What is Multicultural Awareness?

A Discussion of Diversity in Public Education

By: Mariah Brashar

In the United States of America, there are hundreds of regions, hundreds of

religions, thousands of cultures, and millions of individuals. We Americans are all

members of the American culture, our own cultures of origin, our distinct family culture,

and our own individual identity culture. Even a white man from the Midwest has a

unique background: perhaps his parents are immigrants from Russia and he himself is

gay. So, while he was born a white man in the United States, his personal culture

includes aspects that defy immediate observation. Each individual in this country has a

background and a set of characteristics that is unique to him or her. On top of that, each

individual within any of the thousands of cultures represented within American culture

has his or her own personal set of priorities, affiliations, and ways of interpreting or

valuing aspects of that culture. If American culture is a mosaic of the cultures of the

world, then it is a mosaic made of 322 million tiles, each one a different color.

Culture: even the word itself has a myriad of definitions, as Christina Convertino,

Bradley A. Levinson, and Norma Gonzalez explain in their essay Culture, Teaching, and

Learning. While the definition is contested and complex, Convertino, Levinson, and

Gonzalez argue that we cannot ignore culture if we hope to improve education. They

suggest that culture can be thought of as “the symbolic meanings by which the

members of a society communicate with and understand themselves, each other, and

the world around them.” (28)

 Multicultural education began to develop after the upheaval of the civil rights

movement of the 1960s created an increasing demand from women and people of color

for public education to be more accessible to people from minority groups or

disenfranchised backgrounds, according to James A. Banks in his essay Multicultural

Education Characteristics and Goals. Multicultural education is a method and a process

by which educators have sought and are seeking to improve education through

understanding, considering, and listening to cultures other than the dominant culture.

Banks explains that multicultural nations like the USA have a main dominant culture, or

“macro culture,” and a wide variety of “micro cultures” that make up that main culture.

(5-6) The micro cultures may have a variety of ways of interpreting and responding to

the values and goals of the macro culture. In fact, an individual may have ties to multiple

micro cultures and the importance of those ties will vary from person to person. For

some, for example, religion is very important (perhaps even a central aspect of life),

while for others it may play a very small role in their worldview. (11) It is crucial to

recognize that members of a single cultural group do not all adhere to the same exact

mold. We should no more expect members of the same culture to be the same than we

should expect members of the same race to be the same.

Race, like culture, is a group of social constructs. Nathaniel W. Smith describes

this in his essay about the complexity of race, Reconstructing Race. Smith writes about

exploring race with his high school language arts students in Pennsylvania. To these

students, race seems an abstract and meaningless thing. Smith works to show them

that, not only is race important, but it is also undeniably complicated. Smith uses not
only literature from diverse cultures (primarily the accounts of slaves and former slaves)

in his curriculum, but he also seeks to delve deeper into the issue of race in the past and

in the present. This is a fine example of multicultural awareness and education: it’s not

just about content but also about ways of understanding the content, and about delving

into the deeper meanings of our various cultural backgrounds, as Banks explains. (16)

Over the course of his class, Smith helped to show his students that

understanding race and combatting racism isn’t about “not seeing color.” He showed his

students how their own assumptions about peoples’ races shaped the narratives that

they created through an exercise involving old photographs of dark-skinned and light-

skinned slaves posed together. (290) Through this experience, Smith’s students were

able to gain a perspective about the effects of racial attitudes and the importance of

learning more about the views of people from minority races. And that kind of lesson,

according to Enid Lee in her interview Anti-racist Education: Seriously, is what

multicultural and anti-racist education is all about. (9-15)

Lee believes that the point of multicultural awareness is to equip students,

parents, and teachers with the tools they need to combat racism. Multicultural

awareness is about much more than ethnic holidays and foods: those amount to no

more than a “tourist approach,” as Convertino, Levinson, and Gonzalez call it. (25) It

includes elements of how the school is run, from who is allowed to be involved, who is

hired, and whether parents’ voices get to be heard, to the toys, games, and stories

selected to be taught. Lee argues that as long as we treat “white” as normal, and

everything else as an aberration, we will never have equity in our schools.

 If, as Convertino, Levinson, and Gonzalez write, “culture is a placeholder for a set

of inquiries,” then we must teach our students how to make those inquiries, and how to

listen to the questions and perspectives of people from differing backgrounds. We must,

as Lee suggests, truly integrate the stories, perspectives, and voices of micro cultures

into our curriculum. Multicultural awareness isn’t about adding a unit on African

American culture; it’s about creating a truly democratic society by giving our students

not only the tools to succeed in school and be understood and celebrated in school, but

also giving them the tools to understand one another and to be the force that will lead

us towards a more equitable future.

References:

Banks, J. A. (2016). Multicultural education characteristics and goals. In J. A. Banks & C.

A. McGee-Banks (Ed.). Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, 9th

edition (3-47). Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons

Convertino, C., Levinson B. A., & Gonzalez, N. (2016). Culture, teaching, and learning. In

J. A. Banks & C. A. McGee-Banks (Ed.). Multicultural Education: Issues and

Perspectives, 9th edition (25-41). Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons

Lee, E. (2009). Anti-racist education: seriously In W. Au (Ed.) Rethinking Multicultural

Education: Teaching for Racial and Cultural Justice (9-15). Milwaukee: Rethinking

Schools, Ltd.

Smith, N. W. (2009). Reconstructing race. In W. Au (Ed.) Rethinking Multicultural

Education: Teaching for Racial and Cultural Justice (287-306). Milwaukee:

Rethinking Schools, Ltd.