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Multicultural Education

Studies in the Historical Foundations of Multicultural Education

A major goal of this project is to document the ways in which the current multicultural education movement is both connected to and a continuation of earlier scholarly and activist movements designed to promote empowerment, knowledge transformation, liberation, and freedom in U.S. society. Another important goal is to mentor graduate students. This Series was initiated with five papers presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 1993. The Center also presented symposia on this project at the 1994 and 1995 annual meetings of AERA.

Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action

Edited by James A. Banks

This book is the first publication of this project (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996). This book contains most of the papers presented in the AERA symposium series. A brief description follows.

This book documents persistent themes in the struggle for human freedom in the United States since the late nineteenth century as exemplified in the scholarship and actions of people of color and their White supporters. The historical research uncovered in this book reveals several important themes that connect multicultural education to the past and that can help to revitalize and energize it. One is that the margins of U.S. society--to which people of color have often been confined--have usually been the sites for preserving and defending the freedoms and rights stated in the founding documents of the United States when they were most severely challenged.

Groups such as African Americans, Jewish Americans, Latinos, and Japanese Americans were usually among the first to mobilize when anti-democratic actions and movements, such as institutionalized discrimination, immigration exclusion acts, and the internment of American citizens by the US government occurred. Cultural workers and scholars in the margins have also been persistent through time in developing and constructing transformative scholarship oppositional to racist and sexist mainstream scholarship institutionalized in the academic and popular worlds. An important aim of this book is to document the ways in which multicultural scholars and activists today--in their opposition to racist and sexist scholarship--are connected to historical progenitors such as W. E. B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, Franz Boas, Anna Julia Cooper, George Sanchez, and Carey McWilliams.

The conception of knowledge as intricately tied to action designed to further human freedom and justice is another significant idea that connects multicultural education today with its scholarly and activist progenitors.

This book is divided into five parts. The conceptual framework around which it is organized and the historical roots of multicultural education are described in Part I. This part also describes the ways in which transformative teaching is linked to the historical roots of multicultural education.

Case studies of individuals whose works exemplify the contributions of early transformative scholars to the historical foundations of multicultural education constitute Part II. The chapters in Part III describe the work of women scholars and activists who worked to transform society within a historical context. The ways in which women of color have faced triple oppressions of race, gender, and class is an important theme that cuts across the chapters in Part III.

Part IV describes the rise and fall of the intergroup education movement and the emergence of research related to prejudice in the 1930s and 1940s. Part V describes school reforms that are needed to promote educational equity and guidelines for changing schools to make them more consistent with a culturally diverse and democratic society.

Click here for more information on the book: Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action

Improving Multicultural Education: Lessons from the Intergroup Movement

By Cherry A. McGee Banks

This book is the second publication of the historical foundations project.

Intergroup conflict has been a perennial problem in the United States since colonial times. This book describes how a group of educators, social activists, and scholars tried to reduce intergroup tensions and create schools where people of all groups could learn together and from each other. Demonstrating the link between the current multicultural education movement and the roots of intergroup education, this volume:

* Describes the debate over assimilation and Americanization in the 1930s and 1940s, helping us to better understand the complexities of curriculum reform in today’s pluralistic, democratic society.
* Extends our knowledge about educating students in a culturally diverse society by examining past efforts to respond to ethnic, racial, and religious diversity in schools.
* Includes descriptions of projects, approaches, processes, techniques, and materials used by intergroup educators such as John Granrud, Leonard Covello, and Hilda Taba.
* Provides an important departure point for educators to rethink why students segregate themselves at school and the role curriculum plays in this segregation.

Cherry A. McGee Banks is Professor of Education at the University of Washington–Bothell.

Click here for more information on the book: Improving Multicultural Education: Lessons from the Intergroup Movement,