Jurnal 02. indd

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Elm və İnnovativ Texnologiyalar jurnalı – Elmi müsahibə
Scientifi c interview:
World - famous scholar, Professor Christine Sleeter:
” I’m glad Azerbaijan is having a better 
multicultural experience”.
Our guest is Christine E. Sleeter, Professor Emerita in the College of Professional Studies 
at California State University Monterey Bay. She has been a visiting professor or lecturer at 
several universities, including  University of Maine, University of Colorado Boulder, Victoria 
University of Wellington and Auckland University  in New Zealand, San Francisco State Uni-
versity, University of Washington Seattle, and Universidad Nacional de Education a Distancia 
in Madrid, Spain.  Dr. Sleeter has published over 140 articles in edited books and  journals 
such as Educational Researcher, Multicultural Education Review,  Urban Education, and Te-
aching and Teacher Education. Her most recent non-fi ction book is Un-Standardizing Cur-
riculum: Multicultural Teaching in the Standards-Based Classroom (2nd ed. with J. Flores 
Carmona, Teachers College Press, 2016). Her fi rst novel White Bread was published in 2015 
by SensePublishers. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Korean, French, and Por-
tuguese. Recent awards for her work include the American Educational Research Associati-
on Social Justice in Education Award, the Chapman University Paulo Freire Education Pro-
ject Social Justice Award, the American Educational Research Association Division K Legacy 
Award, the Charles DeGarmo Lecturer Award from the Society of Professors of Education, 
and the Doctor of Humane Letters from Lewis and Clark College.

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Scientifi c interview
132
1.What is the meaning and your perception of multicultural education?
To me, multicultural education is a process of transforming schools based on dialog in 
which groups that have been marginalized on the basis of their identities (culture, lan-
guage, gender, religion, etc.) are able to rework what doesn’t work for them, or what 
has kept them marginalized. Ultimate I believe schooling should work for everyone, 
but it’s usually those with most power who are able to defi ne school processes, content, 
etc. Multicultural education broadened who gets to decide those things. As such, it 
doesn’t look the same in every school or in every country. What it looks like depends 
on who is there and the histories of relationships among groups.
2.What do you think is the signifi cance of multicultural education?
I think multicultural education has the potential to support democracy and equity 
in a diverse society. Research fi nds that students, including those from dominant 
groups, develop more accepting attitudes or understandings through multicultural 
education, and that students from marginalized groups become more academic 
engaged with a multicultural education. By making dialog and collective change 
central to it, young people can learn to become engaged in democratic social chan-
ge. 
3.What is the nature of students and the learning process, and how should lear-
ning experiences and relationships be organized?
I think the fi rst place to start is by engaging the students in helping to decide what 
matters to them, what works for them. I don’t think we can simply pick some learning 
processes and expect that those are what work best for any given group of students. 
Students know best how they learn and what interests them. My own teaching has 
involved a lot of dialog with students. I always come to the classroom with ideas of 
where we are going and how we are getting there, but I also involve the students along 
the way.
4. Could you tell us about the transforms of multicultural educators’ practice—
like the sorts of things they should be doing in classrooms?
When I work with teachers, I have them select a main idea or concept from the curri-
culum they will be teaching. Then they work with that idea or concept through several 
lenses. 1) Research the idea as it is refl ected in the intellectual knowledge of at least 
one historically marginalized group. 2) Find out what the students know already, and 
want to know, about that idea. 3) Think about their expectations for student learning, 
and how they will challenge the students intellectually and support them while they 
learn to do diffi cult academic work. 4) Consider how they will assess student learning 
while they are teaching, so they can fi gure out what students are learning and where 
students are struggling. 5) Figure out how the students might become actively engaged 
in learning. 

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” I’m glad Azerbaijan is having a better multicultural experience”
133
Again, some of this will involve talking with the students about the teaching/learning 
process.
5. What are the perceptions of teacher candidates regarding multicultural edu-
cation?
Often they feel they can’t do it because they have a curriculum they are supposed 
to teach, or it’s too diffi cult, or they don’t have the content knowledge from another 
group’s perspective, or it’s something extra. That’s why when I work with teachers, 
we start with their curriculum, central concepts in their curriculum, and then go from 
there.
6. Pleasetell us about multicultural education, and how did you get involved? 
Please describe your commitment to multicultural education (racially, culturally, 
and socioeconomically).
In brief – I trained to teach in inner city schools, on an urban education program during 
the early 1970s. Since I had not grown up in an urban area, the students were quite 
different from those I knew. This was when multicultural education was just getting 
started in the US. There were no courses on it, although some ideas related to it were 
beginning to take shape. While I was continuing to teach in urban schools through 
much of the 1970s when schools were being desegregated, I encountered some early 
multicultural education practices. One was a group of teachers from different racial/et-
hnic backgrounds who had obtained some grant money to write multicultural curricu-
lum and do workshops for teachers. These kinds of experiences helped me understand 
my own students better, and spoke to the kinds of life and learning experiences I was 
having. That’s how I got involved.
7. What are your views about refl ections of multicultural education on social 
life?
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “social life.” If you are referring to social 
relationships in a school – multicultural education helps. My experience has been 
that young people are curious about people who differ from themselves, and about 
social issues they hear about in the media, such as (in the US) Black Lives Matter. 
Usually teachers don’t talk about such things, partly because they feel they don’t 
know how and are afraid that the kids may get into arguments the teacher won’t 
know how to mediate. However, it’s possible for a teacher to learn to facilitate dif-
fi cult conversations about controversial issues (children and youth can often hand-
le controversial issues better than teachers can). And as the students and teacher 
become better at discussing controversial issues involving differences and what is 
fair/unfair around them, the students can develop better social relationships with 
each other.

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