Multicultural Library

While the debate over the merits of licensure testing for new teacher applicants continues in Massachusetts, many students who might have considered careers as teachers are discouraged and in some cases considering other options. This article looks at this issue from 4 interrelated perspectives: the Northeast's changing demographics, resulting in higher numbers of minority and language diverse children entering classrooms; the need for accurate and detailed information from the Massachusetts Department of Education on the pass rates of minorities taking the teacher tests; the argument from psychometricians that these tests are flawed; and, finally, the argument that a variety of measurements, beyond a single standardized test, should be utilized to ascertain candidates' classroom abilities. At a time when teacher shortages loom larger and larger, we should be welcoming minority and language diverse candidates into our ranks instead of raising the stakes even higher.     

Un-Settling Multicultural Erasures

This essay begins by naming liberal forms of multiculturalism as a complicit discourse and theory in the erasure of Indigenous peoples. For example, it troubles the false narrative of the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” offered up so frequently as a corrective to the current administration's divisive rhetoric and policies. The essay underscores the important role of educators in interrupting the settler logics that pervade liberal educational spaces. Drawing examples from one of the author's hometowns, it presents critical inquiry as one viable approach for supporting students' understanding of the connections between place, power, and knowledge production.     

Multicultural literature: An essay

Effective teacher education should guide preservice and practicing teachers in comprehending and facilitating educational concepts and pedagogical practices that examine and promote equity for all learners. Teachers and young learners benefit from sundry opportunities to recognize their self identities and to celebrate both individual and shared cultural characteristics while increasing their understanding and appreciation of others and society. Teachers' cultural characteristics frequently do not match the cultural characteristics reflective of their young learners, and teachers may not be cognizant that their young learners do not see and operate in the world as they do. Critical pedagogy frequently fails to occur when dissonance lies between teachers' backgrounds, beliefs, and behaviors and those characterizing their young learners. Therefore, a major responsibility of pre-K-12 school administrators and teacher educators focuses on developing cultural self-awareness in teachers concomitantly empowering them to develop cultural self-awareness in their young learners. This article addresses how to initiate and further enhance the development of cultural self-awareness in educators by viewing a short yet provocative video titled, "The Lunch Date." A synthesis of university class discussion techniques drawing on the experiences of two professors provides guiding questions and useful suggestions appropriate for pre-K-12 teachers, administrators, staff developers, and teacher educators.     

Multicultural Vignettes for Teacher Preparation

Future teachers need to attain skills, knowledge, and positive dispositions in multicultural education to provide a culturally sensitive learning environment. It is the responsibility of teacher educators to use tools of assessment to train and gauge student progress toward this end. The purpose of this article is to describe the process of creating and using vignettes as a classroom assessment tool to better prepare teacher candidates for diverse classrooms. Results from our experiences using vignettes indicate that most students are only beginning to develop proficient performance standards, and need additional learning experiences. Implications for using vignettes to partially address National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education standards and prepare students for the Principles of Learning and Teaching (PLT) test are also presented and discussed.     

Multicultural Literature as a Classroom Tool

Multicultural literature can be found all across classrooms in the United States. I argue it is more important what you do with the literature than just having it in the classroom. Multicultural literature should be seen as a tool. In this article, I will share how I used multicultural literature as a tool to (a) promote or develop an appreciation for diversity, (b) honor students' voices, (c) connect to students' rich linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and (d) promote critical consciousness. Through this process, students were able to build a foundation toward critical consciousness in order to take action against their oppressors.     

Together for a Better Multicultural Society

I propose that educators construct pedagogical responses to youth in schools in ways that consider classrooms to be the result of and the boardroom for complex global flows. Youth's production of individual and collective identities wherein flows are apprehended, discarded, combined, and recombined, rages against purifying processes of neocolonial classrooms.     

When Multicultural Education Is Not Enough

In the face of rising white nationalism, multicultural education is simply not enough. In addition to suggestions for curriculum and instruction, in this article the author suggests that teachers, parents, administrators, and students need to be organizing to push back against this tide of racism, sexism, and xenophobia and find ways to concretely support their students and communities.     

Collaborations Between Multicultural Educators and Archivists: Engaging Students with Multicultural History Through Archival Research Projects

When multicultural educators and archivists collaborate to design projects that engage students with multicultural history through archival research, students can learn in-depth research skills with primary source documents, creatively share their knowledge, and, on a broader level, engage with their local community history. The projects shared in this article serve as examples of how partnerships between multicultural educators and archivists can occur, the types of projects that can be developed and how they are implemented, and students' responses to their work. The three student projects, including a display, a history guidebook, and an oral history project, are intended to offer a variety of ideas to inspire multicultural educators to reach out to their local archivists to develop archival research projects of their own. And, to promote effective and fruitful partnerships, also included are lessons learned as well as tips for successful collaborations between multicultural educators and archivists.     

Assessing Multicultural Competence of Helping-Profession Students

In this article, I focus on assessing multicultural competence of helping-profession students. The Multicultural Competence Scale of Helping-Profession Students was used for data collection. The aim of the research was to find out the level of students' multicultural competence due to the current lack of this information in Central Europe. Generally, students assess their multicultural competence on the higher level. There is a significant relationship between the students' study degree and the level of their multicultural competence. Multicultural activity was shown as an important predictor of multicultural knowledge. Also, multicultural knowledge was identified as a significant predictor of multicultural communication skills.