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