Varieties of Multicultural Education: An Introduction. ERIC Digest 98.

What we now call multicultural education originated in the 1960s in the wake of the civil rights movement as a corrective to the long-standing de facto policy of assimilating minority groups into the “melting pot” of dominant American culture (Sobol, 1990). Multicultural education has captured almost daily headlines in recent years, as it has become an ever more contentious and politicized battleground. To cite just two instances, attempts to establish multicultural curricula in New York City and California were the subject of considerable public attention. In the debate over New York’s Children of the Rainbow curriculum, opponents such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1991) argued that multicultural education threatened to divide students along racial and cultural lines, rather than unite them as Americans. California’s curriculum was met with strong attacks from both opponents and proponents of multicultural education; depending upon one’s perspective, the curriculum either carried diversity too far, or merely bolstered the traditional curriculum’s Eurocentric biases (Kirp, 1991; King, 1992).
 

Benefits of racial diversity in K-16 education
School Diversity
We are committed to generating and synthesizing research on key civil rights and equal opportunity policies that have been neglected or overlooked.Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality
Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee. January 13, 2005 One of the common misconceptions over the issue of resegregation of schools is that many people treat it as simply a change in the skin color of the students in a school. If skin color were not systematically linked to other forms of inequality, it would, of course, be of little significance for educational policy. Unfortunately that is not and never has been the nature of our society. Socioeconomic segregation is a stubborn, multidimensional and deeply important cause of educational inequality.


On Educating for Diversity: A Conversation with James A. Banks
Originally published in 1994, this interview with James A. Banks still rings true ten years later. Here Banks discusses three approaches to educating for diversity.

Multicultural Education Connecting Theory to Practice
by Allison Cumming-McCann
Multicultural education is more than just teaching about “heroes and holidays” (Lee et al., 1998). It goes beyond teaching tolerance of differences, and it is much deeper than studying or celebrating Black History Month in February. So, what is multicultural education? To answer the question, we must first understand the goals, definitions, and a predominant model of multicultural education (Banks, 1998). Although I am not an adult basic educator, multicultural education as it is studied, conceptualized, and practiced in K-12 and higher education is applicable to adult basic education as well. In the next sections, I review the goals of multicultural education and provide a theoretical framework for implementing multicultural education into adult basic education programs.

15 Misconceptions About Multicultural Education
The movement toward multicultural education has gained momentum over the past 20 years. Guidelines from professional organizations have been in place for some time. While many elementary educators support multicultural development and genuinely try to incorporate diverse cultural issues into the curriculum, some widespread misconceptions about what multicultural education is and how it should be implemented hinder the process.
 

A Synthesis of Scholarship in Multicultural Education
by Geneva Gay
Multicultural education means different things to different people. However, the differences are not as great, confusing, or contradictory as some critics and analysts claim. Many of these differences are more semantic than substantive, a reflection of the developmental level in the field and the disciplinary orientation of advocates. One should expect people who have been involved in a discipline or educational movement for a long time to understand and talk about it differently from those who are new to it. Similarly, educators who look at schooling from the vantage point of sociology, psychology, or economics will have differing views of the key concerns of schooling. Yet, these disparate analysts may agree on which issues are the most critical ones. Such differences over means coupled with widespread agreement on substance are naturally found in discussions of multicultural education. But this diversity should not be a problem, especially when we consider that multicultural education is all about plurality.