Multicultural Classroom Quotes

Multiculturalism compels educators to recognize the narrow boundaries that have shaped the way knowledge is shared in the classroom. It forces us all to recognize our complicity in accepting and perpetuating biases of any kind.

In the multicultural classroom, every culture appears to be taught except Britain’s indigenous one. Concern not to offend minority sensibilities has reached the risible point where piggy banks have been banished from British banks in case Muslims might be offended.18

They(students) accept the shift in the locus of representation but resist shifting ways they think about ideas. That is threatening. That’s why the critique of multiculturalism seeks to shut the classroom down again— to halt this revolution in how we know what we know. It’s as though many people know that the focus on difference has the potential to revolutionize the classroom and they do not want the revolution to take place.

Being accused of microaggression can be a harrowing experience. Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald relates in City Journal how an incident got out of hand at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2013. Professor Emeritus Val Rust taught a dissertation preparation seminar in which arguments often erupted among students, such as over which victim ideologies deserved precedence. In one such discussion, white feminists were criticized for making "testimonial-style" claims of oppression to which Chicana feminists felt they were not entitled. In another, arguments over the political implications of word capitalization got out of hand. In a paper he returned to a student, Rust had changed the capitalization of "indigenous" to lowercase as called for in the Chicago Manual Style. The student felt this showed disrespect for her point of view. During the heated discussion that followed, Professor Rust leaned over and touched an agitated student's arm in a manner, Rust claims, that was meant to reassure and calm him down. It ignited a firestorm instead. The student, Kenjus Watston, jerked his arm away from Rust as if highly offended. Later, he and other "students of color", accompanied by reporters and photographers from UCLA's campus newspaper, made a surprise visit to Rust's classroom and confronted him with a "collective statement of Resistance by Graduate Students of Color". Then the college administration got involved. Dean Marcelo Suarez-Orozco sent out an e-mail citing "a series of troubling racial climate incidents" on campus, "most recently associated with [Rust's class]". Administrative justice was swift. Professor Rust was forced to teach the remainder of his class with three other professors, signaling that he was no longer trusted to teach "students of color". When Rust tried to smooth things over with another student who had criticized him for not apologizing to Watson, he reached out and touched him in a gesture of reconciliation. Again it backfired. That student filed criminal charges against Rust, who was suspended for the remainder of the academic year. As if to punctuate the students' victory and seal the professor's humiliation, UCLA appointed Watson as a "student researcher" to the committee investigating the incident. Watson turned the publicity from these events into a career, going on to codirect the Intergroup Dialogue Program at Occidental College in Los Angeles. As for the committee report, it recommended that UCLA create a new associate dean for equity and enhance the faculty's diversity training program. It was a total victory for the few students who had acted like bullies and the humiliating end of a career for a highly respected professor. It happened because the university could not appear to be unsympathetic to students who were, in the administration's worldview, merely following the university's official policies of diversity and multiculturalism.

Page 42: Whatever the combination of sources of test bias might be, genuine bias against a minority will show up in a way that leaves no room for doubt: It will under-predict the test taker’s performance in the classroom or on the job. Whether predictive validity is the same for different groups can be subjected to rigorous statistical scrutiny, and it has been, repeatedly. The results are unambiguous, whether the thing being predicted is grades in school or performance on the job. The major tests do not under-predict the performance of Africans or Latins.

Since I began teaching I’ve wanted to expand the curriculum, but my first year was mostly about surviving rather than looking critically at what I teach and why I was teaching it. American literature conjures up a strong multicultural image for me. I’ve followed Sherman Alexie’s characters on the struggle to find them themselves; I’ve explored the New Mexican desert of Rudolfo Anaya’s novels; I’ve traveled down Harlem streets with Hughes and experienced Hurston’s southern lifestyle. I imagined, when I received my first teaching assignment of American literature, that these authors would be the ones to grace my classroom. However, the way that my English 10 colleagues read the new state standards and the common assessments required by my district made it almost impossible to fit these authors into a “dead white guy” curriculum. I began to struggle through a year of teaching the curriculum as it was, feeling that I was doing a disservice to my students and my educational upbringing. I was required to stay on track with what other teachers in my grade level were doing, when they were testing, and how much time they were spending on units.

Humans do not have an innate urge to explore; only European man has exhibited a keen desire to move beyond the known world into the unknown. Current historians of exploration cannot come to terms with this difference in human psychology. In the egalitarian world of academia the deeds of great European men stand like an irritating thorn. Allowing university students (the majority of whom are now females) to learn that practically every great philosopher, scientist, architect, composer (or, simply put, everyone great), has been a male makes them uncomfortable. The thought of teaching their increasingly multiracial classrooms that these males are overwhelmingly European terrifies them.

Social constructivist and postmodernist articles of faith-that no community of knowers enjoys a privileged epistemological position above any other-obviously stokes the confidence of multiculturalism's advocates when they insist that these "Otherly" perspectives be brought into today's science classroom, despite their poor fit with standard science.-';

What if, upon completion of this course, participants: »​Engage in a supportive arts community »​Study one another’s writing to enhance their appreciation of the genre(s) »​Select readings from a living archive of multicultural texts that best inform their individual projects »​Curate their own literary anthologies with texts that appeal to their aesthetic preferences

»​Engage in daily freewriting sessions »​Read their raw, unedited work aloud »​Draw from a living archive of multicultural texts as ready reference »​Honor their artistic mentors by researching a “family tree” of writers, musicians, filmmakers, etc., from whom their writing extends11 »​Publish their work online and/or in a chapbook »​Perform their work at a public venue

The regular public schools ... have become more secular ... and more value-free. The education profession's cherished "progressivism" is part of the reason. And the close scrutiny of fierce watchdog groups ... has made schools and educators gun-shy. In recent years, however, perhaps the strongest influences have been postmodern relativism and multiculturalism, which first trickled, then gushed from university campuses into primary and secondary school classrooms. If scholars, teachers, and those who train them abjure fixed distinctions between right and wrong, if all judgments are said to depend upon one's unique perspective or background rather than universal standards of truth, beauty, or virtue, if every form of family, society, and polity is deemed equal to all other forms, and if every group's mores and values must be taught ... who is there (in school) to help children determine what it means to be an American, how to behave, and what to believe?