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Running Head: Barriers To Multicultural Education

This document outlines barriers to multicultural education and proposes an action plan to address them. It notes that while schools and teachers support multicultural education, communities lack understanding of how to help. It proposes hiring a "Community Multicultural Liaison" to coordinate volunteers in gathering resources, planning cultural events and educating the community. Funding would come from local government, businesses and schools. The plan would take 3 years to implement, with the first year spent securing funding and the second for the liaison to meet stakeholders and raise additional funds for materials.

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Mona Vimla
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83 views6 pages

Running Head: Barriers To Multicultural Education

This document outlines barriers to multicultural education and proposes an action plan to address them. It notes that while schools and teachers support multicultural education, communities lack understanding of how to help. It proposes hiring a "Community Multicultural Liaison" to coordinate volunteers in gathering resources, planning cultural events and educating the community. Funding would come from local government, businesses and schools. The plan would take 3 years to implement, with the first year spent securing funding and the second for the liaison to meet stakeholders and raise additional funds for materials.

Uploaded by

Mona Vimla
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Barriers to Multicultural Education

Running head: Barriers to Multicultural Education

Barriers to Multicultural Education An Action Plan YOUR NAME YOUR CLASS YOUR INSTRUCTOR YOUR SCHOOL

DATE

Americans are good at pulling together, when they know what is needed, can see a result and believe in what they are doing. Currently the connection between our educational system and our communities and local governments is weakened by the need for a revamping of a system that has worked for years and is no longer working. Multicultural education has not reached outside the doors of our educational institutions, and it is time that it does! When we say America is facing an astounding change in the variety of it population, topics of importance separate and grow needs of their own. Schools are struggling to provide a truly multicultural education in the classroom. As the world continues to shrink, and our population continues to be a multi linguistic one, the need for multicultural education grows ever more important. As recently as 60 years, multicultural education was not a concern in education. All education was directed at White Americans (and especially American men). Females received the same education, but with different motives. They were also being training in the home. While they learned to read and write, it was understood that this would be for the advancement of their status as a wife and mother. Other discrepancies lay in the division of wealth when it came to education. Those that could afford private school attended the best college preparatory schools there were. Poorer students sometimes had to leave the educational system in order to begin working to help support families. Approximately 50 years ago, the concept of multicultural education began to take shape, first in U.S. universities who realized that a global world would require a knowledgeable global population. Civil rights joined in the cause as did women who wanted a different and higher purpose in life than what they were being trained for.

As our educational facilities slowly took on the task of multicultural education, always losing ground as the immigrant populations changed faces and countries and many more children came to us from their native lands to be educated in our schools. As a training ground, legislation insisted that all children be given an education that was not separate, but rather was equal. African American and White Americans began to learn about each others cultures and the educational process moved forward, with literature being introduced that opened the eyes of many parents of white students who really had no idea what it was like to grow up and be educated if you were not white. All this was in preparation for the influx of a multitude of cultures. Even so, we were not prepared. Teachers were aware, but not trained. Single required courses at University had not prepared them for a 7th-grade child who had never been to school in his own country. If schools were unprepared, communities were more so unprepared. They had been the backbone of real world social studies education, and trips to the state capital were looked forward to by generations of students. There they would learn about Democracy at work. Local communities supported bake sales and fund raisers for the football team. Schools suddenly turned to them and asked them to continue to support their efforts, but here the instructions ended and community members looked around and continued to say what can we do to help? There are currently

two viewpoints or perspectives of multicultural education in the United States, namely the assimilation or melting-pot perspective and the pluralism or global perspective (AmenyDixon, n.d.). People want to do what they have been comfortable in doing to help education in the past. Unfortunately, this is not going to be successful as our global populations grow and our schools continue to need better multicultural outreach.

The communitys assistance is needed in areas for which they are not prepared at all such as differences in gender orientation, economic status, race and individuals whose ethnicities are not familiar to them. School boards are in the middle and are also struggling to help the schools re-connect with the communities, but both their lack of understanding due to internal inequities and their lack of resources will need to be replaced with clever, creative ideas. Defining the Problem Communities are willing, but confused as to what they can do. School boards want to start programs but lack resources. Teachers have the knowledge but are trapped between spending their energies on creative multicultural programs and answering the state mandated testing requirements by providing proper curriculum that will drive students to do well on the standardized tests. Who is involved This might come down to who can take charge. Teachers, students, administrators, local business owners, local government, parents, grandparents; the list goes one. Everyone is on deck to be involved. Everyone is a part of the problem as well as a part of the solution. A coordinator is needed. Unfortunately, this is not going to be a successfully filled volunteer position for even a committee of five. An individual with the title of Community Multicultural Liaison needs to be hired. Now volunteers can be gathered from all members of the community to begin to alleviate the need for a successful community based multicultural education program. What is needed for a solution Unfortunately, the one thing that school districts have little of is the key to this plan being put into action. That is money. I am suggesting that the salary of the individual be pieced together from local government, local business organizations and the schools.

Once a trained and educated individual is in place, they can begin to institute programs to gather materials, plan events, research cultures and make contact with those from other countries who have moved to the community to find ways to celebrate their cultures. I project a 3 year timeline for this to begin. A search for the money to pay the salary and benefits of a well trained individual may take as much as a year. Following that, the individual will need a school year to meet and greet the members of the educational community, the members of the governmental community and the members of the business community. Additional monies will need to be raised to provide the proper educational materials such as literature from other cultures. Setting a program that is initially free of bias and stereotyping needs to be a key element, and must be done with education.

References Ameny-Dixon, Gloria, Why Multicultural Education is More Important in Higher Education Now Than Ever: A Global Perspective (n.d.). Retrieved October 2012 from http://www.nationalforum.com/Electronic%20Journal%20Volumes/Ameny-Dixon, %20Gloria%20M.%20Why%20Multicultural%20Education%20is%20More %20Important%20in%20Higher%20Education%20Now%20than%20Ever.pdf

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