THE MULTICULTURAL CURRICULUM:Children can and will learn important concepts while incorporating cultural diversity into daily lessons and the overall curriculum

A multiculturally-oriented curriculum

• Enrich courses in the social studies by including multiple perspectives on American culture and history, reflecting various viewpoints of different groups of Americans;

• Use comparisons in describing and analyzing traditions, events, and institutions to help students know and appreciate similarities and differences among various ethnic groups;

• Communicate to students of various ethnic identities that they are valued members of the school community;

• Provide opportunities for students to have positive interpersonal relations with individuals of various ethnic groups;

A multiculturally-oriented curriculum…..

• Reaches beyond the textbook to use community resources on ethnic diversity;

• Strives to expand students' knowledge of ethnic groups in American history and contemporary society through reading programs that expose students to books of fiction, biography, and history, and to magazine and newspaper articles about ethnic diversity;

• Stresses values of ethnic diversity and national unity.

Culturally responsive teaching…

• Acknowledges the legitimacy of the cultural heritages of different ethnic groups…that affect students’ dispositions, attitudes, and approaches to learning and as worthy content to be taught in the formal curriculum;

• Builds bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences…and lived sociocultural realities;

• Uses a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to different learning styles;

• Encourages students to know and praise their own and each others’ cultural heritages;

• Incorporates multicultural information, resources, and materials in all the subjects and skills routinely taught in schools;

• Has high expectations for all group of students alike.

Key Concepts in Multicultural Education

What must be considered first?

• Multicultural curricula is organized around concepts/themes dealing with history, culture, contemporary experiences of ethnic groups in US life, contributions of ethnic groups to the mainstream culture, expressions such as immigration, discrimination, protest and resistance, cultural assimilation and acculturation, etc.

• Attention must be given to the developmental level of the students, e.g. in the primary grade curriculum, the focus must be given to concrete concepts such as examples, similarities and differences, historical facts and evens and not to abstract concepts such as “results of constitutionalized racism on the lives of minorities.”

Types of concepts

• Curricula in any subject area can profit from multidisciplinary, multicultural concepts from different disciplines such as history or math and expressions such Art, music, dance, languages and literature, etc.

• Interdisciplinary concepts include: • Culture, ethnicity and related concepts: culture, ethnic group, ethnic

diversity, minorities

• Socialization and related concepts: prejudice, discrimination, racism, values

• Intercultural communication and related concepts: intercultural communication, perception

• Power and relations and related concepts: power, protest and resistance

• Migration and immigration

Culture, ethnicity and related concepts

Macrocultural group> microcultural group>ethnic group>ethnic minority

• Culture: behavioral patterns, symbols, institutions, values and other human-made components of society; an ethnic group is a type of cultural group

• Macroculture: US culture

• Microcultures, smaller groups within the macroculture:• Appalachian culture, Southern culture, Western culture

• gay culture (voluntary group)

• various ethnic groups

• Ethnic group: • Anglo-Saxon, Italian Americans, Mexican-American

• involuntary microcultural groups with which individuals may or may not identify

• group has a historic origin, shared heritage and ancestral tradition

• members (may) share orientation, values, behavioral patterns, and often political and economic interests;

• individuals may be members of many different groups: religious kinship (association, relationship), economic groups

• Ethnic identification or ethnicity may not be important to highly assimilated or upper socio-economic class members

• Ethnic minority group: • People of color--African Americans, Vietnamese Americans,

Hispanics

• Distinguished on the basis of religious characteristics: Muslims, Jewish Americans

• involuntary microcultural groups with a historic origin, heritage and ancestral tradition; shared orientation, values, behavioral patterns, and often political and economic interests;

• minority in number, and political and economic power

CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: Study the experiences of ethnic groups in the US from the point of view of (a) shared identity of peoplehood and ethnic

identity, (b) shared values and symbols that resulted from ethnic institutions created as a response to discrimination or from their social

class position. Study the ethnic institutions that have resulted in response to discrimination and segregation.

• Ethnic diversity vs. cultural assimilation (melting pot--true assimilation)

• The mainstream culture and ethnic minority groups incorporate concepts from each culture and are transformed as they interact;

• Ethnic individuals may be bicultural, especially members in ethnic minorities;

• Upper social classes and upwardly mobile member are less ethnic than lower-class members, i.e., they tend to conform to the dominant culture’s norms and language;

• Acceptance to upper classes and possibility of upward mobility requires assimilation to the mainstream culture: speech, behavior, values

• Mainstream culture has the economic and socio-political power and control of institutions

Goal: ethnic diversity and acculturation, not assimilation, encapsulation.

Schools should help release students from cultural and ethnic encapsulation and participate of ethnic diversity

• Cultural assimilation: • process by which an individual or group acquires the cultural traits of a

different ethnic or cultural group, mainly for social mobility• culturally assimilated groups, especially color groups, may still be victims

of discrimination;• Types: voluntary –need of upward mobility

involuntary –forced assimilation such native migrants

(native Americans) or forced immigrants (African Americans) who were forcedly integrated to the mainstream culture.

• Acculturation: • process by which the mainstream culture incorporates components of ethnic minority

cultures: ethnic foods, artifacts

• Cultural encapsulation:• process by which ethnic minority groups form cultural enclaves;

• Reverse cultural encapsulation: ethnic minority groups, in order to attain social and economic mobility, are usually forced out of their ethnic encapsulation—e.g. youths of color tend to devaluate their ethnic cultures to gain acceptance from peers;

• Mainstream culture groups show strong forms of encapsulation as they deny cultural values of other groups;

CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: Examine shared values among ethnic groups: values, sense of identity, common history; examine the different

perspectives in the way a certain value is interpreted by different ethnic groups. Study the influence of ethnic minority cultures on the

mainstream culture; the extent of assimilation to the mainstream culture of minority ethnic groups.

Intercultural communication and related concepts

The wider the differences in cultures or microcultures between individuals, the more ineffective communication is likely to be

Communication often fails across cultures because the message producer and the receiver have few shared symbols and have been socialized

within environments in which the same symbols are interpreted differently

• Perception: • “process by which people select, organize, and interpret sensory

stimulation into a meaningful and coherent picture of the world” (Berelson & Steiner, 1964)

• Factors that may influence perception:

• level of identification with a group,

• culture, ethnicity, and race are strong factors in The United States, a country characterized by inequality, high levels of ethnic discrimination and stratification along racial, social class, and ethnic lines

Power and related concepts

Struggle for power among competing groups (Anglo Saxon Protestants) has played a considerable role in shaping American history

Almost every decision is made by those in power to enhance, legitimize and reinforce their power

People in power make socio-political and economic decisions, laws, and determine which traits and characteristics are necessary for

admittance to society and full participation

Social protest emerges within ethnic communities to protest social conditions, political policies, and economic practices that attempt

against their integrity as humans

CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: Study about power relationships in American society –hypothesize about how we can make our nation an open society, one more

consistent with our national ideology. Propose several movements organized by ethnic groups and study the causes and consequences –Black movement

of the 1960’s,Chinese parents in CA fighting equality in education in the 1970’s, etc.

Movement and related concepts

• Migration: movement of natives or citizens within the same country

• American Indians, Eskimos, Native Hawaiians, Aleuts

• Puerto Ricans are migrants to the mainland; not considered immigrants as they became citizens with the passage of the Congressional Jones Acts of 1917.

• Immigration: individuals or groups who have settled in the US culture from a foreign country; legal, illegal, political asylum, etc.

CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: Examine the origins and immigration patterns of an ethnic group in the US; recreate the chronology of immigration waves to the US; compare and contrast reasons why

groups have immigrated; study the ‘forced’ immigration of African Americans; investigate the cultural assimilation of European immigrants in metropolis such as New York Boston, Chicago.

A person’s beliefs, attitudes and values may be viewed together as an integrated system and

together they result in shaping a person’s behavior with respect to the other

Socialization And Related Concepts:

Attitudes, Beliefs, Values

Attitude

relatively stable organization of interrelated beliefs that describe, evaluate, and advocate action with respect to a person, object or situation

An attitude has three components:

idea or thought,

feeling or emotion

readiness to respond or predisposition to action

Value beliefs about how one ought or ought not to behave, or about some end state of existence worth or not worth attaining

Values are abstract ideals, positive or negative, that represent a person’s beliefs about ideal modes of conduct and ideal terminal goals

Belief opinion, expectation, or judgment that a person accepts as true

Religion

system of social coherence based on a common group of beliefs or attitudes concerning an object, person, unseen being, or system of thought considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine or highest truth, and the moral codes, practices, values, institutions, and rituals associated with such belief or system of thought. It is sometimes used interchangeably with "faith" or "belief system", but is more

socially defined than that of personal convictions

Socialization And Related Concepts:

Stereotype, prejudice, racism, discrimination

Stereotype

• mental category based on exaggerated and inaccurate generalization used to describe all members of a group (Bennett, 1995);

• erroneous beliefs, either favorable or unfavorable, that are applied universally and without exception (Bennett, 1995);

• stereotypes become truths:• African Americans are violent and sexually promiscuous,

• Mexicans are illegal, hard-workers;

• athletes are dumb and fat people are lazy,;

• Jews are stingy

Discrimination

• differential treatment of individuals considered to belong to particular groups or social categories (Rose, 1974).

• set of rigid and unfavorable attitudes toward a particular group or groups that are formed in disregard of facts

• individualized attitude (behavior);

• leads to discrimination.

Prejudice

Racism

• belief that human groups can be grouped on the basis of their biological traits; these identifiable groups inherit certain mental, personality, and cultural characteristics that determine their behavior;

• extension of an attitude into an action. In a racist society, the political, economic, and social systems reflect and perpetuate racism; thus, racism is institutionalized (Gay, 1973);

• related to the idea of race, • Race: human or biological traits of a group

• practiced when a group has the power to enforce laws, institutions, and norms based on its beliefs that oppress and dehumanize another group.

• Prejudice is an individualized attitude while racism is an institutionalized concept/belief;

Ethnocentrism

• feeling of superiority of a culture over another culture; culture is defined by our values;

• important to comprehend the complex dimensions of American racism and the separatist movements that have emerged within ethnic minority groups.