Project 4. Culturally responsive teaching
1. Multicultural education (Banks)
James Banks considers five dimensions to be important in the design of multicultural education:
content integration, knowledge construction, equity pedagogy, prejudice reduction, and empowering
school culture.
Banks (2016) – Cultural diversity and Education (Ch 1: Dimension, history and goals)
The aims and goals of multicultural education
- Major goal of multicultural education: to reform schools, colleges, and universities so
that students from diverse racial, ethnic, and social-class groups will experience
educational equality
- Another important goal of multicultural education: to give both male and female
students an equal chance to experience educational success and mobility
- To multicultural education be implemented successfully, institutional changes must be
made, including changes in:
o The curriculum
o The teaching materials
o Teaching and learning styles
o The attitudes, perceptions, and behaviours of teachers and administrators
o The goals, norms, and culture of the school
Many school and university practitioners have a limited conception of multicultural
education: they view it primarily as curriculum reform that involves changing or restructuring
the curriculum to include content about ethnic groups, women, students with disabilities,
LGBT students, and other minoritized cultural groups
The dimensions and their importance
- Multicultural education conceptualized as a field that consists of five dimensions: (1)
content integration, (2) the knowledge construction process, (3) prejudice reduction, (4)
an equity pedagogy, and (5) an empowering school culture and social structure
- Educators need to be able to identify, to differentiate, and to understand the meanings
of each dimension of multicultural education
- Multicultural education is for all students, and not just for low-income students and
students of colour
- The knowledge construction process most important:
o The kind of knowledge that teachers examine, and master will have a powerful
influence on the teaching methods they create, on their interpretations of school
knowledge, and how they use student cultural knowledge
o The knowledge construction process is fundamental in the implementation of
multicultural education implication for each of the other four dimensions: for
example, for the construction of knowledge about pedagogy
Limitations and interrelationship of the dimensions
- The dimensions typology is an ideal-type conception
- Categories of typologies are interrelated and overlapping, not mutually exclusive
- Typologies rarely encompass the total universe of existing or future cases some cases
can be described only by using several of the categories
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, - The dimensions typology provides a useful framework for categorizing and interpreting
the extensive literature on cultural diversity, ethnicity, and education the five
dimensions are conceptually distinct but highly interrelated
- Content integration, for example, describes any approach used to integrate content
about racial and cultural groups into the curriculum
- The knowledge construction process describes a method in which teachers help students
to understand how knowledge is created and how it reflects the experiences of various
ethnic, racial, cultural, and language groups
The meaning of multicultural education to teachers
- We need to better clarify the different dimensions of multicultural education and to help
teachers see more clearly the implications of multicultural education for their own
subject areas and teaching situations
- More success in multicultural teaching if we set limited but essential goals for teachers,
especially in the early phases of multicultural educational reform
- During the first or early phases, all teachers would be encouraged to determine ways in
which they could adapt or modify their teaching for a multicultural population with
diverse abilities, characteristics, and motivational styles
- A second or later phase would focus on curriculum content integration
Contextualizing multicultural education
- Educators who reject multicultural education will use the ‘irrelevance of multicultural
education’ argument as a convenient and publicly sanctioned form of resistance and as a
justification for inaction
- Most mathematics and science teachers do not have the kind of knowledge and
understanding of their disciplines that enables them to construct and formulate lessons,
units, and examples that deal with the cultural assumptions, frames of reference, and
perspectives within their disciplines
- Multicultural education is a way of viewing reality and a way of thinking, and not just
content various ethnic, racial, and cultural groups
- All teachers, including mathematics and science teachers, need to think of ways in which
they can modify their teaching and implement equity pedagogy in their classrooms,
which is a way of teaching that is not discipline-specific but that has implications for all
subject areas and for teaching in general
The dimensions of multicultural education
- Content integration
o Content integration deals with the extent to which teachers use examples and
content from a variety of cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts,
principles, generalization, and theories in their subject area or discipline
o The infusion of ethnic and cultural content into the subject area should be
logical, not contrived
o More opportunities exist for the integration of ethnic and cultural content in
some subject areas than in others
o The scientific explanation of skin colour differences, the biological kinship of the
human species, and the frequency of certain diseases among specific human
groups are also content issues that can be investigated in science
o FOR EXAMPLE: integration of ‘immigrant’ names in content, handbooks, instead
of standard western names
- The knowledge construction process
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, o Consists of the methods, activities, and questions teachers use to help students
to understand, investigate, and determine how implicit cultural assumptions,
frames of reference, perspectives, and biases within a discipline influence the
ways in which knowledge is constructed
o When the knowledge construction process is implemented in the classroom,
teachers help students to understand how knowledge is created and how it is
influenced by the racial, ethnic, and social-class position of individuals and
groups
o Positionality = the ways in which race, social class, gender, and other personal
and cultural characteristics of knowers influence the knowledge they construct
or produce
o It is important for teachers and students to understand how knowledge is
constructed within all disciplines, including mathematics and science
o Students need to understand, even in the sciences, how cultural assumptions,
perspectives, and frames or reference influence the questions that researchers
ask and the conclusion, generalizations, and principles they formulate
o Students can analyse the knowledge construction process in science by studying
how racism has been perpetuated in science by genetic theories of intelligence,
Darwinism, and eugenics
o FOR EXAMPLE: western where does it come from? Provide students the base
for content
o Knowledge construction and the transformative curriculum
The curriculum in schools must be transformed in order to help students
develop the skills needed to participate in the knowledge construction
process
The transformative curriculum changes the basic assumptions of the
curriculum and enables students to view concepts, issues, themes, and
problems from diverse ethnic and cultural perspective
The transformative curriculum can teach students to think by encouraging
them, when they are reading or listening to resources, to consider the
author’s purposes for writing or speaking, his or her basic assumptions, and
how the author’s perspective or point of view compares with that of other
authors and resources
Students can develop the skills to analyse critically historical and
contemporary resources by being given several accounts of the same event
or situation that present different perspectives and points of view
o Teaching about knowledge construction and production
Example of how to teach in America about ‘The New World’ and ‘The
European Discovery of America’ (p. 10 t/m 11)
The goal of teaching knowledge as a social construction is to help students
to understand the nature of knowledge and the complexity of the
development of the society
Another important goal of teaching knowledge as a construction process is
to help students to develop higher-level thinking skills and empathy for the
people who have been victimized by the expansion and growth of the
United States
- Prejudice Reduction
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