Celebrating
Diversity Everyday
Copyright © Adam Waxler
www.teaching-teacher.com
By the year 2020
almost half of the population of the United States will be from
ethnic groups (Woolfolk, 1998). Therefore, as teachers, we must
place a high value on cultural diversity and educational equality.
Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994) in her article, “What We Can Learn
from Multicultural Education Research”, brakes down multicultural
education into five areas bringing up many possible problems we may
face as teachers today and in the future. I agree with Billings
that multicultural education can help teachers be more successful
with all students. However, I have trouble with one particular
example she used concerning content and materials.
I have always
questioned the value of such shortsighted efforts in cultural
awareness as black history month. At first this may seem like a
great idea, to single out African Americans who have made an
accomplishment or contribution to our society. However, to do this
one month out of the year is degrading to those particular
individuals and to African Americans as a whole. I have known
several African American Professors that were outraged that every
February they would receive numerous telephone calls to speak at
various universities simply because they were African American. In
response one particular Professor would tell the interested
university that they would be glad to be a speaker any other month
of the year. This usually led to the university changing their mind
about who they wanted as a guest speaker. Black history is part of
U.S. history and should be taught everyday of every month. Billings
does not mention black history month in her article, but she does
refer to superficial celebrations. I agree that these short-lived
celebrations, whether they are a day or a month, trivialize
multicultural education. Schools need to move away from this
towards a curriculum that celebrates diversity everyday not just
once a year.
However, educators
must be careful of how they go about integrating multiculturalism
into the classroom. One example that Billings gave I strongly
disagree with. The example involved the reading of several ethnic
versions of the Cinderella story. The idea of multiculturalism is
not to take white and make it black. Or in this case take white and
make it Chinese, Egyptian, and Zimbabwean. The idea is to celebrate
ethnic differences and similarities by studying, comparing, and
contrasting different cultures. Taking a European story, such as
Cinderella, and trying to adapt it to a different ethnic culture I
believe does more harm than good. It gives the impression that the
only way to study ethnic achievement is to adapt it to European
culture. I believe the better way to have students understand about
various cultures is to compare and contrast different stories from a
variety of ethnic groups. In all fairness, Billings does provide a
number of examples that compare and contrast different cultures, but
the Cinderella example was not one of them
References
Billings, G.
(1994, May). What we can learn from multicultural education
research. Educational Leadership, 22-26.
Woolfolk, A.E.
(1998). Educational Psychology (7th ed.). Boston:
Allyn and Bacon.
Adam
Waxler is a middle school social studies teacher, teacher mentor,
and the author of eTeach: A Teacher Resource for Learning the
Strategies of Master Teachers. Adam is also the
editor and publisher of The Teaching Teacher’s Newsletter.
For more information about his ebook or to sign up for your free
monthly newsletter log onto:
http://www.teaching-teacher.com
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