Blog #3 - Multiculturalism and Education

One of my initial experiences with classroom diversity occurred about 12 years ago in Memphis, Tennessee. I had just moved to the South and Memphis was a whole new experience for me. As a new community educator, my job was to conduct supplemental educational programs in schools. One of the first barriers that I came up against was language. I had difficulty understanding the students and the students had difficulty understanding my lack of Southern accent. This was truly a learning experience for all of us and working to find common ground in which I needed to embrace these classrooms in order to become effective with my teaching.

In the classroom, educators are faced with issues that extent beyond diversity to the socio-economic factors as well. As such, the issue of diversity is a multi-faceted topic that expands beyond the textbooks. The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (n/d) indicates that multiculturalism education focuses on educational equity for all students. Multiculturalism includes the various racial, socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds of individuals. For the remainder of this blog, however, I will focus on multiculturalism from the perspective of teaching history in our schools.

Samuel Taylor’s article brought up a number of interesting points and made me really think about multiculturalism and education. One has to wonder if teaching history from so many different points of view provides opportunities for more divisiveness rather than uniting the various cultures. If history is truly taught from so many perspectives, are we losing an account of what truly happened? I have always felt that there are huge chunks of history that are left out of the textbooks and our memories. For example, we learn about the Presidents of the United States, but what about so many of the other contributors who have made significant “behind-the-scenes” contributions? Are they less worthy of recognition and inclusion in history? Not necessarily, but there is only a limited amount of time in the school curriculums for recounting the history of our nation.

We certainly don’t want to leave out key events, but when we look back at our nation, we need to remember that we have always been a nation of many cultures. And, there have always been immigrants from various countries who have been marginalized throughout history. However, I do think it is important that we respect and learn from the various cultures that make up our country. There doesn’t seem to be one standard way to go about this initiative since the cultures do vary from one part of the United States to another. The “Why Multiculturalism is Wrong” article describes attempts in the Netherlands to maintain the culture of certain nationalities by having those individuals learn the language of their “native” culture; however, this approach proved to be ineffective because not all individuals of a particular descent speak the same language.

With so much division, I am afraid that we may end up with no clear history for our nation. Instead, we may have so many story lines that attempt to tell the history that we end up less unified as a country. For example, I can’t even imagine a history book that was written from the Nazi point of view regarding the Holocaust. Or, for events within our own country, historical perspectives on September 11 or the Oklahoma City bombing from a radical perspective would provide a very different viewpoint on these horrible events. The concerns for these perspectives became very clear to me as I read the “Pithissippi Burning” article. However, I do realize that there is much to learn from the varying perspectives related to history and think that it could be beneficial to consider how to integrate these views into the curriculum rather than simply replace the written past.

Now, this is not to say that our history books will not look different going forward based on the events of modern history. Clearly, our nation continues to evolve and our history books must reflect such evolution and change.

Resource
North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (n/d). Multicultural education. Retrieved September 26, 2009, from http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/educatrs/presrvce/pe3lk1.htm.