Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education helps readers understand these pervasive influences by presenting extensive research and data on the sociopolitical nature of schools and society, information about different sociocultural groups, and a conceptual framework for examining multicultural education.
Real-life cases and teaching stories dominate in this book that offers a first-hand look into the lives of students and educators from a variety of backgrounds. Additionally, tips for classroom activities and community actions offer aspiring teachers concrete suggestions to provide high-quality, inclusive education in spite of obstacles they may face.
Throughout the 7th Edition, Nieto and Bode consider current policy, practice, and legislation issues while they outline a model of multicultural education that affirms diversity, encourages critical thinking, and leads to social justice and action. The book looks at how personal, social, political, cultural, and educational factors affect the success or failure of students in today's classroom. Expanding upon the popular case-study approach, the fifth edition examines the lives of 19 real students who are affected by multicultural education, or a lack of it.
Social justice is firmly embedded in this view of multicultural education, and teachers are encouraged to work for social change in their classrooms, schools, and communities. Inservice and preservice teachers, principals, school administrators and anyone interested in multicultural education.
Sonia Nieto and Patty Bode look at how personal, social, political, cultural, and educational factors affect the success or failure of students in today's classroom. Expanding upon the popular case-study approach, "Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education" examines the lives of real students who are affected by multicultural education, or the lack of it.
This social justice view of multicultural education encourages teachers to work for social change in their classrooms, schools, and communities. MyEducationLab is an online learning tool that provides resources to help you develop the knowledge and skills you'll need to be a successful teacher. All of the activities and exercises in MyEducationLab are built around essential learning outcomes for teachers.
The site provides you with opportunities both to study your course content and to practice the teaching skills you need to excel as a teacher.
The software also makes it easy to integrate your state's content standards into all of your lesson plans. Practice applying what you're learning in interactive excercises and simulations including Building Teaching Skills exercises. Respond to real classroom situations as you analyze classroom video, case studies, and authentic student and teacher artifacts.
Gain a better understanding of concepts and student experiences in multicultural settings through additional case studies, content, and resources. Assess your mastery of chapter content through a book specific Study Plan quizzes that provide overall scores for each objective and also explain why responses to particular items are correct or incorrect. Develop action plans for promoting culturally relevant curriculum and environments, social-political consciousness, and student involvement.
This text offers a breadth of disciplinary perspectives on how to center difference, power, and systemic oppression in pedagogical practice, arguing that these elements are essential to knowledge formation and to teaching.
Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education is structured as an ongoing conversation among educators who believe that teaching from a social justice perspective is about much more than the type of readings and assignments found on course syllabi. It is also about knowing students and teaching beyond the traditional classroom to meaningfully include local communities, social movements, archives, and colleagues in student and academic affairs.
Premised on the notion that continuous learning and growth is critical to educators with deep commitments to fostering critical consciousness through their teaching, Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education offers interdisciplinary and innovative collaborative approaches to curriculum transformation that build on and extend existing scholarship on social justice education. Newly committed and established social justice pedagogues share their experiences taking up the many difficult questions pertaining to what it means for all of us to participate in shaping a more just, shared future.
Organizations the world over — from nonprofits to large corporations, and secondary schools to massive intergovernmental institutions — increasingly tip into crisis as they fail to meet the challenges of diverse and complex societies. Their durability is tested by how they deal with difference, and whether they break out of dominant ways of thinking about culture, merit, and success. This book is thus designed to contribute to the ongoing conversation between the strategic imperatives of organizational leaders, and the day-management of diversity interventions by diversity practitioners and human resources specialists.
Let me suggest five realities that educators need to appreciate and understand if this is to happen:. Contrary to what the pundits who oppose multicultural education might say, multicultural education is not about political correctness, sensitivity training or ethnic cheerleading. It is primarily about social justice. Given the vastly unequal educational outcomes among students of different backgrounds, equalizing conditions for student learning needs to be at the core of a concern for diversity.
If this is the case, "celebrating diversity" through special assembly programs, multicultural dinners or ethnic celebrations are hollow activities if they do not also confront the structural inequalities that exist in schools.
A concern for social justice means looking critically at why and how our schools are unjust for some students. It means that we need to analyze school policies and practices that devalue the identities of some students while overvaluing others: the curriculum, testing, textbooks and materials, instructional strategies, tracking, the recruitment and hiring of staff and parent involvement strategies. All of these need to be viewed with an eye toward making them more equitable for all students, not just those students who happen to be white, middle class and English speaking.
Schools inevitably reflect society, and the evidence that our society is becoming more unequal is growing every day. We have all read the headlines: The United States has one of the highest income disparities in the world, and the combined wealth of the top 1 percent of U. Growing societal inequities are mirrored in numerous ways in schools, from highly disparate financing of schools in rich and poor communities, to academic tracking that favors white above black and brown students, to SAT scores that correlate perfectly with income rather than with intelligence or ability.
Although it is a worthy goal, equality is far from a reality in most of our schools, and those who bear the burden of inequality are our children, particularly poor children of all backgrounds and many children of Latino, Native American, Asian American and African American backgrounds.
The result is schools that are racist and classist, if not by intention, at least by result. Inequality is a fact of life, but many educators refuse to believe or accept it, and they persist in blaming children, their families, their cultural and linguistic backgrounds, laziness or genetic inferiority as the culprits. Once educators accept the fact that inequality is alive and thriving in our schools, they can proceed to do something about it.
Until they do, little will change. I went to elementary school in Brooklyn, N. My classmates were enormously diverse in ethnicity, race, language, social class and family structure. But even then, we were taught as if we were all cut from the same cloth.
Our mothers were urged to speak to us in English at home fortunately, my mother never paid attention, and it is because of this that I am fluent in Spanish today , and we were given the clear message that anything having to do with our home cultures was not welcome in school. To succeed in school, we needed to learn English, forget our native language and behave like the kids we read about in our basal readers. Of course, learning English and learning it well is absolutely essential for academic and future life success, but the assumption that one must discard one's identity along the way needs to be challenged.
There is nothing shameful in knowing a language other than English. In fact, becoming bilingual can benefit individuals and our country in general. As educators, we no longer can afford to behave as if diversity were a dirty word. Every day, more research underscores the positive influence that cultural and linguistic diversity has on student learning. Immigrant students who maintain a positive ethnic identity as they acculturate and who become fluent bilinguals are more likely to have better mental health, do well academically and graduate from high school than those who completely assimilate.
Yet we insist on erasing cultural and linguistic differences as if they were a burden rather than an asset. Effectively teaching students of all backgrounds means respecting and affirming who they are. To become effective teachers of all students, educators must undergo a profound shift in their beliefs, attitudes and values about difference. In many U. Consequently, students of diverse backgrounds are treated as walking sets of deficiencies, as if they had nothing to bring to the educational enterprise.
Anybody who has walked into a classroom knows that teaching and learning are above all about relationships, and these relationships can have a profound impact on students' futures.
But significant relationships with students are difficult to develop when teachers have little understanding of the students' families and communities. The identities of non—mainstream students frequently are dismissed by schools and teachers as immaterial to academic achievement. When this is the case, it is unlikely that students will form positive relationships with their teachers or, as a result, with learning.
It is only when educators and schools accept and respect who their students are and what they know that they can begin to build positive connections with them. Over the years, I have found that educators believe they are affirming diversity simply because they say they are. But mouthing the words is not enough.
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