Critical Multiculturalism

Theory and Praxis

Stephen May, Christine E. Sleeter, Stephen May, Christine E. Sleeter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135161460
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Critical multiculturalism has emerged over the last decade as a direct challenge to liberal or benevolent forms of multicultural education. By integrating and advancing various critical theoretical threads such as anti-racist education, critical race theory, and critical pedagogy, critical multiculturalism has offered a fuller analysis of oppression and institutionalization of unequal power relations in education. But what do these powerful theories really mean for classroom practice and specific disciplines?

Edited by two leading authorities on multicultural education, Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis brings together international scholars of critical multiculturalism to directly and illustratively address what a transformed critical multicultural approach to education might mean for teacher education and classroom practice. Providing both contextual background and curriculum specific subject coverage ranging from language arts and mathematics to science and technology, each chapter shows how critical multiculturalism relates to praxis. As a watershed in the further development of critical multicultural approaches to education, this timely collection will be required reading for all scholars, educators and practitioners of multicultural education.

I
Critical Multiculturalism and Teachers

1
Critical Multiculturalism and Higher Education

Resistance and Possibilities Within Teacher Education

MICHAEL VAVRUS

Contemporary multiculturalism in higher education emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. It was a result of uprisings against colonial regimes globally and activism for civil rights in the United States when the effects of racism and economic dependency were identified as central political reasons for emancipatory social action by historically marginalized and oppressed groups. From this cauldron of international movements for fundamental civil rights, multicultural education as a reform movement materialized. The struggle to incorporate multi cultural perspectives into the higher education curriculum, including teacher education, was met with stiff resistance from Eurocentric privileging of access and knowledge. The fight for academic studies with explicit counter-hegemonic content such as Black, Chicano, and Indigenous studies paved the way for eventual calls for inclusion of multiculturalism in higher education.

Despite these initial inroads, what appears to take place in higher education today generally reflects normative sentiments of the nation-state as a monocultural, equal-opportunity entity for all individuals, whereas group identity discrimination is viewed as an aberration rather than a structural practice. Hierarchical group rankings along the lines of race, gender, and religion, however, “are both worldwide and local, and … have enormous consequences in the lives of people and in the operation of the capitalist world-economy” that result in local nationalized interpretations as to “who would be considered ‘true’ nationals” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 39). Hence, consistently denied by monocultural nationalists are pervasive racialized “societies in which economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races” (Bonilla-Silva, 2005, p. 11).

Since World War II the United States, along with the United Kingdom, has exported an educational model based on universalistic meritocratic assumptions that mask the realities of a political economy of racialized hierarchies globally. This imperial model ignores the demoralizing poverty perpetuated through the political role of international monetary organizations that negatively affect life opportunities for millions, including access to even elementary education in a political environment where tax bases for public services are sacrificed to prop up finance capital for the upper classes (Foster, 2007; Wroughton, 2008). Correspondingly, access to higher education internationally in the last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed an affirmative action rise and a corresponding twenty-first century retreat for historically subordinated people. Even where equitable access to higher education is a stated goal for a nation like Brazil, inadequate secondary education has limited the success of traditionally subordinated populations (Canen, 2005). Tomasevski (2003) explained that globally,

the laissez-faire regime for universities has led to private universities being operated as commercial companies whose shares are quoted on stock exchanges …. A blend of deregulation and privatization has created fertile ground for the mushrooming of private universities. The cost has been removed from the public to the private realm, to individual students, to their families and to corporate sponsorship.

(p. 115)

Furthermore, as demand for higher education increased internationally, public expenditures have declined relative to public funding (Gordon, 2007). Hence, as education entered international trade law as a commodity in the 1990s, access to higher education by low-income and poor students significantly decreased (Tomasevski, 2003).

Because the state—and hence public primary, secondary, and higher education— depends on significant revenues from corporate capitalism, state institutions behave accordingly through selections and exclusions, including ideological orientations, that can in turn service capital. This dependency on capital filters into universities and public schools through rules and regulations that influence and often set educational expectations that can be contrary to multiculturalism. In this climate, Mahalingam and McCarthy (2000) warn about “the need to rescue the best intuitions in multiculturalism from a full-scale corruption and incorporation by the interests of global capitalism” (p. 6).

Placed within this international political and economic environment, this chapter uses teacher education as a key example of the contested nature of multiculturalism in higher education. First, an overview is presented of the disjunctive nature of teacher education programs that claim a vision of multiculturalism yet evidence practices absent of a critical perspective. Next examined for their effect on multiculturalism are higher education accreditation standards to which teacher education programs in the United States are expected to demonstrate an adherence. This analysis of accreditation standards focuses on the problematic construction of multicultural and social justice discourse. Following this is a case study of the response and resistance of a local state government and its teacher education institutions within the U.S. state of Washington to efforts to incorporate critical multiculturalism into their programs for preservice teachers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of promising critical multicultural perspectives and practices in teacher education.

Locating the Critical in Multicultural Teacher Education

Today, multicultural education in higher education is explicitly located within academic studies orientated toward prospective and current primary and secondary school teachers. As an interdisciplinary field of study, multicultural education draws from such disciplines as sociology, history, legal studies, economics, political science, social philosophy, social psychology, and communications studies. Within teacher preparation programs, multicultural education is often located programmatically under the umbrella of the social foundations of education and marginally, if at all, infused across the curriculum.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the growing consensus among internationally recognized multicultural scholars (see Vavrus, 2002, pp. 2–6) was for an emancipatory conception of multicultural education as the best possibility to transform social relations and institutions in order to overcome discriminatory schooling and societal conditions. Sleeter and Bernal (2004) highlight how drawing from critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and antiracist education, a critical multiculturalism can “steer the course of transforming education more strongly” (p. 252). Yet, as Sleeter and Bernal aptly observe, this theoretical consensus for a critical multiculturalism should not be confused with actual higher education practices.

In effect, the response has generally been tepid to multicultural incorporation into teacher education programs. Overall, for the past 40 years teacher education in the United States has successfully managed multicultural expressions and commitments so that individualistic psychological and technical orientations remain the central curricular focus of these programs. In a comprehensive review of higher education programs, Cochran-Smith, Davis, and Fries (2004) poignantly observe:

Although a “new multicultural teacher education” may indeed be envisioned as the way to meet the needs of students and families in the real world, it is far removed from the demands and traditions of another real world: the institutional reality of colleges and universities, which supports and maintains the status quo.

(p. 954)

Isolated praiseworthy programmatic and individual faculty efforts aside, the tendency in teacher education is to exclude social, economic, and political factors that affect student learning: “many of the fundamental assumptions about the purposes of schooling and the meritocratic nature of American society that have long been implicitly in teacher education remain unchallenged and undermined by the other aspects of preparation” (p. 964). Faculty and programs who make multicultural commitments face a double bind in that this status quo orientation spills over even more dramatically from higher education to primary and secondary government-supported schools, the public spaces in which their graduates work.

This disjunctive condition between critical multicultural advocacy and higher education’s too-often status quo position should not be entirely surprising. The roots of critical multiculturalism developed from the ways in which critical theory “problematizes the structures of history that embody who we are and have become” (Popkewitz, 1999, p. 3). Embedded within this critical perspective is the development of a critical consciousness cognizant of unjust social systems that can lead to a sense of agency where mainstream conditions are perceived as capable of being transformed (Freire, 1970). Clearly, critical multiculturalism can strike at the heart of hegemonic positions both inside and outside of higher education and faces, therefore, waves of opposition.

Higher Education Accreditation Standards

In the United States, higher education state and national accreditation standards serve to set multicultural and “diversity” expectations and parameters along with a normative climate for teacher education. The following sections examine from a critical multicultural perspective the accreditation standards of the influential National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) that determine “which schools, colleges, and departments of education meet rigorous national standards in preparing teachers and other school specialists for the classroom” (NCATE, 2008c). As of 2006, NCATE had accredited 632 institutions with another 100 colleges and universities in the process of seeking governmental approval for their teacher education programs (NCATE, 2006). Following this is a case study of a state of Washington effort to create a critical, performance-based pedagogical assessment instrument for preservice teachers in its 21 higher education institutions. Revealed in analyses of both of these cases is a resistance to naming a “master narrative” (Huggins, 1991) that demands institutional incorporation of a history of European colonialism, white supremacy, and the implications of this history for the schooling and eventual economic and political opportunities for historically marginalized populations.

NCATE’s Vague Multicultural Advocacy

By the use of the term diversity in the absence of any mention of multicultural, turn-of-the-century NCATE (2001) standards advanced an assimilationist assessment ideology upon state-level accrediting requirements that drive higher education teacher education practices. A critique of those standards and accompanying assessment rubrics revealed an absence of transformative knowledge grounded in historical foundations of white privilege, property rights, and color blindness (Vavrus, 2002). Seven years later NCATE (2008b) tinkered with diversity expectations that remain in effect until 2015.

Multicultural and Global Perspectives

Just one use of the term multicultural is found in the primary text of current NCATE higher education accreditation standards (2008b) by mentioning the importa...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• I Critical Multiculturalism and Teachers
• II Critical Multiculturalism in Language and Language Arts
• III Critical Multiculturalism in Mathematics/Sciences
• IV Critical Multiculturalism in Humanities and Social Science
• Contributors
• Index