Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis

232 Pages·2010·2.191 MB·English

by  Stephen May (editor), Christine E. Sleeter (editor)

Critical Multiculturalism
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 antiracist education, crit-
ical race theory, and critical pedagogy, critical multiculturalism has offered a
fuller analysis of oppression and the institutionalization of unequal power rela-
tions in education. But what do these powerful theories really mean for class-
room practice and specific disciplines?
Edited by two leading authorities on multicultural education, Critical
Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxisbrings 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 sci-
ence 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.
Stephen May is Professor of Education in the School of Critical Studies in
Education, Faculty of Education, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Christine E. Sleeteris Professor Emerita in the College of Professional Studies
at California State University,Monterey Bay.

Critical Multiculturalism
Theory and Praxis
Edited by
Stephen May
Christine E. Sleeter
The cover picture is from an acrylic painting “Te Kaha o te Mahi” by Donn Ratana (copyright
D. K. Ratana, 2009). The painting depicts the mangopare(hammer head shark) moving around
the different currents of the ocean. It emphasizes blazing trails, new adventures and different
pathways.
First published 2010
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Critical multiculturalism: theory and praxis/editors, Stephen May, Christine E. Sleeter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Multicultural education. 2. Multiculturalism. 3. Critical pedagogy. I. May, Stephen, 1962– II.
Sleeter, Christine E., 1948–
LC1099.C746 2010
370.117—dc22 2009050288
ISBN 0-203-85805-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–80284–9 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–80285–7 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–85805–0 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–80284–0 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–80285–7 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–85805–9 (ebk)
Contents
Introduction. Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis 1
STEPHEN MAY AND CHRISTINE E. SLEETER
Part I
Critical Multiculturalism and Teachers
1 Critical Multiculturalism and Higher Education: Resistance and
Possibilities Within Teacher Education 19
MICHAEL VAVRUS
2 Empowering Preservice Teachers, Students, and Families
Through Critical Multiculturalism: Interweaving Social
Foundations of Education and Community Action Projects 33
VIRGINIA LEA
3 Daring to Infuse Ideology into Language-Teacher Education 47
LILIA I. BARTOLOMÉ
4 Discursive Positioning and Educational Reform 61
RUSSELL BISHOP
5 Critical Multicultural Practices in Early Childhood Education 73
JEANETTE RHEDDING-JONES
Part II
Critical Multiculturalism in Language and Language Arts
6 Critical Multiculturalism and Subject English 87
TERRY LOCKE
7 Critical Multicultural Education and Second/Foreign
Language Teaching 99
RYUKO KUBOTA
8 Critical Multiculturalism and Cultural and Media Studies 113
SANJAY SHARMA
v
vi • Contents
Part III
Critical Multiculturalism in Mathematics/Sciences
9 Critical Multicultural Approaches to Mathematics Education
in Urban, K-12 Classrooms 127
ERIC GUTSTEIN
10 Digital Stories for Critical Multicultural Education:
A Freireian Approach 139
JAMES C. McSHAY
11 Knowing Our Place: Critical Multicultural Science Education 151
GEORGINA M. STEWART
Part IV
Critical Multiculturalism in Humanities and Social Science
12 Discussing Race and Culture in the Middle-School
Classroom: Scaffolding Critical Multiculturalism 165
JILL EWING FLYNN
13 A Critical Multicultural Approach to Physical Education:
Challenging Discourses of Physicality and Building Resistant
Practices in Schools 177
KATIE FITZPATRICK
14 The Arts and Social Justice in a Critical Multicultural
Education Classroom 191
MARY STONE HANLEY
15 Breaking Through “Crusts of Convention” to Realize
Music Education’s Potential Contribution to Critical
Multiculturalism 203
CHARLENE A. MORTON
List of Contributors 215
Index 219
Introduction
Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis
STEPHEN MAY AND CHRISTINE E. SLEETER
A little more than a decade ago, it seemed that multicultural education would
become common practice in schools. After all, advocacy for it had by that time—
in the 1990s—a history of 30–40 years in Western countries such as the United
States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Its core tenets
seemed both obvious and unproblematic—at least, that is, with respect to its
most popular variant, liberal multiculturalism. What could be wrong, surely,
with recognizing, respecting, and including cultural differences as the basis for
teaching and learning, as liberal multiculturalism averred? Wasn’t fostering
intercultural respect and engagement among both students and teachers a wor-
thy and important goal? Why couldn’t we all just get along better, recognizing
and celebrating our ethnic and cultural differences in the classroom, and
beyond?
You might well ask these questions—since in the last decade, we have seen a
major retrenchment of the principles of multiculturalism, in both education
and wider public policy. In the United States, a rapidly growing standards and
testing movement has replaced earlier attention to racial and ethnic diversity.
Beginnings of this shift were visible in the report A Nation at Risk(National
Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), which warned that U.S. inter-
national preeminence was being eroded by the mediocre performance of its edu-
cational institutions. A system of setting standards and measuring student
performance based on them was cemented by passage of the No Child Left
Behind Actin 2001, leading to pressure to raise test scores, which has turned the
work of teachers into that of standardized curriculum technicians and test man-
agers (Valli, Croninger, & Chambliss, 2008). In this context, despite emphasis
on efforts to close the “achievement gap,” multicultural education has all but
disappeared.
This move towards a standardized curriculum was also framed within a wider,
growing skepticism of the merits of diversity per se, particularly, after 9/11. For
many, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity are no longer something to be
celebrated, but rather feared. Bellicose U.S. critics of multiculturalism, such as
Barry (2000) and Huntingdon (2005), argue that ongoing ethnic, cultural,
1
2 • Stephen May and Christine E. Sleeter
linguistic, and religious differences are simply no longer to be tolerated if nation-
states are to continue to make their way safely in the world. And the role of mul-
ticultural education is often at the center of such attacks.
As a result of such visceral critiques of multiculturalism, and their promi-
nence in political and media commentary, wider multicultural policies and prac-
tices that seemed well accepted have simply unraveled. For example, decades of
affirmative action and related civil rights advances for African Americans have
been dismantled, most notably in relation to access to higher education
(Kellough, 2006). The provision of bilingual education, particularly for Latino/a
Americans, has also been severely circumscribed, and in some U.S. states actu-
ally proscribed, by legislation promoting a monolingual English language phi-
losophy as a prerequisite for U.S. citizenship (May, 2008). Meanwhile, across
Europe, multiculturalism as public policy is in apparent full retreat, as European
states increasingly assert that minority groups “integrate” or accept dominant
social, cultural linguistic and (especially) religious mores as the price of ongo-
ing citizenship (Modood, 2007). The obvious target here, as Modood argues,
are Muslims and Islam (see also Rhedding-Jones, this volume), who have regu-
larly been both homogenized and demonized in the post-9/11 environment, a
position represented most clearly in the former U.S. President George W. Bush’s
irresponsible and reductionist phrase “axis of evil.”
And if that were not all, there is neoliberal economic philosophy, with its
emphasis on laissez-faire economics, the “free” (read: unregulated) market, and
individualistic opportunism, as the key drivers of late capitalism. This philoso-
phy, the implosion of the 2009 U.S. economic market aside, dominates the social
and economic policies of modern nation-states, as well as those powerful supra-
national organizations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) who control the provision of funds to the developing world. In the
process, neoliberalism has entrenched, rather than ameliorated, differences in
access and opportunity between the already privileged and the marginalized and
disempowered. In many nations, such as the United Kingdom, as neoliberalism
has shifted education from a “democratic right” to a “prize to be competitively
sought,” the “haves” increasingly resist sharing social resources, leading to a
rewidening of gaps (Tomlinson, 2001). Not surprisingly, this also corresponds
closely with established racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies (Giroux, 2008).
Even here, not all is what it seems. Critics of multiculturalism, for example,
increasingly construct middle-class whites, white men, and/or monolingual
English speakers as the “new minority,” the newly disadvantaged (see, e.g., Barry,
2000; cf. Vavrus, this volume). It is almost as if, in Kozol’s (1992) wry observa-
tion, having monopolized power and privilege, such groups now wish to
monopolize misery! And yet, the ongoing social and economic realities for
indigenous, black and other marginalized groups continue to tell quite a differ-
ent story—often, a disturbingly tragic one. Residential taxation formulas in the
United States consistently privilege wealthy white communities and their schools
at the expense of poorer black, Latino, and Native American communities and
schools (Kozol, 1992; Pollock, 2008). Exclusions disproportionately target
Introduction: Critical Multiculturalism • 3
African American males and male black British students in the United States
and Britain respectively (Gillborn, 2008). Non-white and/or English language
learners have likewise been consistently overrepresented in special education
classes, particularly in the United States (Menken, 2008). Teachers still too often
construct indigenous and other minoritized students in deficit terms, with
inevitable negative consequences for their longer-term academic success
(Shields, Bishop, & Mazawi, 2005; see Bishop, this volume). All these trends are
the result of longstanding racialized institutional policies and practices that con-
sistently disadvantage minoritized students.
Meanwhile, contra the multicultural critics, the wider distribution of social,
economic, and cultural capital also clearly continues to favor those whom it
always has. Take the relationship between racialization and wealth. In the United
States, even when white and black families are on similar incomes, their respec-
tive net worth still differs markedly. Fewer black families own their homes, for
example, and more are likely to live in minority neighborhoods, where house
values appreciate more slowly (Guinier & Torres, 2002). As Guinier and Torres
argue, these differences in family wealth have demonstrable intergenerational
consequences, particularly when one recognizes the close relationship, high-
lighted by Kozol above, between wealth and educational access and opportu-
nity in the United States. Guinier and Torres conclude: “Race in this society [the
United States] tracks wealth, wealth tracks education, and education tracks
access to power” (p. 48).
Why do these structural inequalities continue to persist? And why is it that
multiculturalism has apparently been so easily rebuffed as a potential answer,
both within and beyond education? The next sections will explore this conun-
drum in two ways. First, we will highlight, ironically, a key weakness of liberal
multiculturalism—its inability to tackle seriously and systematically these struc-
tural inequalities, such as racism, institutionalized poverty, and discrimination,
as a result of its continued use of the affirmational and politically muted dis-
courses of “culture” and cultural recognition. Second, we explore how more crit-
ical educational conceptions—notably, antiracist education, critical race theory,
critical pedagogy, and critical multiculturalism—too often fail in turn to provide
actual examples of transformed and/or emancipatory pedagogy and practice.
Indeed, as we shall see, a key focus of this volume is to do precisely the latter, for
both teachers and teacher educators. By this, we aim to make clearer and more
consistent links acrossthe various critical paradigms, in ways that complement
and extend them, rather than entrench them in their own disciplinary orbits.
The Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism
Let us begin here with a vignette. Picture a predominantly white, affluent school
somewhere in the United States that has begun to experience a gradual diver-
sification of its student population, as a few middle-class African American
students and a small but growing population of Mexican immigrant students
from low-income homes began to attend. As a result, two people at the school