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Republic of the Philippines

ISABELA STATE UNIVERSITY

Module in Multicultural Education

GE ELEC 2
TOPIC 1: MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

Introduction

This topic introduces the overview of multicultural education with a special focus on theory and
practice in multicultural education as it pertains to the preparation of preservice teachers. One of the
other challenges in multicultural education is that of providing a fair education for students with the
purpose of achieving social justice (Gordon, 1999). A fair education takes into account the perspectives
of many groups. Multicultural perspectives should prepare teachers to critically reflect on the power
and privileges of dominant culture, their own place within these systems, and to deconstruct them to
create social equality through teaching practice. Jenks et al. (2001) identified three theoretical
frameworks of multicultural education in teacher education: conservative, liberal, and critical
multiculturalism.

Learning Outcome

At the end of this chapter the learners should be able to:

a. Acquire a working knowledge about the nature of multicultural education

b. To examine the relationship of cultural assimilation and pluralism to multicultural education
c. To compare assimilation and pluralism

Learning Content

What is Multicultural Education?

• Multicultural education relates to education and instruction designed for the cultures of several
different races in an educational system. This approach to teaching and learning is based upon
consensus building, respect, and fostering cultural pluralism within racial societies.

• Multicultural education is a field of study and an emerging discipline whose major aim is to
create equal educational opportunities for students from diverse racial, ethnic, social- class, and
cultural groups. One of its important goals is to help all students to acquire the knowledge,
attitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society and to
interact, negotiate, and communicate with peoples from diverse groups in order to create a civic
and moral community that works for the common good."

• Multicultural education not only draws content, concepts, paradigms, and theories from
specialized interdisciplinary fields such as ethnic studies and women studies (and from history
and the social and behavioral sciences), it also interrogates, challenges, and reinterprets
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content, concepts, and paradigms from the established disciplines. Multicultural education
applies content from these fields and disciplines to pedagogy and curriculum development in
educational settings. Consequently, we may define multicultural education as a field of study
designed to increase educational equity for all students that incorporates, for this purpose,
content, concepts, principles, theories, and paradigms from history, the social and behavioral
sciences, and particularly from ethnic studies and women studies.

• One set of program that favors the cultural pluralist, in contrast to the monocultural education
espoused by cultural assimilationists.

• Education that advocates differential instructional approaches to reaching students with

different ethnic and racial backgrounds (Ornsteinand Levine, 1982)

• A process of educational reform that ensures that all students from all groups (racial, ethnic,
socio-economic, ability, gender, etc.) experience educational equality, success, and social ability
(Cushner, 2006).

• A process of comprehensive school reform and basic education for all students (Nieto, 2002).

Key Principles of Multicultural Education

Principle 1. Multicultural education is anti-racist education.

Principle 2. Multicultural education is basic education.

Principle 3. Multicultural education is political movement.

Principle 4. Multicultural education is a process of wide-ranging school reform.

Principle 5. Multicultural education is critical pedagogy.

Principle 6. Multicultural education is education for social justice.

Principle 7. Multicultural education is important to all students.

Goals of Multicultural Education

1. The supreme aim of ME is to assist learners obtain better self-understanding by looking at themselves
from the standpoint of other cultures.

2. ME presupposes that with the proper orientation and understanding of diversity, respect may follow.
3. To provide students with cultural and ethnic alternatives.

4. To afford learners with the essential knowledge, skill, and values needed to function within their
ethnic culture, within mainstream culture, and within and across other cultures.

5. To lessen the pain and inequality that members of some ethnic and racial groups experience because
of their unique physical, ethic, racial, and cultural characteristics.
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Four Approaches of Multicultural Education

1. Contribution Approach- Deals with heroes, holidays and discrete cultural elements. Teachers
conveniently infuse cultural themes like holidays and heroes into the curriculum.
2. Additive Approach- Where teachers add content, concepts, themes, and perspectives that are
multicultural without changing the structure of their instructional materials. Here teachers work
hard to infuse multicultural themes, content, and perspective into the main curriculum. This
usually entails worksheets and reading materials on specific cultural activities’ related to the
main topic being taught.
3. Transformative Approach- Requires teachers to change the structure of their curriculum to
enable students to engage concepts, issues, events, and themes from a multicultural
perspective. Here the teacher uses the mainstream subjects like mathematics, the arts, and
language and literature to acquaint students with the ways the country’s culture and society has
emerged from a complex synthesis and interaction of the diverse cultural elements that
originated within the various cultural, racial, ethnic and religious groups that make up the
society
4. Social Action Approach- Allows the students to make decisions on important social issues and
take actions to help solve them.

Importance of Multicultural Education

1. Helps to eradicate prejudice and racism.

2. Brings different races together in harmony.
3. Builds interaction between diverse cultures.
4. Creates tolerance between two groups.
5. It eradicates cultural barriers.
6. Helps students develop positive self-image.
7. Allows multiple perspectives and ways of thinking.

Dimensions of Multicultural Education- Formulated by James A. Banks (1979)

1. Content Integration
- DEALS WITH THE INFUSION OF VARIOUS CULTURES, ETHNICITIES, AND OTHER IDENTITIES
TO BE REPRESENTED IN THE CURRICULUM.
- In the Philippine context, which activities/sports taught or initiated by the teacher best
represent this?
2. Knowledge Construction Process
- Involves student in critiquing the social positioning of groups through the ways that
knowledge is presented.
- Recalling some activities done in the classroom during the basic education years may be
classified under this
3. Prejudice Reduction
- DESCRIBES LESSONS AND ACTIVITIES THE TEACHERS IMPLEMENT TO ASSERT POSITIVE
IMAGES OF ETHNIC GROUPS AND TO IMPROVE INTERGROUP RELATIONS.
- What subject in your teacher education course allow you to go through this process?
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4. Equity Pedagogy
- Modifying teaching styles and approaches with facilitate the intent of facilitating academic
achievement for all students.
- What are some of the modifications done by your teachers in order to facilitate students’
achievement?
5. Empowering School Cultures
- Describe the examination of the school culture and organization by all members of school
staff with the intent to restructure institutional practice to create access for all groups
(Banks, 2004)
- What activities can you initiate as a future teacher, in order to empower the school’s culture
of addressing multicultural learners?

CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING

1. Respect and appreciation for cultural diversity must be taught.

2. Teachers are models to their students.
3. Teachers should create a diverse environment so that students learn to respect themselves and
others.
4. Teachers should re-evaluate their own feelings about multiculturalism in order to effectively
create diverse classrooms.
5. School and all social institutions must be reformed to that students from all the cultural groups
will have equal opportunities to learn and experience cultural empowerment.

THEORETICAL VIEWS ON MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

1. Interactionist Perspective- individuals experience is socially constructed

➢ Ethnic or cultural groups are results or products of social interaction.
➢ Ethnic or cultural prejudices come about when communication channels or socialization
between cultural groups are limited and the different groups develop different systems
of meanings
➢ View that labeling and teacher’s expectation of students from various ethnic groups
provide meaningful constructions about themselves 
➢ Critically looks into these labels and challenges schools to provide a liberating
atmosphere for the construction of personal identity, linguistic, and cultural assertion of
their individuality, without prejudice to other cultural groups.
➢ Multicultural Education must orient students to the idea that “beauty is in the eye of the
beholder”
2. Functional Perspective- multiculturalism pervades in everything that human beings do.
➢ School plays a pivotal role in ensuring multiculturalism by acknowledging and
accommodating a variety of different cultural practices.
➢ Multicultural Education nurtures teaching practices that are effective for members of a
diverse group.
➢ View multiculturalism as a useful approach in promoting a national culture that reflects
the experiences, struggles, and vision of all ethnic groups in a given society thus,
fostering the common good.
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3. Conflict Perspective – Multicultural Education experiences impressive success in being

implemented in many schools, colleges, and universities.
➢ However, a problem that Multicultural Education faces today is the tendency of the
public (including teachers) to oversimplify the concept.
➢ Multicultural Education is complex and multidimensional, yet the focus is usually only
on one of the several dimensions.
➢ There is significant mismatch between the curriculum of the school and the daily
experiences, as well as cultural backgrounds of the students.
➢ Schools succeed in placing students of dominant culture at an advantage while
effectively suppressing those who belong to the minority groups.
➢ Critical about having educational system that assimilates the minority culture by the
dominant culture in the school system.
➢ School teaches the values and cultural elements of the dominant culture and not the
beautiful cultural differences of students.
➢ It does not provide equal opportunities for the various ethnic groups to ethnic
representation and access to access to resources, self-determination, and self-
development
4. Critical Perspective- emphasize the need to analyze how identity, ethnicity, and culture may
affect educational achievements
➢ Experiences of educational inequalities arise from prejudices as response to social class,
language, cultural differences, race, and physical features.
➢ The role of the school is to unmask and analyze these biases through a critical classroom
dialogues and programs that promote respect, tolerance, and appreciation of cultural
diversity.
➢ Multicultural Education should allow every student to see a reflection of him within the
school curriculum.
➢ The bias of the dominant culture is continuously perpetuated, without ME in the
educational system