In Chapter 5 of Joel Spring’s book, American Education, he shares his research on multicultural education in the United States of America with references to the works of John Ogbu, Lisa Delpit, Rosalie Pedalino Porter and Mick Fedullo. Spring also explores the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the English Language Acquistion Act of 2001 on ethnocentric, bilingual and bicultural education in US schools and its impact on the diversity of its student body.
Readers are introduced to the three types of culture that exists in American schools – dominant, dominated and immigrant. The dominant culture in US schools was brought over by European immigrants and modified by the social and political conditions at the time resulting in a European American dominant culture established in our public school system. Spring defines dominated culture as “groups who were forcefully incorporated into the United States.” This “incorporation” produced African American, Mexican American, Asian American and Native American cultures through the domination of the European American culture. The “first generation” of groups who freely decided to come to the United States are considered immigrant cultures which also includes European American immigrants.
Spring shares the main concern of the multicultural educational movement and its goal “to reduce prejudice, eliminate sexism and equalize educational opportunities through empowerment.” The leaders of the movement – James Banks, Christine Sleeter, Carl Grant and Sonia Nieto – are committed to “empowering oppressed people by integrating the history and culture of dominated groups into public school curricula and textbooks” through three types of multicultural education: ethnocentric education, bilingual education and bicultural education. Ethnocentric education is focused on teaching from the perspective of a particular culture which has traditionally been the European American culture in US schools; however, the curriculum of “new” ethnocentric schools are developed based on the cultural frames of reference for African American, Native American and Hispanic cultures. Bilingual education protects the language and cultural rights of non-English speaking students while teaching them English but, as Springs points out, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 opposes the bilingual education movement by emphasizing English acquisition with the English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement and Academic Act. The author defines bicultural education as “being able to function in another culture without losing ties to one’s original culture” and illustrates his point with the work done by Mick Fedullo with Apache students in Fedullo’s book, Light of the Feather.
Joel Spring ends this chapter with seven questions for us to ponder as educators regarding multicultural education, but these two really caused me to reflect on my own educational experiences as an African American student and my role as an educator:
- Should students have the right to learn their mother tongue and the dominant language?
- Should the major goal of instruction about different cultures be the teaching of appreciation of other cultures?
What do you think?
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