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).

The public debate continues. As recently as May 1994, a school board in Lake County, Florida, voted that its schools could teach children about other cultures, but only as a way of teaching them that American culture was inherently "superior," a decision much discussed around the country ("School Board," 1994).

In the midst of such controversy, there has been little agreement on a precise conceptualization of multicultural education; indeed, while some limit its applicability to curriculum, multicultural education has also been broadly defined to include "any set of processes by which schools work with rather than against oppressed groups" (Sleeter, 1992, p. 141). Even more sweeping, one scholar asserted that multicultural education can have an impact upon every aspect of a school's operation: staffing, curriculum, tracking, testing, pedagogy, disciplinary policies, student involvement, and parent and community involvement (Nieto, 1992). Clearly, multicultural education, as practiced in the United States, takes many varied forms.

TYPOLOGIES OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION
Multicultural education, however, cannot be all things to all people. Several attempts have been made to detail the various educational strategies that fall under the broad umbrella of multicultural education--to develop a "typology." A typology can provide a useful framework for thinking about multicultural education, giving educators--and others--a clearer understanding of what people mean by the term. Two of the most useful typologies, albeit different from each other, were developed by Banks (1994), and by Sleeter and Grant (1993). Drawing upon both those typologies, this digest presents a third typology in order to offer a brief summary of how multicultural education is implemented in the United States. It is intended for educators, policy makers, and others who are just beginning to consider multicultural education options; future digests will address more advanced issues.
The multicultural education typology presented here is comprised of programs that can be broadly divided into three categories, according to their primary emphasis. Each is discussed below.

taken from : http://www.ericdigests.org/1995-1/multicultural.htm