Name: Yingcong Liang (Russell)

Instructor: Dr. Amy Stornaiuolo

EDUC-6306

Fall 2022

Multicultural Education

From my point of view, multicultural education in education can not only provides students with

a learning environment that is more in line with the future social structure and helps students

develop the multiple competencies needed when they enter society, but also disrupt the current

hegemony in education, which results from only promoting the mainstream culture while

denying culture from other groups to enter our schools, or even disrupt the power structure in

society.

The first role multicultural education plays in education is to help students to develop multiple

literacy practices in different systems. In my opinion, literacy is what people do, think, and make

meanings with language for a purpose within a particular context. And according to

Goodenough’s (1971) definition, culture consists of various standards for perceiving, evaluating,

believing, and doing. Therefore, usually, members within a cultural group share a set of

practices. And for a member, those practices could be acquired through engaging in activities

within the cultural group such as learning writing. Gee (2009) notes that when people are taught

a way of writing by participating in, or at least coming to understand, the distinctive social and

cultural practices of different social and cultural groups, they are also taught to act, interact, talk,

and value in certain ways. Therefore, literacy education could happen when an individual is

learning culture or being a participant in the culture, or getting involved in cultural activities.

And Gutiérrez and Rogoff (2003) interpret the practices learned within a culture as “linguistic

and cultural-historical repertoires,” which means for individuals, the ways of engaging in

activities stemming from observing and otherwise participating in cultural practices, and

individuals’ background experiences, together with their interests, may prepare them for knowing

how to engage in particular forms of language and literacy activities. And in multicultural

education, when we are able to help students to develop practices of different cultures. And

multicultural education could be understood as the process whereby a person develops

competencies in multiple systems of standards for perceiving, evaluating, believing, and doing

(Gibson, 1976). According to Maxwell (2014), American society’s demography is changing

rapidly and it is predicted there will be no ethnic majority in the country by 2043. Therefore, the

numerical minority at present might become the majority in the future. And the prevailing

cultural practices in the society might alter. Therefore, it is necessary to develop students’

literacy practices of different cultures so that they can adapt to a new social reality more easily in

the future. The mainstream practices at present might not be the “best” solution for problems

people encounter in everyday life. So students should develop different literacy practices for

different contexts. Moreover, with the rapid development of technologies and the needs of

economics, the process of globalization is progressing quickly. Technologies are bringing the

world together. Sometimes for a particular purpose, an individual needs to communicate,

interact, and collaborate with people from other cultural groups on the internet. And when one

needs to collaborate with others, to better achieve their purpose, they should share a certain set of
literacy practices. And for a country that only contains less than 5% of the world’s total student

population (Morrell, 2017), if students only develop competencies and practices for one system,

they are missing the other 95% of opportunities in the world.

The second role is that diversity helps us to reconstruct the power structure in society. In school,

students are engaged in a process of socialization, and they learn the way to think and act within

a society. And the education prepared the students to fit into a society in that multiple individuals

combine and interact with each other (Thomas and Wahrhaftig, 1971). And in this society, there

are certain rules and norms that are already set. Therefore, if a school considers the norm and

culture of a society are fixed, then the goal of it should always be teaching students the

mainstream practices which help them to fit into the current society. And the students should be

educated according to the figure world (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, Cain, 1998) so that they

are able to act in a particular way to be acknowledged and play certain roles in society in the

coming years. Therefore, the practices from other minority cultures, which are less likely to be

acknowledged in society, are not considered helpful for students’ socialization. And for the sake

of the students, those practices should be restrained in school, and only applying mainstream

cultural practices is more efficient for the process of socialization. As a result, when engaging in

activities in school, students from minority cultures are not allowed to draw practices from their

experience from their culture group, which leaves them no room to engage and perform. And

students that are less familiar with the mainstream are also considered deficient by the teachers.

And they are treated as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a “good,

organized, and just” society, and are required to be integrated into a healthy society (Freire,

1970). However, the norms of a society are not static. The practices of students from minority

groups should not be ignored, but to be viewed as resources that could be used to create new

norms. If we are aiming at building a more equitable society, we can build a society based on

practices from more cultural groups. And school is a place that allows this transformative process

happens. And what multicultural education does in this situation is that it values the cultures of

all groups, so one essential way to reproduce unequal social conditions in school by devaluing

minority groups’ cultural practices is denied. And we can shift the decision-making power over

schooling away from dominant groups and towards oppressed groups (Sleeter, 1995). By

empowering those oppressed students, we are allowed to create a new power dynamic in the

classroom and construct a society with a new power structure in the future.
 References

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (MB Ramos, Trans.). New York: Continuum, 2007.
Gee, J. P. (2009). Digital media and learning as an emerging field, part I: How we got here.
International Journal of Learning and Media, 1(2), 13-23.
Gibson, M. A. (1976). Approaches to multicultural education in the United States: Some
concepts and assumptions. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 7(4), 7-18.
Goodenough, W. (1971). Culture, language and society reading. Massachussets: Addison-Wesley.
Gutiérrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires
of practice. Educational researcher, 32(5), 19-25.
Holland, D., Lachicotte Jr, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (2001). Identity and agency in cultural
worlds. Harvard University Press.
Maxwell, L. A. (2014). US schools become majority minority. Education Week, 34(1), 1-15.
Morrell, E. (2017). Toward equity and diversity in literacy research, policy, and practice: A
critical, global approach. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(3), 454-463.
Sleeter, C. E. (1995). An Analysis of the Critiques of Multicultural Education.
Thomas, R. K., & Wahrhaftig, A. L. (1971). Indians, Hillbillies, and the" education Problem".
Basic Books.