MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION.   Term Paper ID:26769 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Examines attempts to diversify curricula to meet multicultural needs of students & society. Definition, Ebonics, public views, social divisions, values & morality.... More...

10 Pages / 2250 Words 10 sources, 13 Citations, APA Format $40.00 Return to List of Papers

Paper Abstract: Examines attempts to diversify curricula to meet multicultural needs of students & society. Definition, Ebonics, public views, social divisions, values & morality. Paper Introduction: Ebonics If people did not know about the attempts being made in American school systems to reach out to a multicultural population before 1996, they certainly found out about it then. When the public school system in Oakland, California, decided to treat the standard speech of black Americans as a separate language or dialect, the issue of multicultural education (which had been discussed and agreed upon and argued over at the local level for at least a decade) became an important part of the national dialogue. Ebonics became a symbol for nearly everyone who thought that something should be changed about the way American schoolchildren are taught, with some people applauding the idea and many others -- and not only conservative whites -- decrying it. An examination of this issue will serve as an introduction to the topic of Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. (199 ). Tomlinson, S. Whether high school children in Oakland study Ebonics as aseparate dialect has little real consequence for the fate of the nation(although it may well affect individual students in important ways). B1). If it is questionable whetherone can even measure a student's abilities in geometry or calculus, how canone possibly measure skills like tolerance or appreciation for diversity?Test students on their knowledge about important black inventors? The Los Angeles Times, p. (1994, March 3). This is certainly a resurgence of the Melting Potideal of American society, in which within two generations all Americanstalk the same, even if they do not (and cannot be made to) look the same. Luna, N. Students who go through what might be termed as high-intensitysensitivity training are more likely to have friends or date people of adifferent race and to say that they would be comfortable hiring, workingfor or marrying someone of a different race (Cava, 199 , March 14). An examination of this issue willserve as an introduction to the topic of multicultural education in theUnited States. Byhonoring the indigenous speech of each student, the Oakland schools soughtto instill in their pupils an appreciation for the importance and eleganceof the spoken and written word (Associated Press, 1996, December 24). This is not in contention. 14, p. It should also be clear that oneof the places where they will come to metaphorical blows will be within theschools. But except for the grossest ofmeasurements -- whether or not one commits hate crimes, for example -- itis difficult to measure increased tolerance and respect for peopledifferent from oneself. The doctrine of "separatebut equal" that justified segregation is of course today rejected, but ithas in many ways been replaced by the idea of "equal but different." The social movements of the 196 s through 198 s, which asked for equalrights for blacks and other racial minorities and women, laid thegroundwork for this idea, that we should each be able to be ourselves on alevel playing field. She notes thatsmall elements of the pupil's day add up to an overall feeling of beingeither excluded or included and that teachers must be aware of each one ofthese, from the images in the pictures of books for younger children to howauthority figures treat different kinds of children in films that are shownto the kinds of foods that are served for snacks (Kendell, 1996, chapter7). There arecertainly some good elements to this model. A5. The outcry that greeted this proposal from across the country -- andthat included both protests and support from all racial groups -- wasastonishing in its intensity. B1. In general, multicultural education is "aninclusive concept used to describe a wide variety of school practices,programs and materials designed to help children from diverse groups toexperience educational equality" (Modgil etal, 1987, p. Past Imperfect, Present Tense. B1. (1998, June 1 ). The adage that ignorance breeds mistrust is in deed true.Classroom programs that work on getting individual students to comparetheir own personal experiences (including how their own lives are affectedby whatever race and gender they are) have proven to be effective, at leastif the students' self-reports of their own feelings and experiences areaccurate. Before proceeding further with a look at multicultural education inthe United States, it will be useful be useful to define the term"multicultural education" more clearly. And if it is the case the schools are not simply where children aretaught their times tables and the periodic chart of elements but also whatit means to be an American, the importance of multicultural educationbecomes much greater. When the public school system inOakland, California, decided to treat the standard speech of blackAmericans as a separate language or dialect, the issue of multiculturaleducation (which had been discussed and agreed upon and argued over at thelocal level for at least a decade) became an important part of the nationaldialogue. There have, after all, always been people whocrossed racial lines in the friendships and relationships, and yet racism,sexism and other divisions still remain. There are what might be seen asimmersion multicultural programs in which the entire curriculum isrewritten to ensure that the fact that diversity is valued is made clearnot just one hour a day or one day a week but throughout the entire day.Kendell (1996) notes that language arts, social studies, dramatic play,music, math and science as well as play itself can all be expanded toincorporate concepts of diversity and multiculturalism. The Press-Enterprise, p. Certainlythat provides a glimpse into one kind of knowledge that is useful for anappreciation of a diverse society. etal. Oakland Firm About Ebonics.The Press-Enterprise, p. The debate about multicultural education going on in the United Statesseems to be about things like Ebonics or whether or not to celebrate Cincode Mayo. 223). Celebrating Cultural Diversity. Ironically, those programs that sometimes seem to work best in trulypromoting tolerance (and therefore the ones that progressive critics ofeducation are most pleased with) are the kinds of relatively low-tech onesthat conservative critics also find appealing (at least in form if not incontent). Modgil, S. One has only to walk downthe streets of any major U.S. 13-19). It is hard to know exactly what to make of such findings. Ebonics was so vociferously debated by so many people in differentsectors of society because it called into question the basic goals ofpublic primary and secondary education in the United States. Butwhether those students grow up to be Americans who happen also to be blackor African-Americans has a very great effect on society as a whole. Inglewood High Cancels EthnicCelebrations. London: Falmer Press. Kendell, F. Many Americans believe inwhat has over the past century been seen as a "melting pot" ideal of thecountry, in which everyone comes from someone else and contributessomething of their own language, customs, beliefs and history into thecommonality of American culture and in return is assimilated into anaverage American, someone who is a multicultural hodge-podge. Schools in some real measure have the power to makepupils more homogeneous, to push them firmly down the road to assimilationand the great melting pot or to push them with equal firmness away fromassimilation. The Nation, website. Batsford. (1996, December 24). Educating Americans in a Multiethnic society, 3rd ed.,New York: McGraw-Hill. We aresimply too diverse a country ever to agree perfectly on anything. Butschools for many people, including many parents and school administrators,are also institutions for shaping future workers and citizens. As a result, this idea that everyone, once they came to America,should melt together into a homogeneous whole, has lost nearly all of itscurrency. All theemphasis on not being tardy, on perfect attendance, on observinghierarchies is often explicitly justified on the grounds that at some pointchildren will go off to work and the good responsible habits they learnedin school will help them climb their professional ladders. Being different has become much moreacceptable. Thus we have come to a point in American society when some people wantto adhere to a "melting pot" ideology while a now substantial andpolitically sophisticated group wants differences and diversity to beacknowledged, celebrated and encouraged. On the onehand, it is certainly encouraging that such a simple things as opendialogue and friendship should make such a difference. People still want to fit in -- for this is a desire that we allpossess at least in some measure -- but they also want to stand out asindividuals different from the rest of society. It would be impossible to summarize the entire range of multiculturaleducation programs in the United States for there is simply too muchvariation from one school district to another, from one teacher to another,from one pupil's experience to another. The OrangeCounty Register, p. Immigrants (and this class must include to some extent African-Americans and other groups that because of their racial features alwayswill look to some white Americans as if they belonged somewhere else) areless threatening now because there are fewer of "them" as opposed to the"us" that are already here. What is in contention, in bluntterms, is what should be done about this fact. And it does seem clear that an effective method of multi-culturaleducation is certainly needed if for no other reason than to counter thebacklash that has been felt against multiculturalism in both the schoolsand in society at large, a backlash that both prompted and has come to besymbolized by California's Proposition 227, which has had among numerouseffects the result that bilingual education has been radically changed inthe state of California. Ebonics became a symbol for nearly everyone who thought thatsomething should be changed about the way American schoolchildren aretaught, with some people applauding the idea and many others -- and notonly conservative whites -- decrying it. (199 , March 14). Programs promoting these values throughout the curriculum have hadsome measure of success in creating a more tolerant student body (Luna,1994, March 3), although it is difficult to define exactly what successfulmulticultural education programs should do, which is no doubt one of thereasons that such programs have so often been attacked as beingacademically suspect and wishy-washy, a sap provided to members ofhistorically oppressed groups so that they will think that maybe thingsaren't really so bad after all (Tomlinson, 199 , introduction). (1997, May, 12). This dialect,Ebonics, was influenced in part by West African languages, in part by thespeech patterns of the Southern United States, in part by the linguisticchanges that always occur to a language when it is spoken by a minoritygroup. etal, eds. Ebonics, strippedof its political rhetoric (to the extent that is possible with such asubject) was really just an acknowledgement of the fact that BlackAmericans, caricatured for years as being unable to speak proper English,were instead simply speaking a separate dialect of English. Raising Racial Respect. Though Sympathetic to the Cause, the SchoolBoard Decides it Can't Afford to Join the Fight. And this year, the Inglewood school district decided to cancel blackhistory month and Cinco de Mayo celebrations at Inglewood High because thetwo events, which began as precisely the type of multicultural educationalprogrammed originally seen by school administrators and teachers as a wayto promote tolerance and to bring groups together, have become polarizingsymbols pushing the school's black and Latino students farther apart(Streeter, 1999, Feb. Streeter, K. Nava, A. A3 Associated Press. 222). However,it does also assume that the goal of being an American means less ofwhatever else one is -- less Armenian, less Jewish, less Nigerian, and theenforced nature of this assimilation has come to seem very undesirable tomany people. No one would have cared if a linguist had given a paperat an academic conference looking at the historical roots of black Englishor poetic cadence in black English or differences among different African-American groups in verb formation. D1. We tend to think of elementary and secondary schools as places wherepupils learn basic facts about the world -- how many feet in a mile, whodiscovered hemoglobin, the perfect imagery of Emily Dickinson's poems. This paperexamines one of those goals -- the teaching of pupils about themulticultural nature of our society -- within the context of the purpose ofeducation as a whole. But Ebonics was different, because itwent to the heart not of a particular dialect or even to the socialstanding of a particular racial group but to what it means to be anAmerican (Associated Press, 1997, February 11). Surely it is not the school celebrationof Cinco de Mayo or Martin Luther King's courage that has polarizedstudents, but larger forces in society that the students have absorbed andbring with them to school. "Radical scholars criticize multicultural education fornot doing what the conservatives are afraid that it will achieve:significant reform of the social structure" (Modgil etal, 1987, p. (1986). On the other hand,it is difficult to believe that such mild measures can have the ability tomake drastic social changes. References Associated Press. LA Rejects Move to Put Ebonicsin Curriculum. They have alsobeen criticized by both progressives and conservatives and ironically forthe same reason. Multicultural education in white schools.London: B.T. Useful, but not easy, because theterm has been and is used to cover so many different kinds of programs --from reading lists that include the literatures of different traditions tobilingual education -- that it has been diluted almost into meaningless asa single pedagogical concept. It should also be noted that changes in ideas about what shouldhappen to people after they immigrated to the United States may alsoreflect the lessening numbers of immigrants to this country (at least inproportion to the population as a whole) that has occurred over the lastcentury. Immigrants are no longer expected to fit in quite asquickly as they once were or quite as thoroughly. New York: TeacherCollege Press. Cava, M. (1997, February 11). USA Today, p. (1999, February 14). Even is one approves on what one might call politico-moral grounds ofmulticultural education, it is a legitimate question to ask how one mightknow that one's program is successful. Diversity in the classroom, 2nd ed. Or at least it was initially astonishing, butit should not have been, for the issue at stake was far more than simplythe question of whether Ebonics -- or Standard Black English, as linguistshave been calling it for years -- was in fact a true dialect, a vernacular,a sub-dialect, a regional dialect or another form of language division.While such things are properly the subject of debate among linguists (whocan, like all scholars, become rather heated in their support of theirideas on a subject), such fine scholarly distinctions are unlikely to makeit to talk radio. It is important to begin the discussion of Ebonics by noting that thestorm that settled itself so quickly over the Oakland school board had verylittle to do with the actual linguistic issues at hand. Such programs might generally be seen as promoting an overall respectfor cultural diversity by providing concrete demonstrations of the factthat people and families come in all different forms, that talent and hardwork can help one achieve one's dreams regardless of one's gender or race,and that each of us will have to acquire the skills to spend our entirelives working and living with people who will never be just the same as weare. It is all too easy to see how suchprograms could be overly watered down all too quickly until they becameentirely ineffective (Nava etal, 1995, pp. This school district wanted to ensure that this dialect would berecognized and validated, just as the Spanish spoken by the children ofMexican immigrants was recognized as a fully expressive language. Clearly, there will not be muchmiddle ground found between these groups. Ebonics If people did not know about the attempts being made in Americanschool systems to reach out to a multicultural population before 1996, theycertainly found out about it then. The Los Angeles Times, p.B1. Multicultural education: Theinterminable debate. Such programshave been seen by many members of minority or marginalized groups as onemeans of attaining broad social equality for their group. Some schools across that country have found that creating greaterrespect for each other is a process that can best be achieved not byensuring that each student can recite the names of military heroes of everypossible race but simply by learning to get along with the people theyactually know (Cava, 199 , March 14; Past Imperfect, Present Tense, 1997,May 12). Before the passage of this proposition, studentscould be enrolled for their entire school careers in bilingual classes(which catered mostly to Spanish-speaking students but were also offered tospeakers of Cambodian, Korean, Vietnamese among other languages) must nowwithin a couple of years be mainstreamed into English-only classrooms(Chey, 1998, June 1 ). Theschool district hoped to make African-American children bilingual inEbonics and English just as it hoped to make Spanish-speaking childrenbilingual in English as well, not because one language was superior to theother, but because English is the lingua franca of the United States. It seems hard to imagine that one could find a person who would arguethat ours is not indeed a multicultural society. But it is in fact about what we want to be as a country and as apeople and so it is hard to imagine that it will ever be resolved. city to hear a dozen different languagesbeing spoken. People no longer changetheir names on a regular basis or (in general) work so assiduously toremove all traces of a foreign accent. Chey, E. There are standardized ways oftesting reading proficiency and mathematical skills, but even these testsare frequently challenged as being biased. It has a certain basicdemocratic nature to it, a sense that everyone does indeed have somethingto contribute to the national dialogue and the national culture. (1996). But there are certain general waysof categorizing multicultural programs. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.

Many of our Papers can be Downloaded From This Site!

PLEASE READ THIS, IT IS IMPORTANT!

Office hours are Monday through Friday, from 9 am to 5 pm (PST). You may place orders for custom research over the phone during office hours. E-mail requests can be made to our graduate and undergraduate department any time, and will be reviewed during office hours. You may also contact customer service any time through e-mail, and we will review your message during business hours. A great many papers can be downloaded right from this site, but not all of them. If you would like to know if a particular paper is downloadable, just look in the description for: "Available for Internet Download: Y" or "Available for Internet Download: N" If you wish to purchase a paper which is NOT available for immediate download, you will need to make other shipping arrangements. Also, please be aware that these orders are processed Monday through Friday from 9 am to 5 pm (PST). If you place your order after 4:45pm on Friday, it will not be processed until the following Monday morning. We charge $8 per page for all of our pre-written reports, plus shipping (and tax for California residents). However, the highest cost of any ONE report is $136, or 17 pages. Please, take a moment. Make sure you have chosen the report you want or need BEFORE you complete your order. If you are not sure, allow us to help you. We do not offer refunds or exchanges, so it is important for you to let us answer your questions during office hours. Reports which are e-mailed or downloaded are in Microsoft Word format. We are making more reports available for e-mail delivery faster than we can update our listings. Please call to check on the status of particular reports. There are many other shipping options which are listed on the Checkout page.