knowledge derived
from a long term occupancy by a group of people in a
specific place
– This knowledge determines ways of acting, feeling,
and knowing, creating different perspectives
– This indigenous knowledge emerges from
interpretations of social, political, physical, and
spiritual worlds
• In Western education, indigenous knowledge and
anticolonial agency provide students with the opportunity
to arrive at different ways of seeing things, and to
articulate community and individual differences

Spiritual Resistance and
Decolonizing Knowledge
• The authors refer to spirituality as an
understanding of the self and culture that serves
as a starting point for education and learning
• Spirituality can be pursued as a valid body of
knowledge in schools, as it enables the learner
to engage in personal experiences of
understanding
• In this way, colonial education can be further
resisted because the learner is arriving at new
understandings, independent of the
understandings that have become normalized

Conclusion
The authors emphasize anticolonial and multiple-centred
curriculum. This means accepting many ways of knowing
based on the differences of students. In creating this
type of curriculum, we are called to question the colonial
social order that has been pervasive in the institution of
education. This type of curriculum critiques all
oppressive relationships that result from power and
privilege. The colonized have the power to question and
resist the structure that results from the perpetuation of
the normalized values of the colonizers, while the
colonizers are urged to think critically about the
oppression of marginalized group based on the
reproduction of normalized values.

Coloma, Roland Sintos. (2009). “Destiny
has thrown the Negro and the Filipino
under the tutelage of America”: Race and
curriculum in the age of empire.
Curriculum Inquiry, 39(4), 495-519.
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Coloma (2009)
Part 1: The Study of Transnational History of Race, Empire,
and Curriculum
• Coloma (2009) brings together the fields of curriculum studies,
history of education, and ethnic studies to a perspective called
“transnational history of race, empire, and curriculum.”
• The author suggests that rather than discussing curriculum in terms
of national and international analysis in isolation, transnational
studies can provide insights into the interrelatedness of nations and
the flow of “people, ideas, goods, cultures, and institutions.”
• In this article, Coloma uses a transnational perspective to examine
connections and relations of power between the US and the
Philippines.
• Similarities are drawn between the curriculum used for African
American students in the US during the late 1800’s/early 1900’s and
the Filinpino/as students in the Philippines.

Coloma (2009)
Part 2: The Racialization of Colonized Filipino/as
• A statement from literary and cultural critic Homi Bhabha (1994) argues that “the
objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of
degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to
establish systems of administration and instruction.”
• The US occupied and governed the Philippines from 1898-WW2
• At the time of US colonization, the Filipino/as people were quite heterogeneous,
consisting of various ethnic, socioeconomic, spiritual, regional, and linguistic
backgrounds.
• The process of colonial discourse is evident in the American description of
Filipinos/as in this time as a “wild devil child” or “savages” who are in need of
rescuing.
• For imperialist purposes, American media outputs such as cartoons, photos, and
statements from US officials dismissed the cultural diversity of Filipinos/as and
instead portray them as inferior and underdeveloped culturally, intellectually, and
physically compared to Americans.
• Further, the distorted perceptions of African Americans in the US were applied to the
Filipino/as and they were labeled as “Negroes”

This political cartoon from U.S
newspaper in 1989 “shows a stars-
and-stripes-clad Uncle Sam
balancing five dark-skinned
children who are marked as the
Philippines, Porto Rico, Cuba,
Hawaii, and Ladrones. Infantilized
as a child and racially construed as
Black, hence visually conjuring
Kipling’s devil-child figure, the
Filipino with bulging eyes,
protruding lips, and twisted, coarse
hair is displayed and held high by
the United States-like the other
colonized subjects-in front of well-
dressed European men.”
Coloma (2009)
Part 2: The Racialization of Colonized Filipino/ as
Continued
This picture emphasized the idea that the Philippines needed rescuing and
protection by the US from other potential colonizers.

1899 cartoon School Begins in
popular US magazine. “The
cartoon illustrates a bewildered
Filipino dressed in the Western
style of long-sleeved shirt and
pants and seated in the front row
with three other students
representing Hawaii, Puerto Rico,
and Cuba. All four students are
looking up at the towering,
bespectacled Uncle Sam who is
leaning over his desk with a stick
in hand. Underneath the image
are the words of Uncle Sam’s
stern lecture to these newly
arrived students: ‘Now children,
you’ve got to learn these lessons
whether you want to or not! But
just take a look at the class ahead
of you, and remember that in a
little while, you will be as glad to
be here as they are!”
A public education system was
established by the US to help pacify,
discipline, and civilize the Filipino/as to
benefit the Imperialism agenda.
Coloma (2009)
Continued

• In the previous image, the author describes 4 options presented to the
Filipino/as
1) Assimilate to the US norms of whiteness seen by the White children
reading behind the front row
2) Follow the Native American who is reading an upside down book in
the corner by himself which emphasizes “education of extinction”
where indigenous students were removed and isolated from both their
own communities and the White America
3) Follow the Chinese child and have no access; represented by the
Chinese child standing outside the school door
4) Become like the African American child who is washing the
classroom window
Coloma (2009)
Continued

• The author argues that “since the options of whiteness, extinction, or
exclusion were not completely tenable for Filipino/as in the Philippines, the
last option of adhering to the policy and curriculum for African Americans in
the U.S South became the educational template for Filipino/as across the
Pacific.”
• Dei & Doyle-Wood (2006) discuss the dehumanizing asymmetrical power
relations resulting from colonial systems controlling production, education,
and knowledge.
• We see this occur in the Filipino/as when colonized by the USA, as
described in Coloma’s (2009) article. Not only did the Americans force their
education system on the country, but they acted as if it was a gift given from
the goodness of their hearts. I appeared as though they ultimately expected
Filipino/as to graciously accept the subordinate role given to them.
Coloma (2009)
Continued

Coloma (2009)
Part 3: African American Perspectives on Filipino/as
• Most African Americans could sympathize with the oppression the
Filipinos/as faced as being a “colored minority in a white-dominated
society.”
• Most African Americans emphasized solidarity with Filipinos/as as
they stand “outside the American Constitution but under the
American flag.”
• One contrary opinion was that African Americans felt superior to the
Filipinos/as by describing a US nation that “excluded those not
White or Black.”

Coloma (2009)
Part 4: Educational Policy, Curriculum, and Teacher Preparation
• US officials implemented a mass public education system in the Philippines to reach
more children; English was the primary language of instruction.
• Initially American educators taught in the Philippines, but Filipinos/as were eventually
recruited to develop a sustainable national public school system.
• 4 strategies were used to train Filipinos/as teachers:
 The most common were after school sessions (daily one hour teacher training
sessions and vacation institutes (4 to 5 week training sessions) both which
were conducted by US teachers and trained teachers to teach primary grades.
For these options, teachers often taught one week the material they had learned
in the previous week.
 The capital city Normal School (trained teachers for secondary grades) and
government scholarships to US colleges and universities (trained teachers
for secondary and university teaching)
• The National School was the highest institution for teacher training in the Philippines,
and many Filipino/as therefore saw the additional employment and status
opportunities with this type of training.
• Government scholarships to US colleges and universities allowed select Filipino/as
with a keen interest in US history and politics to live in the US amongst Americans.
After training they were required to return to the Philippines to provide lectures on
America, its history, American people, and how America has rescued the Philippines
from Spain.

Coloma (2009)
Continued
• The teachers who taught the primary grades were initially trained to focus
on liberal arts topics, with supplementary instruction on agriculture, arts, and
handicrafts. But by 1908, the teacher training shifted to focus on a manual-
industrial training curriculum.
• The manual-industrial training curriculum was based on the curriculum used
in the States for African American students and intended, according to US
administrators to, “service the greatest possible good” by directing
Filipinos/as towards practical fields such as carpentry, woodwork,
agriculture and handicraft making.
• At the same time it tried to deter students from becoming high status
professionals with legal, business, and medical training who could
potentially challenge the “political, economic, and scientific contradictions of
empire in their own country.”
• While this approach seemed benevolent, it served the agenda to keep the
Filipinos/as submissive to the US.

Coloma (2009)
Part 5: The Dominance of the Manual-Industrial Curriculum
• The manual-industrial curriculum worked in the economic interests of the
US, goods produced by Filipino/as were exported and sold for foreign
purchase.
• Similar to the education that African Americans were receiving in the states
during that time, in the Philippines “majority of teachers and students
worked under a curriculum geared toward the interest, consumption of and
hence, dependence upon external markets as opposed to the enrichment
and sustainability of local communities. By relying on foreign external
markets for Filipinos/as labor and products, a culture of dependency was
created, a conduction that remains to haunt the Philippines to this day.”

Coloma (2009)
Part 5: The Dominance of the Manual-Industrial Curriculum
• Half of the Filipinos/as did not receive any schooling at all, and 95% of those
who did only completed up to grade 3. Of those who went to school, he
overwhelming majority (over 99%) received education through the manual-
industrial schooling.
• Those who made it through the secondary schools and university were
members of the social, economic, and political elite.
• This caused a huge gap between high and low SES.

Coloma (2009)
Continued
• Dei & Doyle-Wood (2006) discuss the concept of ‘deep curriculum’ in which
cultural and racial concepts deemed “legitimate” by the school become
imbedded in the formal and informal school environment. Unfortunately, for
non-dominant students, their expression and communication is limited to the
system of the dominant group that decides what is acceptable, appropriate,
and approved.
• In all aspects of ‘deep curriculum’, Filipino/as were purposefully meant to
feel inferior to the “rescuing” Americans. Their cultural, spiritual, and
language diversity was completely ignored by colonizers, and they were
required to conform to the schooling that was developed by the Americans.
Students were not encouraged to think critically about themselves and their
learning, instead had to be educated in a manner completely different for
them, in a foreign language. Alienation from all forms of communication,
expression, and knowledge were disregarded.

Coloma (2009)
Conclusion
• The educational model developed in the USA for African Americans
was proven effective in creating an oppressive two-tiered education
program: one with an academic focus for the elite, and one with an
industrial-manual focus for the majority.
• Coloma concludes by stating “How those in power construe
racialized and colonialized Others indelibly shapes the type of
education provided to them. Discourse matters, after all”

Supplementary Reading:
Gay, Geneva. (2003-4). The importance of
multicultural education. Ch 28 in Flinders, David &
Thornton, Stephen. (Eds.) The curriculum studies
reader, 2nd
ed New York: Routledge.
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Gay (2003-4)
Geneva Gay urges for a need to develop instructional programs and practices in
education that “…respond positively and constructively to diversity” (p. 315).
The result?
•Disparities in educational opportunities and
outcomes among ethnic groups, resulting in
concerning achievement gaps (p. 316).
•Irrelevant learning experiences for ethnically
diverse students, which “dampen their academic
interest, engagement, and achievement” (p. 319).
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4YgJGFQmIxU/Ta76EsGgacI/AAAAAAAAAAY/_R1cXZydk6k/s320/gifted-
student-feeling-left-out.jpg
Why?
•Despite the “vibrant mixture of cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and experiential plurality”
that makes up the U.S. today, school curriculums “still do not regularly and
systematically include important information and deep study about a wide range of
diverse ethnic groups” (p. 316).

Gay (2003-4)
The solution: Multicultural Education
Gay argues that:
•“Multicultural education is integral to improving the academic success of
students of color and preparing all youths for democratic citizenship in a
pluralistic society” (p. 316).
•“Students need to understand how multicultural issues shape the social,
political, economic, and cultural fabric of the United States as well as how
such issues fundamentally influence their personal lives” (p. 316).
• This parallels Sleeter’s (2005) encouragement for teachers to
lead students to understand their environment.
• This also connects to Friere’s notion of ‘problem-posing’
education, in which students are encouraged to engage in the
process of inquiry and to think critically about social issues,
events, etc.
Image retrieved from: http://affairstoday.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2014/09/El-multiculturalismo3.jpg

Gay (2003-4)
The problem: “Multicultural education has not yet become a central part of the
curriculum regularly offered to all students” (p. 316)
Why not?
•Educators have relegated multicultural education to social studies, language arts,
and the fine arts and have targeted instruction for students of color (p. 316).
•Educators are “unconvinced of its worth or its value in developing academic skills
and building unified national community” and about the feasibility of its
implementation (p. 316).
Image retrieved from: http://cte-blog.uwaterloo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Teacher-War-time1.jpg

Gay (2003-4)
The misconception: Educators perceive multicultural education as ‘separate
content’ that educators must ‘append to existing curriculums as separate lessons,
units, or courses’ (p. 316).
“School curriculums are already overburdened. What do I take out to make room for
multicultural education?” (p. 316)
•This mentality relates to the pressures of teachers having to adhere to the
standards, and the standards having priority, which is described in Sleeter’s (2005)
article.
However, Gay explains that:
•“Multicultural education is more than content; it includes policy, learning climate,
instructional delivery, leadership, and evaluation” (p. 316).
•Virtually all aspects of multicultural education are interdisciplinary. As such, they
cannot be adequately understood through a single discipline, and instead must be
connected across disciplines (p. 318).

Gay (2003-4)
Example decision-making process:
•Creating learning goals and objectives that incorporate multicultural aspects.
•Using a frequency matrix to ensure the inclusion of a variety of ethnic groups in a
variety of ways in curriculum materials and instructional activities.
•Introducing different ethnic groups and their contributions on a continuous basis.
•Including several examples from different ethnic experiences to explain subject
matter concepts, facts, and skills.
•Showing how multicultural content, goals, and activities interconnect with subject-
specific curricular standards.
What does this mean for educators?
•Educators must systematically weave multicultural
education into the central core of curriculum,
instruction, school leadership, policymaking,
counseling, classroom climate, and performance
assessment (p. 317).
•In practice, this means developing intentional and
orderly decision-making processes for including
multicultural content (p. 317).

Gay (2003-4)
Examples of approaches to accomplish multicultural curriculum integration
(continued):
•Teachers could demonstrate mathematical concepts (i.e. percentages, ratios,
probabilities) using ethnic demographics (p. 317).
•“Educators should teach students how to think critically and analytically about
certain events, propose alternative solutions to social problems, and demonstrate
understanding through such forms of communication as poetry, personal
correspondence, debate, editorials, and photo essays” (p. 317).
• This was portrayed in the “Why Critical
Pedagogy” video by Friere Project, as
students used ‘Slam
Poetry’/‘Performance Poetry
Curriculum’ to express their feelings
and raise awareness about social
issues.
• This also connects to Sleeter’s (2005)
suggestion to help students develop
skills such as: the ability to speak up,
debate, listen, and think.
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Gay (2003-4)
Reality/representation:
•Curriculum studies needs to help “students understand the realities of the social
condition and how they came to be as well as adequately representing those realities” (p.
318).
• This relates to Friere’s ‘problem-posing’ education, which ‘involves a
constant unveiling of reality’ (Friere, 1970, p. 7).
•School curriculums need to include “equitable representations of diversity” (p. 318)
because the reality is that diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural groups and individuals have
made contributions all aspects of U.S. history, life, and culture.
• This connects to Sleeter’s (2005) encouragement for students to make
connections to history. Gay argues for these connections to be accurate
and include contributions of may ethnic groups.
Example: “the study of American literature, art, and music should include contributions
of males and females from different ethnic groups in all genres and in different
expressive styles” (p. 318)
http://mtamconference.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/Diversity
-Shutterstock-998x615.jpg

Gay (2003-4)
Gay paints the unfortunate reality that “many ethnically diverse students do not find
schooling exciting or inviting; they often feel unwelcome, insignificant, and alienated
(p. 319).
Why? Because schooling does not reflect who they are (p. 319).
Solution: Educators need to practice “culturally relevant teaching” (p. 319).
• This mirrors Sleeter’s (2005) argument for students to engage in
personally relevant subject matter.
How?
•Teach content about the cultures and contributions of many ethnic groups so that
students find the content to be relevant and relatable.
•Understand the distinguishing characteristics of different learning styles and use a
variety of instructional techniques that are culturally responsive best suited to
different ethnic learning styles (p. 319).
Example: the teacher might offer three or four ways for students to learn, helping to
equalize learning advantages and disadvantages among the different ethnic groups
in the classroom (p. 319).

Gay (2003-4)
Closing points:
Studies have shown that “students perform more successfully on all levels
when there is greater congruence between their cultural backgrounds and
such school experiences as task interest, effort, academic achievement,
and feelings of personal efficacy or social accountability” (p. 320).
Therefore, multicultural education is critical for student success, and
to provide equitable and relevant education.
Gay: “Multicultural education may be the solution to problems that currently
appear insolvable: closing the achievement gap; genuinely not leaving any
children behind academically; revitalizing faith and trust in the promises of
democracy, equality, and justice; building education systems that reflect the
diverse cultural, ethnic, racial, and social contributions that forge society;
and providing better opportunities for all students” (p. 320).

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