Multicultural Education : Where Are We Now

Here’s a test: Walk into your local school and take a peek at the posters on the walls and the books in the library. If the only non-homogenous representations are of heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., or celebrations like Cinco de Mayo, then chances are, your school has some work to do when it comes to giving students a multicultural perspective.

It’s actually a twofold problem that experts say schools struggle with: Giving students exposure to more than the heroes and holidays of other cultures, and meeting the needs of students from different cultural, racial and religious backgrounds.

Rebecca Bustamante, assistant professor of educational leadership at Sam Houston State University in Texas, says schools aren’t doing enough to be culturally responsive. To be effective, multiculturalism needs to be infused in schools, she says. That means making sure that the walls reflect diversity, but also that discipline policies are balanced and advanced classes are inclusive. “In Advanced Placement or gifted programs, are they all white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant kids, or are they representative of all cultures?” says Bustamante, who specializes in research and consulting on culturally responsive school leadership, intercultural communication and global education.

The impact on students comes in many forms. If teachers aren’t familiar with different cultures, or aware of their own preconceptions and attitudes, even the smallest verbal and non-verbal messages might alienate a student, says Maria Morukian, training and consulting manager with the National MultiCultural Institute in Washington, DC. It’s easy for even well-meaning people to make stumbles if they don’t know, for example, that making eye contact with elders isn’t acceptable practice in some cultures, Morukian says.

The result is, “there’s a greater possibility they’ll shut down, and they won’t try to excel,” she says of those students. 

One solution is a focus on greater teacher training about the needs of students from other cultures, with an emphasis on gaining an understanding of students’ experiences. “It’s not the kind of training where ‘people from this country act like this,’ because that’s just perpetuating stereotypes,” Morukian says. “We have to understand ourselves and how we view the world.” The training should include some tangible skills, including how to resolve conflicts among diverse students, respond when there are cultural insensitivities and create a comfortable classroom.

Schools also need to facilitate better student interaction, making sure students from different cultures have opportunities to mix, Bustamante says. That might mean periodically rearranging seat assignments in classrooms and the cafeteria.

Bill Howe, an education consultant for diversity training, multicultural education and gender equity based in Connecticut, says the reality is that teachers in the United States are allotted few days for training, and those are usually devoted to standardized testing issues. Teachers need to consider modifying their methods and the examples they use in lessons to accommodate students from different cultures.  “It’s not just the content, it’s the process. It’s important to have differentiated instruction,” Howe says.

Many schools also haven’t made a connection between multicultural education and achievement, Howe says. The impact goes beyond creating a more harmonious school: A culturally responsive school prepares kids for life in a global economy. “There isn’t enough focus on developing the skills for working in a diverse environment,” Howe says. In the workforce, “it’s not enough that Johnny can read, they also have to be culturally competent.”

That competency comes from learning cultural nuances and languages. Howe says he gets requests for training from affluent, suburban school districts that want to expose their homogeneous student bodies to cultural diversity. “They just realize that these kids are so disadvantaged when they go out into the world of work because they don’t know diversity,” Howe says.
But, he says, he gets fewer calls from urban districts, “which concerns me.”

Bustamante agrees. While it’s good that kids in wealthy schools have access to different languages and exchange programs, “it shouldn’t be the elite that just have the opportunity,” she says. All schools need to be better. “A major part should be exposing students to people of other cultures and increasing capacity to interact, and have a more global view,” she says. “We don’t pay enough attention to world geography.”

Literature, art and music are great ways to expose students to different cultures, as are having students take part in service-learning activities, Bustamante says. In the virtual world, too, the possibilities to connect with people around the world are endless.

The picture isn’t entirely bleak, though. Howe says school textbooks have vastly improved in the last 15 years, with good multicultural texts available. And while schools have a ways to go in responding to students from different cultures and exposing them to the cultural world at large, progress has been made, he says.

“They might not always be on track, but they’re trying very hard,” he says.