Curriculum in Multicultural Education

The article I found isn't actually an article, it is a chapter from a book written by James A. Banks. The chapter is titled Approaches to Multicultural Curriculum Reform. Although the majority of the reading was very interesting, I focused on the first 5 pages which discuses mainstream-centric curriculum and the integration of multicultural curriculum. The dominant mainstream-centric curriculum is centralized around concepts, and events that reflect american experiences therefore making education biased and unbalanced for a diverse student.
According to the article, factors that have slowed teachers from the institutionalization of a multicultural curriculum include teachers focusing on high stakes testing which especially has increased in the last decade with the new standards for accountability, low awareness and knowledge of ethnic cultures through educators, and a heavy reliance on textbooks for teaching. Banks says if teachers want to integrate multicultural education into their curriculum, they need knowledge of ethnic cultures and experiences to bring these cultures into the lessons.
The levels of integration begin at level 1 and progress to level 4. Most teachers begin at level one with lessons and over time work in the continuing levels to incorporate cultural diversity in curriculum
Level 1: The Contributions Approach
Focuses on heroes, holidays, and discrete
cultural elements.
Level 2: The Additive Approach
Content, concepts, themes, and
perspectives are added to the
curriculum without changing its
structure.
Level 3: The Transformation Approach
The structure of the curriculum is changed
to enable students to view concepts,
issues, events, and themes from the
perspectives of diverse ethnic and
cultural groups.
Level 4: The Social Action Approach
Students make decisions on important
social issues and take actions to help
solve them.


This reading reminded me of chapter 9 in the Affirming Diversity text where the authors discuss classrooms with multicultural curriculum in action and how the teachers were able to get started and what they had to do to make everything happen (Pages 344 & 354). In the Cambodian lesson the teachers prepared the curriculum up to what Banks would consider Level 3 because they changed the structures of the original curriculum and talked about Cambodian cultural but was still able to tie in all of the standards. The second lesson in the book reaches what Banks would identify as Level 4. It is the Expanding Family definitions lesson and it allows children and family of all diversities and backgrounds to decide together on the social issues of "what is a family".

https://www.pcc.edu/resources/tlc/anderson-conference/documents/multicultural-banks.pdf

Rethinking the School to Prison Pipeline

In the article "Stop the School to Prison Pipeline" the website Rethinking-schools focuses this editorial on the common pipeline that schools do see forming in urban schools and how to stop it. The article defines the pipeline as forming from deep social and economic inequalities, and when schools were reformed during the civil and human rights movements in the 60's and the 70's. The original reform of education was going to reset schools back to the basics and set all students on an equal playing field, however in the 80's, harsh policies were set for the war on drugs that were soon implemented in schools. 

One case that the article talks about is a young boy being punished too harshly for his actions at his age. He was 11 and was wanting to get to school on time so he dressed in old clothes from a boy scout meeting from over the weekend. He still had a pocket knife in his pocket and as soon as he realized he did, he turned the knife into the office and tried to explain his mistake. Within minutes the boy was in custody and was shorty suspended and transferred to a disciplinary school.

This ties in so well with what the book talks about in Ch 7 with resistance theory and prison pipelines. Students and parents are learning to react to the schools because of the reality that takes place at the schools, although some of their coping strategies may be self-defeating and counterproductive.The article concludes by talking about how to seal the pipeline by creating social justice for all students. "We cannot build safe, creative, nurturing schools and criminalize our children at the same time." We need to start by treating all of our students equally and fairly in one movement to get the communities and families on board.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/26_02/edit262.shtml

The Effects of NCLB on ELL students

I chose the article "Promise or Peril? NCLB and the Education of ELL Students" by Cohen, Murray, and Clewell. This article, as well as the reading in our textbook (Ch 6), talks about hows negatively No Child Left behind has effected students who do not speak English in US school systems.

The article discusses how NCLB is implement in high ELL schools, What has been the effect on high-ELL school improvement, and what has been the effect of NCLB on ELL students in high-ELL schools? The article address each of these questions by observing three different districts and there approaches to the problems and how the various solutions work and don't work. This article is long but interesting because it describes different ways to interpret NCLB and ways schools can use it to their advantage to help students.

Part of this article that really stuck out to me was that in our text, the term Limited English Proficient (LEP) was considered abandoned because of its negative connotation and even offensive meaning behind it. The article used this term freely and repeatedly, however it was published in 2007 when this term was perhaps still in circulation with ELL.

http://www.urban.org/publications/411469.html
PDF:  http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411469_ell_students.pdf

Retention In Middle School

Jane David talks about retention in this article and how it is in place in schools but does little to help students while not being cost beneficial. Jane talks specifically about African American males having the highest risk of being retained in a school career at least once. One of the more interesting parts of the article is the discussion of the research done and the negative affects that retention has had on all students such as in the article, one paragraph talks about students with retention rates have much higher drop out rates in high school, meaning the correlations are becoming to close. The article talks about solutions to correct problems such as summer school or after school programs, instead of placing them in the same grade for a second time. Students are losing self-esteem and motivation needed to succeed.

I really enjoyed this article because of how closely it tied into the reading into chapter with retention. The book talks about retention having no positive effects on students and causing only further harm to the students while the article goes further in depth and talks about the costs and some possible solutions. Some of these solutions could be more useful then others like after school programs.

 http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar08/vol65/num06/Grade-Retention.aspx

Multicultural Education as a Process

I have been taking into account the ideas of the course and the readings and discussions about multicultural education and how important it is for all students because of the impact it has on their learning and their social and cultural well-being. After reading Transforming myself to Transform my Classroom (2001) by Paul Gorski, I have a much better understanding of how to go about a multicultural transformation in schools.

Gorski brings up a strong argument that teachers and educators will easily agree to discussion on curriculum changes and cultural diversity appearing. He brings up that the resistance that is occurring is about self-change or self-transformation. I found one of the most interesting part of the article is when he is talking about the process and how the most difficult, and essentially, the scariest part, was realizing or knowing that he had prejudices or biases even when he didn't want to have them because he had considered himself a tolerant liberal man.

This article ties in well to what we are reading and discussing with the class because Gorski creates a list of the "Ten Critical and Self-critical Things I Can Do to Be a Better Multicultural Educator". His list includes reflecting on reactions to people and events, recognizing social identity, understanding the relationship between intent and impact, and many other ways that changing yourself will better your teaching as a multicultural teacher.

http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/edchange_10things.html

Addressing the issue of racism

In the beginning of the course we have talked about the culture that students have and the culture that students lose when they are in our classrooms. The article I read was published by John Hopkins University and it talked about multicultural education in classrooms and racism being a serious issue and topic for discussion. We could all get our first jobs in schools filled with students with various backgrounds and races and a point that is brought up in the article is that the majority of us would at some point be nervous to say the wrong thing, or say something politically incorrect.

The solution in the article ties into our readings really well. We talk about creating an environment for students that allows their culture to be prevalent. Create a classroom for students that they will want to open up and talk about their culture, but it will also take away from a personal tension of addressing races in the room. The article talks about the difficulty of a topic for whites because of potential reprimands, perhaps unlikely though.  This is a hard subject rally but creating a multicultural classroom will provide students the best ways to learn.

http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/strategies/topics/multicultural-education/recreating-schools-for-all-children/index.html