Multicultural Education

In Gay's article, the definition of multicultural education that sticks out to me the most is "an education free from inherited biases, with freedom to explore other perspectives and cultures, inspired by the goal of making children sensitive to the plurality of the ways of life, different modes of analyzing experiences and ideas, and ways of looking at history found throughout the world" because I think it is important to include the different perspectives of history and the experiences and ideas of the children. For example, in Christine Sleeter's interview, she explains how Thanksgiving is a lesson taught from the perspective of the European settlers coming to the "new world" and eating a big meal with the "Indians." However, from the perspective of the Native Americans, the US was not a new world because they were already living here and the European settlers took the land by force and killed their people. Throughout my experience in school, I only knew the story from the perspective of the European settlers and it was mentioned that the Native Americans were forced off their land. But, it was not until I came to college and took different classes that I read and realized the true extent of the whole story, from both perspectives, of what actually happened. It opened my eyes and make me realize how important it is to learn and understand about the whole history from every angle. Also, I believe that in order to fully understand different cultures, students should be able to share experiences about themselves and learn from each other. For example, in Wayne Au's article, he describes an incident in his history class where the teacher was explaining a type of food he ate and was pronouncing it wrong. When Au tried to correct him, the teacher said he was "simply wrong." Even though it was a part of Au's culture and experiences, the teacher did not care to listen to him. I feel that instead of the teacher blowing him off, he should have asked the student how he knew about it and then that would have opened up a discussion about his family and his cultural experiences. This would have helped the classmates better understand what the teacher was talking about and also learn about the individual student. I also agree with Au's statement that "when classes are not grounded in the lives of students, they create environments where not only are white students miseducated, but students of color feel as if their very identities are under attack." Students should feel comfortable in classrooms and by learning about your classmates helps you better understand the culture and experiences. Students relate better to people their own age rather than the teachers.

It was said in my class that whenever people are different from each other in any way, multiculturalism exists. Instead of people taking a single class called multiculturalism, it needs to be fully worked into the education system in some way so that people are learning and understanding different cultures and backgrounds their entire schooling experience. I believe that this will help people in our society better relate to each other.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hJFi7SRH7Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBxxavk9cOU&feature=related

These two videos illustrate how important multicultural education is to understand and learn about the history of different cultures. In the first video, it demonstrates how detrimental not learning both perspectives of history can be on a person's identity. For example, one of the women in the video explains how she saw herself and her people in a negative light because the old western movies portrayed Native Americans only as savages. These single stories stereotype Native Americans and alienates them from the rest of society. If people were educated about the other side of the story, as shown in the second video, Native Americans would feel less victimized and people would have a better understanding of the events in history.

(Sources: Rethinking Multicultural Education Textbook)