Scientifi c interview
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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.
” I’m glad Azerbaijan is having a better multicultural experience”
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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.