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