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Fil.r, Anna May, Comp. Multictlturalism, 1992. New York State Council of Educational Associations. Oct 92 246p.

Robin Wheeler, 59 Cascade Terrace, Schenectady, NY 12309 ($10). Collected Works General (020) Reports Descriptive (141)

MF01/PC10 Plus Postage. Art Education; Elementary Secondary Education; *English (Second Language); History Instruction; *Mathematics Education; *Multicultural Education; *Science Education; Second Language Learning; *Social Studies; Units of Study

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ABSTRACT This monograph, developed to enrich the literature on

multiculturalism, includes 25 articles on the subject. The articles are: (1) "Multiculturalism and an Assessment of Its Critics: Key to an Understanding and Acceptance" (A. J. Williams-Myers); (2) "The New Demographics" (Charles G. Treadwell); (3) "'Multiple Perspectives' or Courting Ethnic Strife?" (Albert Shanker); (4) "Fieldwork and Folklife Studies: Them, Us, and If" (Beverly J. Robinson); (5) "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (Peggy McIntosh); (6)

"Multiculturalism in Mathematics, Science, and Technology" (Gerry Madrazo, et al); (7) "Strategies for Implementing Multicultural Education" (Irene M. Lober; Kathryn Dunlop); (8) "Color Me" (James Hillestad); (9) "The Sociological, Psychological, and Pedagogical Implications of Multicultural Education" (Dolores M. Fernandez); (10) "Librarian-Teacher Partnerships: Serving the English as a Second Language Students" (Anne H. Filson); (11) "The Importance of the Teacher to Multiculturalism" (Maryann Fallek); (12) "Usage is Never Good or Bad but Thinking Makes It So" (Frances E. Blake); (13) "Creating Thematic Units with a Multicultural Focus" (Patricia Baker); (14) The New York State Social Studies Supervisory Association's "Regents' Letter"; (15) "Ways to Implement Multiculturalism: Twenty-One Lessons for American History with a

Multicultural Focus" (Anna May Filor); (16) The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) "Background Paper: Multicultural Science Education" and "NSTA Position Statement: Multicultural Science Education"; (17) "Multicultural Classrooms, Monocultural Teachers" (Terry Dean); (18) "Multicultural Education Mathematics Is a Great Place to Start" (Bill Collins); (19) "Let's Teach Our Common Heritage" (Anthony Cortese); (20) "1492-1992 The Columbian Quincentenary: An Educational Opportunity" (National Council for the Social Studies); (21) "Multicultural Assessment" (Jose S. Sanchez; Ed Yanson); (22) "Bilingual Education: Educating the Global Villager" (Carmen A. Vazqueztell; Ximena E. 'Late); (23) "Experiencing Other Cultures through Fiction" and "Multicultural Fiction: List of Books for Secondary Students" (Judity Gray); (24) "Foreign Language Instruction: Keystone to Multiculutral Education" (Sophie Jeffries); and (25) "Multicultural Art Education: Many Views, One Reality" (Patricia Barbanell). (LBG)

it Points of view or opinions stated in this docu- ment do not necessarily represent official OERI position or DOI.Cy

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Multiculturalism

1992

NYSCEA Prepared by Constituent Associations Forming the New York State Council of Educational Associations

Compiled by Anna May Filor, Chair Research and Development Committee

October 1992

OFFICERS 1991-1992 Harry Kranepool, President Louis Tul lo, President Elect Susan Leahy, Secretary Jack D. Hickey, Treasurer Frances Bliven, Past President

NYSCEA

OFFICERS 1992-1993 Harry A. Kranepool,President Louis Tul lo, President Elect Susan Leahy, Secretary Robin J. Wheeler, Treasurer Frances Bliven, Past President

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many individuals shoLid be applauded for their fine contributions to this monograph. Thank you Colleagues!

Thank yous are extended to the Committee members who edited this Journal. These hard-working committed professionals included: Robin Wheeler, Bonnie McCaig and J. Stephen Bona. Each worked with energy and drive and contributed sensitivity and intelligence to this difficult project.

Thank you Harry Kranepool for your hours of time and the ideas and materials you gave to complete this Journal.

Thank you Sue Chlystun, artist and Art teacher at Poughkeepsie High School and Doris Navarra, typist and secretary.

Thank you Filor Family for the sacrificed farily meals and recreation times and family life you allowed me to miss so that this monograph could be finished.

Special Plaudits are extended also to Charles Santelli, Phil Ellis and NYSUT for the printing of this journal.

Thank you one and all.

Anna May Filor Editor

To Order this monograph, Multiculturalism 1992, contact NYSCEA Treasurer:

Ms. Robin Wheeler 59 Cascade Terrace Schenectady, New York 12309 (518) 785-9397

Cost $10.00

* Printed by New York State United Teachers

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SECTION I: GUEST AUTHORS

Dr. A. J. Williams-Myers Charles G. Treadwell Albert Shanker Dr. Beverly J. Robinson Dr. Peggy McIntosh Gerry Madrazo, et al,

(Dr. Charles Drew and Dr. Elroy Rodriguez Lessons) Dr. Irene M. Lober and Dr. Kathryn Dunlap Dr. James Hillestad Dr. Dolores M. Fernandez Anne H. Filson Maryann Fallek Frances E. Blake

SECTION II: NYSCEA CONSTITUENT ASSOCIATIONS AND AFFILIATES

Dr. Patricia Baker NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL FOR THE SOCIAL STUDIES: NYSCSS

Regents Letter NEW YORK STATE SOCIAL STUDIES SUPERVISORY ASSOCIATION: NYS4A

Anna May Filor NEW YORK STATE SOCIAL STUDIES SUPERVISORY ASSOCIATION: NYS4A

NATIONAL SCIENCE TEACHER'S ASSOCIATION: NYSTA/NSTA Terry Dean

NEW YORK STATE TEACHERS OF ENGLISH TO SPEAKERS OF OTHER LANGUAGES: NYSTESOL

Bill Collins NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF MATHEMATICS SUPERVISORS: NYSAMS

Antonia (Tony) Cortese NEW YORK STATE UNITED TEACHERS: NYSUT

NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR THE SOCIAL STUDIES: NCSS Dr. Jose S. Sanchez and Ed Yanson

NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGISTS: NYASP Carmen A. Vazqueztell and Dr. Ximena E. Zate

NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION: NYSABE Judith Gray

SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA SECTION OF NEW YORK LIBRARY ASSOCIATION: SLMSNYLA

Dr. Sophie Jeffries NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS: NYSAFLT

Dr. Patricia Barbanell NEW YORK STATE ART TEACHERS ASSOICATION: NYSATA

INTRODUCTION

Multiculturalism concerns problems, controversies, and implementations and are topics of powerful and great interest today in our country. This monograph has been developed to enrich the literature on this essential and crucial subject.

Twenty-five different articles are in this monograph on Multiculturalism. Constituent organizations of NYSCEA have submitted very exciting ideas and materials. NYSAFLT, NYSTESOL, NYSABE, NYSCSS, NYSASP, NYLA, NYSAMA, are among the many professional organizations that have made outstanding contributions to the NYSCEA Journal, 1992. Additionally, national leaders such as Albert Shanker of the AFT and Gerry Madrazo of the NSTA and New York State leaders such as Toni Cortese of NYSUT have written essays. Academics, College Professors and classroom teachers, Librarians and students also submitted articles. Dr. Irene Lober and Dr. James Hillestad of SUNY New Paltz and Dr. Peggy McIntosh of Wellesley and Dr. Beverly Robinson of UCLA are some of the academics who shared their ideas. Frances Blake, a student from Florida &nd Mary Ann Fallek, a teacher from Poughkeepsie, and Judith Gray, a librarian wrote articles of great interest.

Dr. A. J. Williams-Myers''article "Multiculturalism And An Assessment Of Its Critics: Key To An Understanding And Acceptance" examines the need for a multicultural education and analyzes the critics of multiculturalism.

Charles Treadwell's graphs and comments illustrate the changing demographics of American Society.

Albert Shanker's article on "Multiple Perspectives Or Courting Ethnic Strife" suggests that history and social studies taught from multiple perspectives sounds reasonable, but encourages intellectual dishonesty and promotes divisiveness.

Dr. Beverly Robinson in "Fieldwork Studies "Them," Us" and "If" maintains that folk life research is a wonderful opportunity to break down cultural biases and ignorance. It helps communalize communities.

Dr. Peggy McIntosh's significant article on "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" makes a real contribution to understanding the effects of Racism.

Harry Kranepool shared the book by Gerry Madrazo et all, Multiculturalism In Mathematics Science And Technology. The lessons on "Drs. Charles Drew and Elroy Rodriguez" were selected to illustrate the contents of this new book.

Drs. Lober and Dunlap in "Strategies For Implementing Multicultural Education" illustrate designs for curriculum development.

Dr. James Hillestad's article "Color Ae" is a powerful philosophical statement suggesting that multiculturalism is intellectual deceit as well as dangerous and destructive.

Dr. Dolores Fernandez wrote "The Sociological Psychological and Pedological Implications of Multicultural Education." She gives a lengthy, effective defense of Multicultural Education and suggests fighting institutional racism and helping students develop positive self-concept. She advocates restructuring education for cultural infusion rather than additive programs.

Anne Filson's "Librarian-Teacher Partnerships: Teaching The English-As-A-Second-Language Students," makes many concrete suggestions to help students and teachers improve reading.

Maryann Fallek's essay states that the "teacher is the expert" and that teachers must be inclusive in "The Importance Of The Teacher To Multiculturalism."

Frances Blake in "Usage Is Never Good or Bad, But Thinking Makes It So" alerts teachers that they should take advantage of what linguists say about the nature of language so that they can maintain nonbiased attitudes in their classrooms. Teachers should not conclude that students who speak nonstandard forms of English have low intelligence.

Dr. Patricia Baker in "Creating Thematic Units With a Multicultural Focus" talks about developing "Thematic" Units on Japan. She suggests that a "Contributions" approach may increase stereotyping and adds superficiality while the "additive" approach does not reach the goals of Multiculturalism. She recommends developing a web for inter-disciplinary work.

Anna May Filor shares many lessons to enrich teaching in United States History classes with a multicultural focus. These lessons include readings, poetry, songs, films and books.

The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) in "Multi- Culturalism Science Education" maintains that teachers are aware that all children can learn and that Science study can and must develop positive self-concept.

Terry Dean in "Multicultural Classrooms, Monocultural Teachers" says whether the student assimilates or leaves his culture behind teachers can help with cultural transitions. Lessons such as class newsletters, twenty minute journals, peer groups marking and sharing of papers can give enormous support to students.

Bill Collins in "Multicultural Education In Mathematics" says that Mathematics is a great place to start multicultural education and suggests new books and materials to improve teaching in this area.

Antonia Cortese of NYSUT in "Let's Teach Our Common Heritage" suggests that multiculturalism can divide America.

National Council For The Social Studies article, "1492-1992 The Columbian Quincentenary: An Educational Opportunity" is a very interesting article suggesting the inclusion of many points of view in celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus' conquest of "Paradise."

Dr. Jose Sanchez and Ed Yansen's "Multicultural Assessment" stresses that prejudice must be reduced and teachers must be aware of their cultural "baggage."

Carmen Vazqueztell and Dr. Ximena Zate, authors of "Bilingual Education: Educating the Global Villager," applaud the Dutch and European models of multilingualism rather than American monolingualism or bilingualism.

Judith Gray's "Experience Other Cultures Through Fiction," states that fiction books can be an irportant factor in the multicultural curriculum and shares F. bibliography with us. She suggests that doing such reading he'?s students see the similarities in all cultures.

Dr. Sophie Jeffries' "Foreign Language Instruction: Keystone to Multicultural Education" suggests that Social Studies education should "harmonize" with foreign language education.

Dr. Patricia Barbanell, author of "Multicultural Art Education: Many Views, One Reality" stresses the importance of multiculturalism to the teaching of art and shares resources.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

SECTION I: GUEST AUTHORS

Dr. A. J. Williams-Myers. 1

Multiculturalism And An Assessment Of Its Critics: Key To An Understanding And Acceptance

Charles G. Treadwell 11 The New Demographics

Albert Shanker 19 "Multiple Perspectives" Or Courting Ethnic Strife? AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

Dr. Beverly J. Robinson 23 Fieldwork And Folklife Studies: "Them," "Us" And "If"

Dr. Peggy McIntosh 30 White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack

Gerry Madrazo, et al Multiculturalism In Mathematics, Science, And Technology Dr. Charles Drew and Dr. Elroy Rodriguez Lessons NATIONAL SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION

Dr. Irene M. Lober and Dr. Kathryn Dunlap 47 Strategies For Implementing Multicultural Education

Dr. James Hillestad 56 Color Me

Dr. Dolores M. Fernandez The Sociological, Psychological And Pedagogical Implications of Multicultural Education NEW YORK STATE ASSOICATION OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION: NYSABE

viii 1 0

Anne H. Filson 85 Librarian Teacher Partnerships: Serving The English-As-A-Second-Language Students

Maryann Fallek 96 The Importance Of The Teacher To Multiculturalism

Frances E. Blake 98 Usage Is Never Good Or Bad But Thinking Makes It So NATIONAL SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION

SECTION II: NYSCEA CONSTITUENT ASSOCIATIONS AND AFFILIATES

Dr. Patricia Baker 106 Creating Thematic Units With A Multicultural Focus NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL FOR THE SOCIAL STUDIES: NYSCSS

Regents Letter 118 NEW YORK STATE SOCIAL STUDIES SUPERVISORY ASSOCIATION: NYS4A

Anna May Filor 120 Ways To Implement Multiculturalism: Twenty-One Lessons For American History With A Multicultural Focus NEW YORK STATE SOCIAL STUDIES SUPERVISORY ASSOCIATION: NYS4A

NATIONAL SCIENCE TEACHER'S ASSOCIATION: NYSTA/NSTA 132 Background Paper: Multicultural Science Education NSTA Position Statement: Multicultural Science Education

Terry Dean 134 Multicultural Classrooms, Monocultural Teachers NEW YORK STATE TEACHERS OF ENGLISH TO SPEAKERS OF OTHER LANGUAGES: NYSTESOL

Bill Collins 154 Multicultural Education Mathematics Is A Great Place To Start NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF MATHEMATICS SUPERVISORS: NYSAMS

Antonia (Tony) Cortese 161 Let's Teach Our Common Heritate NEW YORK STATE UNITED TEACHERS: NYSUT

NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR THE SOCIAL STUDIES: NCSS 166 1492 1992 The Columbian Ouincentenary: An Educational Opportunity

Dr. Jose S. Sanchez and Ed Yanson 173 Multicultural Assessment NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGISTS: NYASP

Carmen A. Vazqueztell and Dr. Ximena E. Zate Bilingual Education: Educating The Global Villager NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION: NYSABE

181

Judith Gray 192 Experiencing Other Cultures Through Fiction Multicultural Fiction List Of Books For Secondary Students) SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA SECTION OF NEW YORK LIBRARY ASSOCIATION: SLMSNYLA

Dr. Sophie Jeffries 200 Foreign Language Instruction: Keystone To Multicultural Education NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS: NYSAFLT

Dr. Patricia Barbanell 217 Multicultural Art Education: Many Views, One Reality NEW YORK STATE ART TEACHERS ASSOICATION: NYSATA

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Multiculturalism And An Assessment Of Its Critics: Key To An Understanding And Acceptance

Submitted By

Dr. A. J. Willies -Myers Department of Black Studies State University College New Paltz, New York 12561

A.J. Williams-Myers a historian, writes on the African American presence in the Hudson Valley. His book, "Long Hammering: The forging of an African American presence," is due in 1992. He is the recipient of a 1973-74 Ford Foundation research Fellowship.

According to a report in a TIMES MAGAZINE article of April 9,

In ten years, [people of color] will make up 25% of the population of the United States. English will be the second language for the majority of California's population by the year 2000. By 2020, the majority of that state's entry-level workers will be (Latinos). Sometime in the next century, whites will become the minority in (the U.S. population), but before that time by about 2020, people of color are projected to be nearly 115 million while the white population will not [have increased] at all. Even further, by 2056, when someone born today will be 66 years old, the average U.S. resident,as defined by Census Statistics, will trace his or her descent to Africa, Asia, (the Latino World), the Pacific Islands, Arabia--almost anywhere but white Europe. (TIME MAGAZINE, 1990)

What this means for New York State in the year 2000 is that:

31% of the state's population will be people of color with African Americans and Latinos as the predominant' groups...The number of people of color is projected to increase from a 1980 total of 4.4 million to 5.8 million by the year 2000...At the same time, an older, less fertile white population will decline from a 1981 figure of 13.1 million to slightly less than 12.8 million by the century's end. ("Dropping Out of School...," 1987: pp. 7-8)

The two quotations speak to the heart Df the problem for those who hold the view that multiculturalism is really a smoke screen for a "cult of ethnicity," racial separatism, "feel-good history," a "massive" attack on the canons of American education, and/or "the distrust of the dead, as in 'dead white male(s).'" (Schlesim-rer, 1991: 58; Hughes, 1992: 47) Rather than acknowledging the reality of the situation, the theoreticians of those who are uneasy about or even fear the reality of the demographics projections have begun a campaign to discredit multiculturalism through the use of the most potent political weapon in America-race. If we as teachers are to understand our role as-the molders of tomorrow's leaders with the use of a curriculum that addresses the country's inherent diversity and/or a multiplicity of cultures, it is incumbent upon us first to understand the nature of this pernicious move to discredit multiculturalism or elements of it. Secondly, having arrived at the point where we can view such a move as simply an anachronism of yesterday's unfounded hysterics, we then move beyond it to begin preparing tomorrow's leaders.

Let me succinctly attempt to share with you some of my insights into this move, and then proceed to state why we need to move most expeditiously to the implementation of such a curriculum. In addition, I want to conclude with a statement as to where I feel such a curriculum should take and position us by the turn of the 21st century.

The Critics

There are a number of pundits who have been called upon to run offensive as theoreticians for those who are squeamish and/or fearful of the projected demographics. Because space does not allow me the opportunity to be more comprehensive in my response to many of these tacticians, I will, therefore, keep their numbers to a minimum while curtailing some of my own rhetoric.

In the State of New York the initial move to undermine the idea of multiculturalism came with a searing attack on the Board of Regents' 1989 report "The Curriculum of Inclusion." The report (and it is not a curriculum per se) stated that students of color have been the victims of "intellectual and educational oppression" as a result of a school curriculum that demonstrates a clear "systematic bias toward European cultures and its derivatives." As a viable corrective to that "systematic bias" the report called for the establishment of a "multicultural" curriculum as a way of fostering pedagogical equity, itself a reflection of an inherent multicultural society. Subsequent to the release of the report, the theoreticians let loose with a barrage of rhetorical verbiage such as the report is consistent2y "anti-Western and anti-white;"

"could cause distortions in historical facts;" feel-good history isn't the answer "for safer schools, better teachers, better teaching materials, greater investment in education, the need for stable families that can nourish self-discipline and aspiration...;" and such a curriculum would "turn teachers into ethnic cheerleaders." (Buder, 1990: 7; House, 1990: 4B; Ravitch, 1990; 1990: 41; Schlesinger, 1991: 58; Winkler, 1991: A7) In the words of one source that described the rhetorical attack on the report: "It was interpreted by some as a bashing of American values and an attempt to gut the present curriculum and remove what many people feel is central to our tradition." (Basler, 1990: 2B) As I quoted above, with respect to the "canons," the call for a multicultural curriculum, in the minds of the frightened, gives every indication of "the distrust of the dead, as in 'dead white male(s).'"

The Regents' "Curriculum Of Inclusion" report in no way sought to "gut" the existing curriculum or denigrate the "canonical" dead. The report simply recommended pedagogical steps that tremendously would enhance the mirror image of the school curriculum in its reflection of the inherent ethnic, gender, racial and religious diversity in the state and nation. And because the consultants to the Regents' task force that produce the report were of the four racial groups acknowledged as victims of "intellectual and educational oppression," the importance of racial diversity, depicted with much more substance and validity, was highly recommended. As a result of this recommendation it was the remark of a subsequent consultant, called in to evaluate the "Q.urriculum of Inclusion," that termed the report "anti-Western and anti-white." (House, 1990: 4E) It is this writer's opinion that in the wake of that remark, coupled with the vociferousness of one of the original four consultants and the dynamics of the collegiate imbroglio in New York City, the opposition's strategy was to single out Afrocentrism (a pedagogical approach to the education of students of African ancestry) and tout it as the "real evil" behind multiculturalism.

One of the more prominent theoretician has gone so far as to describe Afrocentricity as the worst threat to the country since -perhaps-the "cult" of hyphenated names of the early 20th century. In the words of that theoretician: "The metaphor of America as a melting pot that banishes old identities is giving way to that of a Tower of Babel: Afrocentrism in the schools is a symptom of a growing fragmentation that is threatening to divide our society." (Winkler, 1991: A7) Referring to Afrocentrism as "an escape from the hard and expensive challenges of our society," this theoretician goes on to posit that "the cult of ethnicity...and Afrocentricity in particular...exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, drives ever deeper the awful wedges

between races and nationalities. The endgame is self- pity and self-ghettoization." (Schlesinger, 1991: 58) This last statement should be of particular concern for all of us because it is alarmist and incendiary. (Williams-Myers, 1990: A10) Why?

Because while the writer acknowledges that most Blacks have "(fought) bravely and patriotically for their country, and would move to the suburbs too if income and racism would permit," the writer says absolutely nothing of the viciousness of racism and how Blacks have suffered and continue to suffer under its impact. (Schlesinger, 1991: 79) Or, for that matter, how racism "exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, drives ever deeper the awful wedges between [Black and white]." The writer never makes the connection for his readers how racism fosters enormous disparities in "income" between Blacks and whites, thus limiting the socioeconomic progress of African Americans. The theoretician does pinpoint the real fear off multiculturalism for those who are swayed by such rhetoric, and that is the projected demographics for the 21st century. In the words of that pundit: "Will not this rising flow of non-European immigrants [people of

color] create a 'minority majority' that will make Eurocentrism obsolete by the 21st century? This is the fear of some white Americans and the hope (and sometimes the threat) of some nonwhites." (Schlesinger, 1991: 70) The statement is baited with race.

Mirroring the rhetoric of the above theoretician, another, arguing that Afrocentrism is a move toward "cultural separatism," posit an unsubstantiated position that it ("cultural separatism") "turns what ought to be a recognition of cultural diversity, or real multiculturalism, tolerant on both sides, into a pernicious symbolic program." Referring to the proponents of Afrocentric thought as "thugs," "cranks," and "an undistinguished group of scholars," the writer goes on to say that "the desire for self-esteem (the 'feel-good' history) does not justify every lie and exaggeration and therapeutic slanting of evidence that can be claimed to alleviate it..." (Hughes, 1991:48-49) Although this theoretician leads the reader to believe that the rhetoric in the essay will be an harangue on the many groups involved in what is termed the "factionization" of America, the real thrust of the rhetoric is a "pernicious" and unwarranted, alarmist attack on Afrocentricity.

A third theoretician called into play to undermine the value of a multicultural curriculum describes it as "illiberal education." Arguing that there is a "cultural revolution" on college campuses, and that it is not one "voted upon or even discussed by society at large," the writer states that "it's all done (in the) name of multiculturalism and diversity." The writer's position is that the "revolution" is a move to replace the "great works of Western culture" with multicultural curricula, i.e Blacks, Latinos, Gays, Lesbians." (D'Sousa, 1989)

Succinctly, other than the right to disagree with and/or challenge the worth and validity of multiculturalism, why the attempt to undermine its pedagogic necessity through an alarmist and unwarranted, vicious attack on Afrocentricity? Further, why this attempt to demonstrate that a "minority," led by Black ideologues, in the academy is subversive, and intent on, through the use of subterfuge, to "gut" the existing Eurocentric curriculum and replace the "great works of Western culture" with an array of multicultural curricula predominated by Afrocentricity? When, in the course of human events in this country, have African Americans been able to force their ideas on the white majority or any other so-called "minority"? Is the attempt to undermine the value and need for a curriculum more reflective of the country's inherent diversity really a response to those demographics indicated above, and coupled with the realization that the "new immigrants" are non- Europeans, so unlike that flow of immigrants over a hundred years ago? And thus the resort to race? I for one would hope not. Yet, let me remind these theoreticians (who by the way are not professionally competent to argue on the credibility or the lack thereof of African history) and those who fear the projected demographics, that multiculturalism is an idea of a pedagogical approach to the training of America's future leaders whose time has come.

Afrocentrism As One Element In The Implementation Of Multi- Culturalism: The Need To Move Expeditiously

Afrocentrism is only one view in a diversity of views on education implicit in multiculturalism. Eurocentrism, along with the other centrisms, is another important view. Afrocentrism is a view that suggests we first build the African world view for the Black child of such a nature that it both educationally and emotionally better equips him/her to fathom and put into perspective the larger, diverse American community. (Asante, 1989: 6-7) Afrocentrism does not reject Eurocentrism or any other centrism that comprise the multicultural mosaic of American education. Afrocentrism accepts the crucial role that the other centrisms must play in the holistic approach to the education of tomorrow's-leaders. What Afrocentrism rejects, and I am sure other centrisms do as well, is a hegemonic mindset that posit the idea that the bases of an American creed and/or "the notion of a shared commitment to common ideals" derives exclusively from people phenotypically described as European. (Schlesinger, 1991: 71) Such a notion is ethnocentrism at its worst. The leaders of tomorrow need to learn of America's inherent diversity.

Because of what I perceive as an ethnocentric plot to undermine multiculturalism, which can only serve to aid and abet the cycle of violence (ethnic and racial confrontations) that continues across this state and nation and is acted out in the halls of schools and neighborhoods, it is my belief that we must move most expeditiously to interdict this cycle of violence. And this can be done with the implementation of a multicultural curriculum. Given the fact that such a curriculum puts emphasis on the interrelatedness of the diversity implicit in the contributions to the country's development, it will not foster ethnic and racial conflict. A multicultural curriculum will teach understanding of and appreciation for America's inherent pluralism. It is one that avoids ethnocentricity by giving tremendous emphasis to a diversity that transcends disciplinary boundaries.

A multiculttiral curriculum is not one that is devoid of truth or distorts the truth. It is a curriculum permeated with truth: a truth that is imparted to the student; and it is a curriculum that constantly challenges untruths or any attempts to distort the truth. A multicultural curriculum is an acceptance of historical truths and a rejection of historical and contemporary distortions of a diverse American society.

The implementation of a multicultural curriculum acknowledges a sharing of power in America. Education is power, and the management of education in power. Education is power because it affords the individual the knowledge and skills necessary for viability in a highly competitive and technologically advanced society. Without an education the individual is powerless. Without a multicultural curriculum the "image of a nation" (the American) is not as forceful, and evinces a skewed sense of power-sharing permeated with ethnocentricity and racially explosive.

We need to move most expeditiously in an implementation of a multicultural curriculum because the demographic projections are already being felt in the public school systems across this state and around the nation. In the New York City system, for one, it is projected that African Americans, Latinos and other nonwhites will be 60% or more of the population by the year 2000." ("Dropping Out of School...," 1987: 9) But much of this increase is counteracted by an equally high dropout rate (40% 50%) for students of color. If we are to train the work force of the 21st century which will be predominantly people of color and white women, we need to once again invest in the American )ublic School system. This will insure the state and country of a highly skilled work force that can guarantee America quality control at home and the competitive edge in foreign markets. A resort to alarmism through ethnocentric rhetoric is not the answer. It can only be counterproductive.

Even within the City University system (CUNY) demographic changes favoring the "new majority" are already evident. On the campus of City College people of color predominate: African American 39%, Latino American 28%; Euro-American 17%, and Asian American 16%. Because of such a predominance of people of color, it can be argued that much of the pedagogical debate on that campus is not over white racism v. African nationalism, but has to do with the changing face of the student body, what this "new majority" will be taught in the 1990's and into the 21st century, and by whom.

When all of the above is coupled with the fact that although there exist so-called integrated classrooms across the state and around the country as a result of the 1954 Supreme Court decision of BROWN v. THE BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS, there still remains the unfinished agenda of an integrated school curriculum. It becomes clear, then, that the task of implementing a multicultural curriculum is a formidable one, but able to be done.

The Battle Lines Are Drawn

The battle lines are drawn between those who are completely satisfied with the existing curriculum and those who see the necessity to reconstruct the school curriculum to make it more exemplary of America's inherent pluralism. It will be a protracted struggle at first as the opposition rallies in an attempt to justify the legitimacy of the existing curriculum and push the idea that a multicultural curriculum is simply in the interest of nationalisms of a variety of colors, genders, and sexual orientations left of center. But for those who ardently defend the need for a more relevant curriculum, the battle poses a creative challenge to humanize the socialization process and in turn, America. For those who take a position to fight for such a curriculum, they will be on what appropriately can be described as the precipice of the debate. The battle at the precipice is that between the forces of educational conservatism and educational progressivism. It is a struggle over whether American society (for us, New York state) will continue a process of, what some have called, "miseducation" that is alienating and dysfunctional, or put in place a holistic approach to education that truly fosters a unity of purpose and educational enlightenment. The creative challenge for the defenders of a multicultural curriculum puts them on the cutting edge of change as they hurry to set in motion the proper mechanisms that will prepare America to be a "kinder and gentler" country in the 21st century.

With this challenge these defenders become social reconstructionists--after a process of creative canonical deconstruction--in building a new educatiOnal mainstream. In essence, this new educational mainstream (the multicultural curriculum) directs the country towards a social transformation which is a recasting of the national culture to depict America as it really is: a plural society of diverse racial, ethnic, and religious groups.

In the struggle at the precipice to bring about a new national culture, the defenders dare not tumble into the all-consuming abyss of racism, sexism, anti-semitism, human and culture degradation, and educational elitism. They must carry the debate to heights of racial, gender, cultural, social, and educational liberation. All of us who abhor a curriculum developed around a hegemonic ethnocentricity, must struggle as well to insure that within the academy there is, in place, a truly functional curriculum that guarantees equity, legitimacy, and empowerment for all Americans.

A CONCLUDING STATEMENT

Let me conclude by quoting from the New York State Regents' Task Force's report, "A Curriculum of Inclusion." I feel it speaks to the viability, credibility and need for a curriculum--that addresses the realities of an inherent, American diversity, and especially for New York State.

Today, representatives of perhaps every known culture and background can be found living in New York. Members of each culture have contributed to the greatness of the Empire State, and to its problems. And as each new generation of young people moves through the school system, the curriculum must help each child learn knowledge, skills, attitudes which enable development of self-esteem as well as help each child understand, respect, and accept as being inherently equal to those who are different: those who look different or dress differently, those who believe or live differently, and those who talk or pray differently. ("Curriculum...," 1987: p. 8)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"A Curriculum Of Inclusion," Report Of The Commissioner's Task Force On Minorities: Equity And Excellence, Albany: July, 1989

Asante, Molefi Kete, Afrocentricity, Trenton, New Jersey: World Press, Inc., 1989.

Asante, Molefi Kete, Kemet Afrocentricit And Knowled New Jersey: Africa World Press, Inc., 1990.

Africa

, Trenton,

Barrett, Carlton, "Controversy Raging Over Proposed Curriculum Of Inclusion," Amsterdam News, February 17, 1990, p. 17.

Basher, George, "George Divided On Mixing Cultures," Community Press & Sin-Bulletin, September 24, 1990, 1B, 2B.

Berger, Joseph, "Ethnic Elements Of The New York Curriculum, Now The Regents Must Decide If History Will Be Recast," The New York Times, February 11, 1990, E5.

Buder, David, "Regents Face Controversial Report On Minorities," The City Sun, February 14, 1990, p. 7.

"Dropping Out Of School In New York State: The Invisible People Of Color." Report Of The Task Force On The New York State Dropout Problem. African American Institute, State University of New York: Albany, 1987.

D'Sousa, Dinesh, "The Visigoths In Tweed," Forbes, April 1, 1991, pp. 81-86.

D'Sousa, Dinesh, Illiberal Education: The Politics Of Race And Sex On Campus, New York: The Free Press, 1991.

Editorial Commentary, "The Afrocentric Idea," Social Studies Review, No. 7, Winter 1991, pp. 3-10.

Gordon, Vivian, 'Multicultural Education: Some Thoughts From An Afrocentric Perspective," Black Issues In Higher Education, n.d.

Harris, Norman, "Multicultural Education In A Changing World," Black Issues In Higher Education, May 24, 1990, p. 19.

House, Billy, "Masrui Among 23 to Review History Courses For Bias," Community Press & Sun-Bulletin, July 28, 1990, 4B.

Hughes, Robert, "The Fraying Of America," Time, February 3, 1992, pp. 44-49.

Ravitch, Diane, "Many Cultures, Mazy Claims. Yes, Revise History Books, But Not Just To Bolster Ethnic Pride," Newsday, December 30, 1990.

Ravitch, Diane, "What's At Stake With Multicultural Education?," Clipboard, Center for Education Innovation, New York, February 15, 1990.

Ravitch, Diane, "A Phony Case Of Classroom Bias," Daily News, January 28, 1990, p. 41.

Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M., The Disuniting Of America, New York, Whittle Direct Books, 1991.

West, Woody, "Out Of Many Comes Division," Insight, December 17, 1990, p. 64.

Williams-Myers, A. J., "From Pluribus To Unum Without A Total Loss Of Pluribus: Education For The Twenty-First Century." Black Issues In Highe Education, November 17, 1991.

Williams-Myers, A. J., "A Multicultural Curriculum, A Must For The Twenty-first Century An Expository Discussion." Albany, New York, New York African American Institute, State University of New York, October 18, 1990.

Williams-Myers, A. J., "Alarmism Doesn't Help," editorial, The Times Union, April 4, 1990, A10.

Williams-Myers, A. J. "Executive Commentary Dissent Against The 'Curriculum Of Inclusion' Or Dissent Against Afrocentrism?," in Williams-Myers, Editor, Towards A Curriculum Of Inclusion: A Round-Table Discussion And An Open Invitation To Prepare For That Kinder And Gentler America, Albany, New York, New York African American Institute, State University of New York, February 25, 1991, iiiix.

Winkler, Karen, "Organization Of American Historians Backs Teaching Of Non-Western Culture And Diversity In Schorlls," The Chronicle Of Higher Education, February 6, 1991, A7.

Yardley, Jonathan, "Dangers Of Afrocentric Push," Times Union, April 8, 1990, Fl, F3.

The New Demographics

Submitted By

Charles G. Treadwell

Charles G. Treadwell is Director of Research Policy Analysis for the New York State Higher Education Services Corporation in Albany, New York. Tony Kruegler, Kristen Osterlitz and Carol VanBuren contributed to this article through graphics, research, and clerical support.

We are at a critical moment of decision in planning for our nation's future. Our population is aging. As people move toward retirement age, they are looking to turn over work and tax contribution responsibilities to the next generation. These responsibilities will require more educational preparation for an increasingly "high-tech" world. Unfortunately, the "old" way of doing business in education does not appear to fit the emerging demographic patterns; the declining rates of high school graduation and college participation bear witness to this trend. Unless radical approaches are tried and succeed, our chances for improving the quality of life in this country will fade as we enter the new millennium.

Historical data, projections of selected populations, and education parameters are examined here in the context of higher education financing. Major questions, concerning issues are raised, and new financing options are suggested to augment current government-sponsored student financial aid, so as to better respond to the emerging needs of our society.

The Lona-Term Future: What Do The Demographers Predict?

According to U.S. Bureau of Census data examined by the American Educational Research Association, the number of children living in our nation will likely continue to grow over the next 30 years.'

The 0 to 17-year-old population projection is one of gradual increase, from 63 million in 1982 to 73 million in 2030, a growth of 16 percent. For administrators who seek to fill college classrooms and to guarantee student loans, this prediction would appear to be good news. However, the comnosition of the school- aged population of the future will be far different from that of past cohorts. That difference could profoundly affect the likelihood of these children attending college.

For example, one fast-growing ethnic group that is dramatically increasing its representation among school-aged children is Hispanics. Recent United States Census reports indicate that the Hispanic population grew at five times the rate of other groups between 1980 and 1989. For Mexican Americans, the rate was even higher.

From 1982 to 2000, the Hispanic school-aged population is expected to increase from 6 million to 19 million--more than tripling (see Figure 1). By contrast, the black population is expected to increase an estimated 22 percent, to 12 million; and the white population will lose 6 million, falling to 40 million children in this age group.

Some pertinent data about this rapidly growing segment of our society is highlighted in the following list. In general, the Hispanic portion of our population tends to be poorer and to have larger families than most other ethnic groups. Specifically:

Sixty-three percent of Hispanics in this country are Mexican and they report a high school completion rate that is 50 percent lower than any other Hispanic sub- group.

Three states--California, Texas, and New York--are home to 65 percent of the Hispanic population in the United States.

Twenty-four percent of Hispanic families fell below the poverty level in 1988, compared with 9 percent of non- Hispanic families.

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Beyond what we know about Hispanics from a research perspective, we can also expect to see the following overall trends in the socioeconomic status of children:

Over the next 30 years, the number of children living in poverty is expected to increase 37 percent, to over 20 million.

The number of children not living with both parents is also expected to increase. This time the increase will be 30 percent, to over 21 million.

The number of children living with poorly educated mothers will grow by 56 percent, to over 21 million (see Figure 2).

All three of these indicators--poverty, single parents, and poorly educated mothers--statistically correlate with poor educational achievement by children. Thus, a growing number of school children may not make it to college over the next 30 years, if traditional patterns continue.

Analysis of the data on college attendance further bears out this possible trend. For example, the rate at which low-income minorities attend college has been declining. As a result, there were declines in the number of academic degrees granted to minority groups.2

Moreover, alarms are beginning to sound early in the educational pipeline. In 1990, the United States Department of Education released the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. They showed that since 1980 the percentage of 9-year-olds possessing basic reading skills declined from 68 percent to 63 percent. While the reading test score gap between whites and minority groups narrowed somewhat, it persisted through all tested age groups.3

The demographic expectations for the next 30 years, coupled with relevant educational indicators, raise serious policy questions. How can our nation avoid a precipitous drop in the educational achievement level of its future adult population, if

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the fastest growing population groups now exhibit the lowest levels of educational attainment? What kinds of new programs can be developed? What kinds of new resources can be committed now--from federal, state, and private sources--to explore approaches to help disadvantaged students stay in school and to improve their educational achievement levels? How much will this cost and where will the money come from? What will happen if the educational outlook of our population is not enhanced? How much will that cost in terms of prisons, law enforcement, welfare, drug-related crime, and moveover our nation's ability to export high quality goods and services at a competitive price?

Options To Consider - State Experience

Many states are actively engaged in assessing the data and discussing the issues described here. For example, Rhode Island is pursuing its Children's Crusade program aimed at third graders. Louisiana has its Taylor program sponsored by a wealthy industrialist. Michigan has the TIP program that offers free community college tuition as an incentive. And Indiana announced its Twenty-First Century Scholarship Program. Each of these state programs attempts to increase early awareness of the benefits of graduating from high school and attending college for at-risk youth through a variety of methods.

A recent innovation begun in New York State, to complement the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP), is the Liberty Scholarship/ Partnership program. This program, part of Governor Mario Cucmo's "Decade of the Child" campaign, will provide new human and financial support for "at-risk" children.

Liberty Partnerships, begun in 1989, offer grants to colleges and r7onsortia to establish mentoring and counseling programs for at-risk students while they are still in secondary school. Liberty Scholarships will, when implemented, offer a guarantee that the low-income child's basic costs of attendance (not just tuition) for public higher education will be met by nonloan government aid, including TAP and federal Pell Grants. Students will also be able to use the aid at nonpublic colleges.

The kind of guarantee that is inherent in the Liberty' program is simple, direct, and easy to understand. For a relatively unsophisticated student, it cuts through the perceived vagaries of financial lid need analysis forms, procedures, and award levels. It also offers a solid alternative to the poverty and depredation that many of these children witness, or are a part of, in their day-to-day lives.

A Possible Federal Model - National Liberty Scholarships

While a few other states have announced similar programs, a federal incentive is necessary. Most states are facing serious budget shortfalls which preclude them from initiating the educational innovations that were planned. For example, the state of New York was forced to postpone the planned 1991-92 start-up of Liberty Scholarships because of budget problems. However, the experience of the federally sponsored State Student Incentive Grant (SSIG) program has demonstrated that the availability of new federal matching funds for a national Liberty Scholarship-style program would likely inspire many state legislators to find additional funds, and thus accelerate the ability of many states to participate.

The program envisioned would build upon an existing administrative structure, decentralized at the state level but with federal coordination. It would provide for a 50-50 shared cost between the state and federal governments. It would also use a liberty grant in conjunction with existing state and federal grant programs. The program would include sponsored mentoring and counseling for eligible students enrolled at the junior high school or high school level and would culminate with Liberty Scholarship grants to fill in the gap between basic costs of attendance (i.e., tuition, room, board, books, and transportation costs within defined public college budgets) and available state and federal grant aid. Liberty grants would be usable at public and independent degree-granting colleges.

The Time For Radical Approaches Is Now

The U.S. Department of Education and the Congress of the United States have an opportunity to directly address these issues. One way is through the reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act. Another way is through the National Liberty Scholarship/Partnership Bill introduced by Congresswoman Nita Lowey on May 15, 1991. The current Higher Education Act expires after September 30, 1991 (unless extended for one year); hearings have been started to gather ideas and opinions on the best way to restructure the student financial aid programs authorized by the statute.

While such reauthorizations in the past have been marked by incremental program change, the data and issues presented in this article argue for a major, innovative augmentation of the current federal student aid program structure, such as presented in the National Liberty Scholarship/Partnership Bill. To do less would severely handicap the ability of our nation to educate the work force of tomorrow, making it unable to compete successfully in an international marketplace. The time for bold action is now.

3 .4

REFERENCES

1. A. M. Pallas, G. Natriello, and E. L. McDill. "The Changing Nature Of The Disadvantaged Population, Current Dimensions And Future Trends," Educational Researcher 18 (June-July 1989).

2. D. Bowman. °Minority College Enrollments Still Too Low, ACE Says," Education Daily (January 16, 1990): 3.

3. L. Daniels, "Tests Show Reading And Writing Lag Continues," The New York Times (January 10, 1990).

Reprinted With Permission Of Author Published in the College Board Review, Summer 1991.

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS "Multiple Perspectives" Or Courting Ethnic Strife?

Submitted By

Albert Shanker

Abstract:

For 20 years Albert Shanker has written a copyrighted column, "Where We Stand," on education and related issues. The column appears in the Sunday New York Times and in more than 60 newspapers across the United States. The following article is excerpted with permission from two of his "Where We Stand" articles: "Multiple Perspectives" (10/27/91) and "Courting Ethnic Strife" (2/23/92).

America's schools have always been subject to fads and crazes, and "multiculturalism" is the latest. Of course, America is a multicultural society, and we have been from the beginning. Our textbooks and curriculums now reflect this fact, and they should. But that's not what the new multiculturalism is about. It has nothing to do with the public schools' traditional role of helping children from various ethnic groups learn to live and work together and everything to do with strengthening and enhancing what separates them. This is dangerous for our schools and our society, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. points out in his brilliant and troubling book, The Disuniting Of America: Reflections On A Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).

It's true that, at one time, American history was presented as a story of white men ruling and making all the important contributions. This kind of history was essentially a patriotic saga--Schlesinger calls it "top-dog history"--showing the inevitable upward progress of the nation. It was designed to create loyalty and patriotism, and it did that. But it was incomplete and it was not honest. It ignored the fact that America had not always lived up to its ideals--that some groups, notably African-Americans and native Americans, were deprived of their rights under the Constitution. And it ignored the c-ntributions of a number of racial and ethnic groups. These distortions have largely been corrected in our history books and curriculums, and I don't know anybody today who would defend that kind of patriotic saga of progress.

But the new multiculturalists want to go to the other extreme --from the extreme of glorifying America to the extreme of putting down everything American. For them, "Americanize" is a dirty word. They want to present this country as a place where only bad things have happened to people who are not white Europeans. Instead of teaching children that they all share a civic culture to which every group has contributed, they want to make kids believe that the common culture is a sham and that their true identity and true self-interest lie in the fact that they belong to different cultures.

For example, a proposal that the New York State Board of Regents recently accepted, "One Nation, Many Peoples: A Declaration of Cultural Interdependence", sounds reasonable--and certainly the racist language that characterized the "Curriculum of Inclusion", an earlier report to the Regents, has disappeared. But even the latest proposal will encourage intellectual dishonesty and promote divisiveness instead of healing it.

The main point of the report is that history and social studies should be taught from the point of view of "multiple perspectives", and that this should start in the earliest grades. Now, "multiple perspectives" is an excellent phrase. It sounds open-minded, which is what the pursuit of knowledge should be. But when you put the concept into the classroom, what does it mean?

For a teacher presenting a historical event to elementary school children, using multiple perspectives probably means that the teacher turns to each child and asks the child's point of view about the event. To an African-American child this would mean, "What is the African-American point of view?" To a Jewish child, "What is the Jewish point of view?" And to an Irish child, "What is the Irish point of view?"

This is racist because it assumes that a child's point of view is determined by the group he comes from. But is there a single African-American or Jewish or Irish point of view? A child may have a point of view based on the fact that he is rich or poor or that he has read extensively or that he comes from a family of conservative Republicans or Marxists. In a society like ours, we are often, and delightfully, surprised that people do not carry with them the views that stereotypes call for. Is it a teacher's job to tell children that they are entitled to only one point of view because of the racial, religious or ethnic group they come from? Should schools be in the business of promoting racial stereotypes and fostering differences where they may not exist?

There is another equally serious problem with the idea of "multiple perspectives" as it appears in the report to the New York State Regents. It means the teaching of history s:iould no longer be dominated by ideas that historians widely accept on the basis of available evidence. It urges, instead, that we open up the curriculum to diverse theories, to "noncanonical knowledge and techniques" and "nondominant knowledge sources". Again, this sounds very open-minded. But what using "noncanonical knowledge" means is that it's okay to teach theories rejected by an overwhelming majority--and perhaps all--experts in a field because there is little or no evidence for them. It makes ethnic diversity in ideas more important than evidence of their validity.

People who worry about education standards get up in arms when some group tries to get Creationism into the biology curriculum. And they call it an act of educational courage when a school board refuses to purchase textbooks that treat Creationism as a scientific theory. Why? Because the scientific community does not accept the validity of Creationism. Scientists say it's an attempt to pass off a religious view as science. Yet, the Regents' history report assumes that one theory is as good as another as long as the materials are "culturally inclusive". And there seems to be very little resistance on the part of people who would raise a stink if kids were being taught the phlogiston theory in chemistry or the flat-earth theory in geography.

The notion of multiple perspectives that is presented by the Regents' report sounds sensible, but it is dangerous. Schools are supposed to educate our future citizens, scholars and scientists. They should be places where youngsters learn to think and weigh evidence. But there's little chance kids will learn these basic lessons if the curriculum teaches them that the evidence for an idea is less important than the ethnic perspective of the person presenting the idea.

Jan Urban, the leader of the Civic Forum, who was the major force in Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, was in this country a couple of years ago for the AFT convention. This was before the demise of the Soviet Union or the disintegration of Yugoslavia. He attended some discussions of the new multicultural curriculums, and he could not believe his ears. He said, "Do you realize that every country in Europe--Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania- is looking at this great miracle, which is the United States. We cannot understand how different people can live together for hundreds of years and think of themselves as one. We are trying to understand how to emulate you so we can remain unified and not return to the racism, pogroms and wars of the past. And as we look to you for an answer, you are about to turn around and head in our direction."

Schools have historically been places where children of varying backgrounds learned to live together. Assigning kids different points of view based on their ethnic, racial or religious background will exacerbate conflict or even create it when none exists. Kids who are not happy to think of themselves primarily as Americans may learn to think of themselves primarily as Hispanics or African-Americans or Jews.

Throughout the world, countries made up of different peoples are coming apart. It would be tragic if here in the United States, where almost all feel that they are first and foremost Americans, we adopted a curriculum that would pull us apart.

Will Americans heed what Jan Urban has to tell us?

Author:

Albert Shanker President American Federation Of Teachers 555 New Jersey Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20001

Albert Shanker

President of the American Federation of Teachers. His leadership has shaped a new era of teacher involvement in education reform and student performance. Mr. Shanker helps forge national, state and local education policy through his work on a number of national commissions and boards including: the National. Academy of Education, the White House Competitiveness Policy Council, the President's Education Policy Advisory Group and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

Fieldwork And Folklife Studies ("THEM," "US" And "IF")

Submitted By

Dr. Beverly J. Robinsor

All of us in the course of our daily lives, have acquired knowledge which appears specialized to others. As one writer points out, "A shaman knows how to perform [special] rituals; a housewife can prepare a holiday meal; a sportsman is an expert in fishing for lake trout; a physician knows her way around a large hospital and can perform open heart surgery; a tramp has acquired strategies for making it; a boy can maneuver with skill on a skate board. Knowledge about everyday life is a common property of the human species.H1 Yet the abilLty to communicate knowledge more often than not involves a native/nonnative, verbal/non-verbal, insider/outsider, us and others process. So what kind(s) of knowledge are we talking about? Within folklore and folklife studies, knowledge is pretty much that special lore, incredible stuff, utopia, soul, raison d'etre which helps to bind and identify communities. This kind of knowledge also has the tendency to have been around long enough to become a tradition, often historical, that distinctly represents the people who practice it.

Folklife knowledge is also special knowledge. You do not necessarily see it because you pass through an old Haitian or Portuguese neighborhood. It is not necessarily marqueed on boardwalks or sung in the renovations of public structures. You cannot pick up a book and creatively draw mental pictures motivated by printed glimpses from a writer's experience or participate in cinematic experiences and say that you have an inside track to folklife knowledge. The inside track begins with understanding what vou are looking for, discerning why it is important and presenting what becomes a friendship with other lives as though it were you and your family. In other words, field research and folklife studies is a personal business--it is serious.

Why Do The Research...Fieldwork?

The United States houses innumerable multi-cultural experiences; probably representing more ethnic groups per capita in major urban areas than anywhere else in the world. Since the arrival of nonnative peoples, North America has continued to

increase its immigrant populations and each state has been a host to these new guests along with emigrant or interstate movers relocating and redefining new and old neighborhoods, new and old communities, new and old states. We are all made up in some way of multiple ethnicities and identities, existing in and of each other, in a complex web of differing differences. Folklife research helps to unfold how we are similar, while at the same time celebrating our differences. The re.--..arch helps to break down the "them" and "us" dilemma so many communities across the country are experiencing. For this reason, programming agencies who have been operating on a "call them" or "make sure they" are included program must reassess their modus operandi.

Folklife field research takes time and, as mentioned earlier, it is serious business. The last minute, ethnic inclusion will not work. I am often reminded how a major film company called me to help them identify what they described as "visible blacks" for an African scene in a film which was later nominated for several Oscar Awards. I liken this visible black syndrome with a visible ethnic rush syndrome which falls in the "them" and "us" dilemma. In order to include "them"--those community members whom we know visibly exist, it takes more than a rolodex listing or phone call. Solid field research calls for communal understanding of where human beings train and prepare for that transformation of consciousness which permits them to genuinely understand what holds various communities together; but above all, guaranteeing that the members of these communities will uide us to those thin s or eo le who pridefully represent their community.

Who Should Do Fieldwork?

Over the years, it has been my experiences that have provided me with the most valuable teachings. Among them is an experience which began with my grandmother in 1971. I was preparing for my first trip to Africa: Ghana, Benin (then Dahomey), Togo, Nigeria, Ivory Coast. It was a dream about to come true. I was going to my continental homeland and my enthusiasm was high. As I smartly packed mosquito repellent, clothing for various anticipated occasions, toilet paper, film, cassettes, recorder and camera, I excitedly told my grandmother about all the things I expected to see, do and buy. For a long time she never commented. Finally, in her quiet, deliberate manner she said: "So what are you taking with you?" Undaunted, I verbally reviewed everything I was packing including clean, presentable underwear in case (as she told us when my sister and I were children) of an accident. Again, but with a more deliberate tone, she asked "What are you taking with you?"

My grandmother was questioning my cultural luggage. What was I carrying that could say something about who I was, my family, my community. I was so busy thinking about what I was going to get, I had almost overlooked what I was taking. It was a temporary wilting reality that proved an invaluable experience. She gave me photos of relatives, events (a neighborhood birthday party, family Chritmas and Easter gatherings), friends, plants in our front and back yards (of which she made me memorize the names) and a picture of _me of her favorite quilts. She also gave me some pillow cases she had decoratively sewn for "the people who will be especially kind" to me. It was the best preparation that could have happened. People loved learning about me via the pictures-- particulat'y one which captured four generations of females and the photoraph! of my grandmother's quilt. Many people would introduce me to the3r older relatives, show me woven or appliqued cloths because of an inspired linkage through sharing. Needless to say, the -Allow cases were like icing on an already good cake!

Every potential field researcher must assess his or her own c-iltural luggage. If you cannot identify special knowledge from your own family or community which you would be willing to share, then do not get involved with folklife fieldwork.

If you do not like being a student involved with learning and you have a difficult time being a listener, then field research is not for you.

If you are more interested in sharing your folklife traditions, rather than discovering, learning aad eventually sharing those of others, do not get involved with folklife.

If language bothers you, e.g., foreign, recently learned English dialects, and expressive forms--including verbal/non-verbal languages, and even rap, forget it! Fieldwork is not your camp, especially when you are apt to meet people who say yes while shaking no or vice versa.

If you suffer from paranoia when in homes or locales other than your own, forget folklife fieldwork.

If you are shy and it is difficult for you to prompt conversations or make friends, then please do not get involved with folklife studies. I am sure there are many more "ifs" that can be added to the list. However, if none or most of the aforementioned does not apply to you then folklife research and documentation can and should be a part of your lives.

And Now If You Begin. .

You begin by knowing what the basic folklife topics are. The Library of Congress Folklife Center has a wonderful laymen's book on conducting fieldwork. The basic areas of study are:

A. Oral Tradition and Performance (spoken word, music, dance, game play and strategy)

B. Material Culture (artifacts, cultural landscape, food ways, folk art, folk medicine, crafts and trades)

C. Customs, Beliefs* and Rituals

D. Family Life

E. Festivals and Drama (religious and secular)

The primary identification of informants is a result of leads. It is very important to identify what is often known as the significant or important others.

* Including superstitions. Normally I do not use the word superstition because of its negative or less than believable connotation.

These are the people whom community residents point out as being special practioners, performers or collectors of folklife tradition. For example, when I arrived in Georgia for the first time to conduct fieldwork in the southern most part of the state, I had a few leads but knew nothing about the local communities. I

shied away from political figures who generally recommended friends or their special choices. Who is identifying whom can be very sticky for a fieldworker, and it is best to leave personal or partisan political, religious and economic affiliations at home.

Begin by seeking out local, religious and social organizations. Learn to conquer some of your nervousness by asking to speak at some of the organization meetings--among African Americans, usually the first or second week of the month are good gathering times. Equally important, explain your work, how your audience can assist (contacts) and then who you are and how to reach you Write announcements for church bulletins and put notices in conspicuous places where community groups gather: post office (when allowable), hospital, senior citizen facility lounges and other public areas where notice boards are regularly checked. Write brief interesting articles for special interest publications which will reach audiences who come together because of similar ethnic, language or geographical backgrounds.

274z.

I have recently begun what I call a "prenotification" strategy. I often will write short articles about folklife that is not necessarily from the area where I anticipate working, but about topics which are familiar and other human related processes including yards and houses, (e.g., quilting, games, storytellers, liars, music). Each article concludes with "Do you know someone special who performs or can do this or some related art form in

your community?"

Local people, regular folks, the "drylongso" will help you identify the significant others. It will take much of the "choice monkey" off the researchers back unless you are one of those blessed fieldworkers who discovers dozens of great folk artists and are forced to make choices. Regardless of the numbers, look at your work as one of becoming friends with new faces, places and spaces. There is a lot of trust involved between fieldworkers and participants. As friends, we must truly be sensitive to what should be made public or what remains private. Folklife researchers are responsible for not only how we present ourselves, but how others are presented. Though I did not intend to talk about documentation, I would like to suggest that during the first few meetings once identification of special people occurs, let your eyes, ears and soul do the recording. Make notes afterwards in your car, around the corner, at home--away from the interview setting. The initial meetings are to establish communication; to create compatibility; to identify the verbal and nonverbal styles of an informant; and to develop a basic respect wherein informants will comfortably share about themselves and their work, and feel assured that a fieldworker will collect and present them in a prideful manner. Because documentation is an extensive workshop topic on its own, (audio and film recorders, cameras, miking, editing, etc.), a training forum should be established prior to conducting field research. Also, the final presentation of one's fieldwork endeavors should be in a comfortable setting. Whenever possible, try to re-establish a public presentation area that attempts to recreate the artist's natural contextual environment for an HedutainmentHsharing with an audience.

Unlike the academic study of folklore and folklife, (folklore is the older parent term of the two), folklife research is a wonderful opportunity to bring community people, agencies, educators and the like together. The research does not take forever, but it does require some "digging" and is not readily achieved nor understood via a "get me some of them" phone call or a fax(ed) process. The research speaks directly to the schism in the "them movement"--"us" and "them"--and helps to break down cultural biases, ignorance and false representations of people in our communities and in our society as a whole. In many ways, folklife

research becomes an important metaphor for communalizina communities. As an educator and fieldworker, folklife dies is a labor of love. One of the special people I met in south Mrs. Phyllis Carter (Ant Phyllis), when talking about and work summed it up best when she said, "There will never be enough money when you follow what is right."

Dr. Beverly J. Robinson, Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles

Author of Aunt [Ant] Phyllis: The Life Narrative of Mrs. Phyllis Carter Regent Press, Oakland, California.

1. Spradley, James P. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 25.

Special thanks to Michael J. Bell, Grinnell College, 1991, for his initial reading and feedback on this article.

White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack

Submitted By

Peggy McIntosh Ph.D.

Dr. Peggy McIntosh is Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from her working paper, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account Of Coming To See Correspondences Through Work In Women's Studies," copyright O 1988. Permission to excerpt or reprint must be obtained from Peggy McIntosh, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley, Massachusetts 02181; (617) 283-2520. NYSCEA has permission to use the article in this publication, but not to grant permission to any other group or individual.

Through work to bring materials from Women's Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials which amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages which men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege which was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women's Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so tha': when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow "them" to be more like "us."

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical location, though of course all other such factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, mm African American co-workers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of being shown housing in an area which I designate as one in which I would want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in a new location I choose will be neutral or pleasant to me the day I move in.

4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives or customers.

5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely and positively represented.

6. When I was told about what is positive in our national heritage or in "civilization," I was shown that people of my color made it what it is.

7. I could be sure that my children would be given curricular materials that testified to the existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

9. I can go into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, or into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who will deal with my hair.

10 Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance that I am financially reliable.

11. I could arrange to protect our children most of the time from people who might not like them.

12. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

13 I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

14 I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

16 I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color, who constitute the world's majority, without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

17 I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

18 I can be pretty sure that if I get angry and ask to talk to "the person in charge," I will be facing a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.

20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.

21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employee without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it or kept it because of my race.

23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.

26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin.

These conditions do not obtain for the African American women in the building where I work; at the start of this analysis, that was the group with whom I compared myself, to create a personal matrix for understanding.

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on the list until I wrote it down. For me white. privilege turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it was great, for in facing it I had to give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things were true, this was not such a free country; my life was not what I had made it; many doors opened for my people through no virtues of our own..

In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I listed conditions of daily experience which I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these conditions are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant and destructive.

I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions which were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I

could think of myself as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made over- confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made inconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from exhausting daily anxiety, worry, fear, and anger owing to others' treatment of people in my racial group. At the same time, I was being subtly trained to perpetrate or at least ignore the hostility and violence against people of color which exhausted and angered them.

For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systemically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power which I originally saa as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned over advantage and conferred dominance.

4,;

I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantaging associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, sexuality and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind us eloquently.

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as a member of the dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.

Disapproving of the systems won't be enough to change them. I

was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. But a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems.

To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

Though systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

36 -

Multiculturalism In Mathematics, Science And Technology Gerry Madrazo, et al.

Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1993, pp. 53 +.

Blood Banks:Assessing The Fluid Of Life

Charles Richard Drew

Millions of people are alive today because of an African- American surgeon's pioneering work with blood. Anyone who has received a blood transfusion, whether in war or peace, probably owes his or her life to Dr. Charles Richard Drew (1904-1950). During World War II, Dr. Drew was the world's leading authority on the preservation of human blood for transfusion.

In 1930, scientist Karl Landsteiner received the Nobel Prize for his work on blood typing. Dr. Drew realized the implications of these research findings: to perform blood transfusions successfully, the donor and the recipient must have the same blood type (A, B, AB, or 0) and their blood must be compatible.

Separated Whole Blood

Plasma (55%) Consists of water, salts. and proteins

Blood Cells (45%) Consists of red blood cells. white blood cells. and platelets

However, Dr. Drew recognized another critical problem: the need to preserve and store blood. He concentrated his research on the use of plasma- the liquid portion of blood. Dr. Drew's research provided evidence that blood plasma could be stored without spoiling for much longer periods than whole blood. The diagram at the left shows the composition of whole blood. Dr. Drew's work on plasma storage made blood banks practical for the first time. Although the idea of a blood bank had been explored by Soviet scientists, the problem of blood spoilage had kept blood,banks from practical use.

The early part of Dr. Drew's career was marked by a love of sports as well as medicine. He graduated in 1926 from Amherst College where he was a football star. Although he could have had a career in athletics, he always dreamed of one day becoming a

medical doctor. In 1928, he was accepted at McGill University Medical School in Canada and soon became an outstanding student. At McGill University he met Dr. John Beattie, an English physician and professor of anatomy. Both Beattie and Drew became interested in investigating the problems associated with blood transfusions. At that time, transfusions were only possible if fresh blood could be obtained from a closely-related donor.

In 1938, Dr. Drew received a fellowship to do graduate research at Columbia University. There, he began his research on techniques to preserve blood for later use. In 1944, Dr. Drew was appointed Chief of 3tatf at Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C. At the same time, he was Head of Surgery at Howard University.

The brilliant pioneering work of Dr. Charles Drew will long be remembered in every blood bank aroun3 the world. The results of his untiring efforts toward the preservation of human blood for emergency use have saved many lives. Ironically, Dr. Drew was involved in a car accident on April 1, 1950, and died because of a desperate need for a blood transfusion.

Questions For Critical Thinking

1. Give at least one important reason why Karl Landsteiner's work on blood typing was significant to Dr. Drew's research?

2. 'Why is a "blood bank" such an important idea?

3. in addition to blood-group compatibility, what precautions might be taken before a doctor considers a blood transfusion?

4. Why was Dr. Drew's research so important during his time?

5. Why is blood sometimes referred to as the "fluid of life"?

6. Now has Dr. Drew's blood research affected public health today?

Reeving Blood Fresh

Materials: pencil

Dr. Charles Richard Drew developed his techniques of plasma storage by performing various laboratory experiments. He identified and tested variables such as storage temperature and preservative concentration. In this activity, you will interpret data from blood storage experiments and come to your own conclusions about the best conditions for keeping whole blood fresh.

Experiment A: (Temperature and Blood Storage)._

Time to Separation

I 1 I I I

5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30%

Temperature (degrees Celsius)

The graph at the left shows six data points from an experiment with whole blood. In this experiment, whole blood samples were stored at 4°C and at room temperature (approximately 25°C). The length of time it took for each blood sample to separate was marked on the graph. Study the graph and answer the questions below.

1. What effect does temperature have on blood decomposition?

2. Is there a "best" temperature for storing blood? Why or why not?

Keeping Blood Fresh (Continued)

Experiment B: (Fresh Blood Preservation)

Time to Separation

0% 5% 10% 15% 20%

Concentration of Sodium Citrate

25%

The graph at the left shows several data points from an experiment with whole blood. In this experiment, whole blood samples were stored at the same temperature with different concentrations of sodium citrate, a preservative. The length of time it took for each blood sample to separate was marked on the graph. Study the graph and answer the questions below.

3. What effect does sodium citrate have on blood decomposition? Explain.

4. What concentration of sodium citrate was the best preservative? Explain.

5. Based on your interpretations of Experiments A and B, what do you think would be the best conditions for preserving whole blood? What do you think would be the worst conditions?

Multiculturalism In Mathematics, Science, And Technology Gerry Madrazo, et al.

Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1993, pp. 143+

Chemicals From Nature

Eloy Rodriguez

Is there "chemistry" between Latin-American herbology, pharmaceutical companies, and chimpanzees? Dr. Eloy Rodriguez, a Mexican-American professor of biology and chemistry, investigates such questions in his laboratory and in the field. Since the 1970's, Dr. Rodriguez and his colleague, Dr. Manuel Aregullin, have researched and isolated chemicals from plants. Often, they first learn of the beneficial properties of plants from various experts ranging from their grandparents to resourceful chimpanzees.

Through his family and community, Dr. Rodriguez recognized the long-established knowledge of herbology in his Latin American heritage. Knowledge of the medicinal qualities of plants in the southwestern United States, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, was first developed by the indigenous people of these areas and then adopted by the Spanish. The use of herbs to cure a variety of illnesses indicates the presence of medically effective chemicals in the plants. Some of these herbs, such as mint, oregano, cinnamon bark, and chamomile, may be familiar to you. Dr. Rodriguez and Dr. Aregullin are experts at isolating the effective chemicals in such herbs.

Although clues usually come from the medicinal-plant knowledge of indigenous people, medicinal plants can also be found by observing the behavior of animals. A recent clue came from the eating habits of wild chimpanzees in Tanzania. An anthropologist observed that chimpanzees showing signs of illness collected and ate special leaves. He sent a sample of these leaves to Dr. Rodriguez. From these leaves, Dr. Rodriguez and his colleagues isolated a rare chemical called thiarubrine-A, and learned that it has strong antibiotic properties. the illustration at the left shows Dr. Rodriguez holding a molecular model of thiarubrine-A. It is interesting to note that this same chemical has been found in a medicinal plant used by native people in Canada.

Once a chemical such as thiarubrine-A has been isolated from a plant, it can serve as a "lead" or model chemical for a pharmaceutical company to synthesize or create artificially. These synthetic chemicals are tested and often developed into medical

drugs. Synthetic drugs or medicines from pharmacies are much stronger than chemicals originally found in nature. Dr. Aregullin has observed that nature rarely produces strong, toxic chemicals; herbal remedies tend to be more gentle and nontoxic. However, Dr. Rodriguez cautions that any remedy should be from a reliable source and if people who know little about herbal medicines "just go out and pluck, they're going to get themselves into problems."

Ouestions For Critical Thinking

1. Think about the times when you have had indigestion, a cold, the flu, a sore throat, or some other minor ailment. Are there any herbal or "family" remedies you commonly use at such times? List them below and explain their use.

2. How do you think indigenous people of North and South America first discovered the medicinal qualities of plants?

3. Some people think herbal remedies are better for your body than commercial pharmaceuticals. what are some arguments for and against this point of view?

4. Who do you think Dr. Rodriguez and Dr. Aregullin chose to spend their career researching the medicinal herbs used by Hispanics and other cultures?

5. Dr. Rodriguez warns that people who "just go out and pluck" herbs are going to have problems. What are some problems that could occur if people gather herbs for medicine without expert advice?

Analyzing Herbs

Materials: pencil, Hispanic herbal remedies, such as yerba buena, mint, oregano, cinnamon bark, chamomile, etc., isopropyl alcohol, acetone, water, beakers or wide-mouth jars, Whatman chromatography paper or heavy coffee-filter paper, paper clips, thin rod (glass rod, wooden dowel, or pencil), parafilm or plastic wrap, capillary tube (thin pipette or modified medicine dropper), mortar and pestle (optional), hot plate (optional)

In the following activity, you will perform a technique that Dr. Rodriguez uses in his laboratory. This chromatographic technique is used as a method of isolating chemical compounds from plants such as yerba buena, mint, oregano, cinnamon bark, and chamomile. You may choose to bring in one of these herbs from home for your experiment.

Depending on the type of herb you have chosen, you will decide on the type of herbal extraction and solvent mixture to use in the following procedure. Suggestions for extraction and solvent mixtures are given below. Study these methods before you proceed.

Making an Extract

The most common extraction method in herbal medicine is to boil the herb in hot water. The finishes? extract is usually called a tea. You make the extract very concentrated by using large amounts of the herb and/or boiling the mixture for a long time. Another type of extract is made by using a mortar and pestle to grind the herb with a solvent such as alcohol or acetone.

Safety Note: Solvents such as acetone and alcohol are highly flammable. Use these only in well-ventilated areas and away from open flames. Boiling liquids can cause serious burns. Handle them carefully to avoid splashes.

Separating The Extract On A Chromatogram

1 Cut several pieces of chromatography paper into 2-cm by 5-cm strips. When handling chromatography paper, hold it by its edges to avoid getting your finger oils into your chromatogram. Draw a thin pencil line 1 cm above the bottom edge of the paper. Fill the bottom of a beaker with solvent (acetone or isopropyl alcohol) to a depth of 1 cm. cover the jar with parafilm or plastic wrep so that it is airtight.

5 r.

2. Fill a thin capillary tube with your herbal extract. The tube

will fill itself by capillary action if you immerse one end. Using the capillary tube, place one very small dot of your herbal extract just above the pencil line you drew in Step 1.

3. Place a bent paper clip through the top edge of the strip as shown at the left. Open the wrapping on the beaker and place a rod across it. Hang the paper clip with the strip attached as shown. Carefully cover the opening again so it is airtight. Be sure not to move the beaker or slosh the contents.

4. Let the wrapped beaker sit undisturbed. You will begin to see the solvent travel up the paper strip. As it moves, it will "drop off" different substances from the extract along the

way. You may begin to see some of these substances as different-colored bands on the paper strip. Chemists can identify these substances by measuring exactly how far they move along the chromatogram.

Your challenge in this activity is to experiment with different extraction methods and solvents to achieve the best chromatographic separation for your herb. To decide which techniques to use, it may help you to study the characteristics of your herb.

5. Carefully observe the characteristics of the herb you have chosen. Name the herb and record your observations about it.

in the space below.

6. Draw your herb in the space at the right. List any parts of the plant that you can identify.

After experimenting with different extraction techniques and solvents for separation, answer the following questions.

7. Draw the results of your best separation in the space at the right.

8. What did you do to achieve the best separation?

9. From your chromatographic analysis, what can you conclude about your herb?

Strategies For Implementing Multicultural Education

Submitted By

Dr. Irene M. Lober and Dr. Kathryn Dunlap

... multicultural education should be a source of strength and pride...National unity does not require that we eliminate the very diversity that is the source of our uniqueness and, indeed, of our adaptability and viability among the nations of the world. If the United States is to continue to prosper in the 21st century, then all of its citizens, whatever their race or ethnicity, must believe that they and their ancestors have shared in the building of the country and have a stake in its success. Thus, multicultural education, far from being a source of dissolution, is necessary for the cultural health, social stability and economic future of New York State and the

nation.

News, NYS Education Department

Recognizing that our schools reflect a broad multicultural population, we must prepare our students for citizenship in a

culturally diverse society. Groups representative of education, business and industry, and community organizations are working together throughout the country to make certain that students understand and respect each other, regardless of their heritage. One such group in New York State is the Education Focus Group of the Enhancing Racial Harmony Committee in Dutchess County. An article, written by Frank San Felice, Assistant to the Superintendent of Instructional Services at Dutchess County BOCES,

in the Poughkeepsie Journal reported that:

All members of the Education Focus Group agree that schools must prepai.e students for citizenship in a culturally diverse world through implementation of instructional programs that are multicultural and accurately reflect the contributions of all peoples....The elimination of prejudice and the guarantee of the rights of every individual require continuous attention and commitment from each of us. Schools mirror society, both its positive and negative aspects.

- 47 -

School leaders must develop a culture that values and cares for cultural pluralism by integrating a concern for cultural diversity into all aspects of schooling. They must work collaboratively with staff and community to develop a school mission that clearly reflects this concern. Only when there is a clear understanding of, belief in, and acceptance of this mission, will cultural diversity become an integral part of the school

culture. Multiculturalism demands a change in school culture.

In order to be effective, multiculturalism must be incorporated into all functions of the school/district including two-way communication, personnel recruitment, staff development activities, the curriculum, textbook adoption procedures, testing,

and school finance.

"Multiculturalism should be infused in reading, language arts, mathematics, science, music, and art....at the same time, instructional materials and techniques should be revised to correct historical errors and gross distortions and to eliminate stereo- typing in the curriculum and in its presentation" (The National Association of State Boards of Education as reported in ERS Bulletin, December 1991). Also in December, 1991, Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, reinforced the need for accuracy and truth when he quoted Frank Snowden, professor emeritus, of Howard University, "The time has come for scholars and educators to insist upon scholarly rigor and truth in current and projected revisions of our curriculum. Tempus fuget!"

In order to have a school climate chat is conducive to learning by all students, the building and the curriculum must reflect a commitment to cultural diversity. There should be evidence of the curriculum being taught in the pictures that are hanging throughout the school and in the classrooms; the displays and exhibits, the murals, and the work of the students should reflect this commitment.

Curriculum review and development should be a dynamic and continuous process in which all curriculum areas are developed, reviewed, and evaluated in a systematic manner. Only when all areas of the curriculum are integrated and supportive of each other will the school have attained an instructional environment in which all students will feel a part of, and included in; they will recognize the values and contributions made by their many cultures.

Curriculum renewal should be a continuous process that addresses three basic questions:

Where are we now? Where do we want to go? How do we get there?

It has been felt that the best designers of curricula are those individuals who understand its necessity, impact and composition through first-hand experiences. The input of classroom teachers in the evaluation of curricula and the implementation of the instructional program is critical. They must be involved in all phases.

If we are to be sensitive to the changing needs of students, a process should be included in the school structure which permits changes to be made in the curriculum. All too often, however, the curriculum renewal process has been merely a textbook selection process, rather than a true review of the curriculum. To avoid this limited perspective, the curriculum renewal plan should have a purpose and proposed outcomes, for example:

Purpose

Curriculum development reflects a concern for the present and the future. It contains a process to guide change, involve the staff and produce a desired outcome for student learning experiences.

Outcomes

1. A philosophy for the educational program

2. Goals and objectives for each learning level

3. Scope and sequence of learning, both within and between grade levels

4. Instructional strategies most useful for meeting goals and objectives

5. Instructional materials and activities to meet the needs of students with varying abilities and needs

6. Prerequisites for student placement and exit

7. Methods for evaluating progress objectives

8. The instructional and financial support the program

towards learning

requirements to

In order to accommodate the purpose and outcomes identified above, the University City Public Schools, Missouri, identified the following Curriculum Renewal Cycle stages:

Stage I -Develop program description, goals and objectives in consonance with district goals and objectives after reviewing emerging and current research trends/reports

Identify program support requirements to include materials, personnel, and staff development needs

-Identify program evaluation component

Stage II Establish pilot program

Provide inservice and articulation

-Monitor pilot program, revising as needed

Refine program support requirements

Evaluate pilot program

Stage III -Expand pilot program

Provide inservice and articulation

Continue evaluation. Revise and modify program as needed

Identify prerequisite for student placement

Incorporate instructional techniques in curriculum guide

Stage IV Complete implementation of program

-Continue to revise and modify program as needed

-Evaluation instruments refined

Stage V -Evaluation of program to assess implications for renewal

Figure 1 illustrates the Curriculum Renewal Cycle that includes the five stages as applied to all areas of the curriculum. Within a five year period of time, all subjects would be systematically reviewed. The time frame can, of course, be shortened to accommodate more pressing needs. A benefit derived from having several stages in progress at the same time is that there can be articulation between the various curriculum areas in order to assure that there is consistency, and support for, the needs of the culturally diverse staff and student body.

Additionally, the multicultural focus should be evident in

school menus, school calendars and holiday celebrations, instructional and library resources, and student activity programs. Parents and community members of diverse backgrounds should be encouraged to share their rich heritages with students; they should be invited to participate in school decision-making. Data on referrals, suspensions, and drop-outs should be carefully reviewed by staff to determine if the needs of all students are being met.

An aggressive personnel recruitment process will insure that staff composition reflects the cultural diversity that exists in the school community. Board policies and practices should enforce equal employment opportunity through such statements as:

The Board of Education believes in the educational soundness of providing students with an opportunity to relate to, and learn from, staff members of diverse backgrounds.

2. The school district will provide, through an affirmative action plan, equal opportunities for employment, retention, and promotion of all people regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, handicap, or sex.

3. Recognizing that the quality of instruction is enhanced by a diverse staff, school leaders will actively recruit, retain, and promote minority staff members.

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YEAR 1 YEAR 2

Figure 1

CURRICULUM RENEWAL CYCLE

YEAR 3 YEAR 4 YEAR 5

Language Arts

Reading

STAGE I

STAGE II STAGE III STAGE IV STAGE V

STAGE V

Practical Arts

Foreign Language

STAGE I

STAGE II STAGE III STAGE IV

STAGE IV STAGE V

Comprehen- sive Art

Math

STAGE 1

STAGE II STAGE III

STAGE III STAGE IV STAGE V

Social Studies

Physical Education

STAGE 1

STAGE II

STAGE II STAGE III STAGE IV STAGE V

Science Health

STAGE 1

Recruitment procedures to increase the number of minority applicants could include:

Establishing and maintaining recruitment relations with colleges and universities that have large numbers of minority students

Requesting referrals from agencies and programs that have contacts with minority individuals

Utilizing minority employees as recruiters

Utilizing facilities, materials, and personnel of

organizations serving minority groups

Advertising positions in newspapers, journals, or other publications that have widespread circulation and are read by

minority groups

Encouraging minority students currently enrolled in the district to pursue teaching as a career

The school leader should foster professional growth of staff members in understanding and implementing multiculturalism. Staff development should be planned to develop communication and human relations skills in interacting with diverse groups and in 4ntegrating multiculturalism into the curriculum and school culture. Staff should be encouraged to creatively use the rich diversity in the school and to weave it into all aspects of school

programming.

A model to insure successful staff development in multiculturalism includes five stages: readiness, planning, training, implementation, and maintenance. The readiness stage will insure that all staff members are aware of the school mission addressing cultural diversity and recognize the importance of developing skills for profiting diversity. The school leader may need to promote awareness by sending staff members to attend conferences or to visit other schools with exemplary programs.

Once the readiness for staff development is established, the school leader will involve staff and community in planning for staff development that will enable staff to create a multicultural learning environment. The planning stage will consider ways to present, implement and maintain an understanding of diversity.

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Information concerning specific needs can be identified through a needs assessment of staff, community, and students. A variety of experiences may be planned for the training stage including visitations, interactive workshops, group study, and peer-partnering.

The school leader must be actively involved in the implementation process to encourage staff members to practice new skills and to promote additional training when appropriate. Once staff members are secure in their use of new behaviors, the leader must initiate supervisory practices that will nurture, support, and maintain the new behaviors. It is only when the new behaviors become a viable party of the school culture that both students and staff can reap the benefits.

It is Sarah Bullard (1992) who said, "Multicultural education is not a substitute for individual attention. But multicultural education, by some definition, is essential. We must help our children find a place in our pluralistic world. In doing so, we must avoid stereotyping, resegregation, indoctrination, assigning blame. We must confront the problems of prejudice and inequality in our classrooms as well as in our society."

As school leaders, we can achieve educational excellence by recognizing, incorporating, and capitalizing on our students', staff's, and community's diversity.

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REFERENCES

Bullard, Sara. "Sorting Through The Multicultural Rhetoric," Educational Leadership, Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (December 1991/January 1992).

Educational Research Service. "Multicultural Education," ERS Bulletin, Arlington, Virginia (December 1991).

San Felice, Frank. "Multiculturalism Vital To Better Learning," Poughkeepsie Journal, Poughkeepsie, New York (1992).

Shanker, Albert. "Where We Stand, Making A Multicultural Curriculum," New York Times, New York, New York (December 1991) .

The State Education Department/The University of the State of New York. News, Albany, New York (June 20, 1991).

Color Me

Submitted By

James T. Hillestad Professor of Education

SUNY - New Paltz

"Introducing Crayola Multi-Cultural Crayons. Crayons come in six different skin tones, so your children can draw and blend colors to match every complexion. Help to develop self esteem and ethnic pride."

S&S 1992 educational products, p. 11

Having reviewed all of the material available to me that has been generated by Educational Commissioner Sobol and the New York State Board of Regents, I now recognize and endorse Cravola as the most appropriate solution to the problems they have presented in both Multi-Cultural Education and A New Compact For Learning.

Clearly the state bureaucracy has the power to enforce its directives. Be careful! In the current habit of mind generated by Rene Descartes, John Dewey, and B. F. Skinner, dissent is eliminated by defining other habits of mind as non-existent. The media is the message--and they control the media. If you are reading this there is evidence that their power is not absolute, except perhaps in its corruption.

Emily Dickinson so aptly presents the predicament of this essay, and perhaps for all of us who would commit ourselves to life through the pursuit of truth and beauty:

Much Madness if divinest Sense To a discerning Eye Much Sense the starkest Madness 'Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail Assent and you are sane Demur and you're straightway dangerous And handled with a Chain

As a backwoods country professor, please permit me to address the non-sense of your soul. This is what does not exist in the current Cartesian habit of mind as manifested by the Regents and

Commissioner Sobol. When Rene Descartes presented his "wondrous strange" Discourse based upon "cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I am) it was accepted initially as complimentary to the prevailing "credo ut intelligam" (I believe so that I may understand) of Anselm. "Both the 'credo ut intelligam' and the 'cogito ergo sum' worked well for a time. However, finally the 'credo ut intelligam' led to the Inquisition and the 'cogito ergo sum' into an ammunition factory." (Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, Out Of Revolution, Autobiography Of Western Man, "Farewell To Descartes," 1969, Argo Books.)

It also led to the New York State Education Department. Let us dare to examine this factory and the ammunition boxes of Multi- cultural Education it now produces. We do not find the words "soul" or "spirit" on these boxes being trucked out to administrators and teachers around the state.

We will not find the words "soul" or "spirit" being utilized by the New York State Department of Education or in our textbooks. There are only descriptive "Behavioral" terms and objectives. This is all that remains of what the Athenians called psychology. To Aristotle that term was connotative as well as denotative. It meant to study the ultimate reality of the soul. With the Cartesian triumph through the French Revolution and the Enlightenment it came to mean "mind" rather than soul.

"Starkest Madness"

After World War II the seeds planted earlier in this century, mostly by Columbia Teachers College, which prepared most administrators nationally, took root in the New York State Education Department. "Mind" was replaced by "brain". This pseudo-scientism asserted that if anything exists it can be measured, standardized, and tested by the power brokers who know best: our regents, our models of cultural ascendancy?

It was during this period of post World War II that all objectives were required to be objective, that is, "Behavioral". "Soul" and spirit" are not physical and cannot be measured. Psychology as presented to teachers, regents, governors, superintendents, lawmaers and all others laundered through our colleges and universities, utilizes its power to condition those subjected to deny all but its own assumptions. This perhaps explains why the New York Times, as well as professional journals, support the tyranny of "the intellectual". John Dewey reigns.

What I will now call the Cartesian Crayola Factor came to control our societies, in the Third Reich, the United States and

the Soviet Union, through the power of its schools and universities as they became instruments of the state. In the United States this evolving and evolutionary current habit of mind is systematically, and I believe lyrically, documented by Page Smith in Killing The Spirit-Higher Education In America (1990).

Mr. Smith more astutely labels the Crayola Factor as the Secular Democratic Consciousness and follows its decline into decadence: "Highly specialized and ritualized activity called, rather pretentiously, 'scholarship' dominated the scene." (p. 303) This analytical and theoretical current habit of mind has been adequately exposed and discredited. Jacques Derrida "destroyed the basic assumptions of analytical philosophy, as Wittgenstein destroyed logical positivism---. He has buried the last lingering hopes of the Enlightenment-Darwinian-Marxist, rationalist consciousness---. He is the bearer of frightening news that we are unable to resist." (p. 303)

Resistance to this "frightening news" is, contrary to Page Smith, possible. Our schools and universities, as well as our Commissioner and Board of Regents, need only to utilize the earlier "approach-avoidance" scheme of Behaviorism (include Secular Democratic Consciousness, Crayola Factor, or Cartesian) that was replaced by "positive-negative reinforcement."

Our power brokers represent a new "know nothing" movement in

America. They simply avoid Page Smith, Neil Postman (Technopoly et al), Antonio T. deNicholas (Habits Or Mind), and David Hicks (Norms And Nobility), and Marva Collins (Marva Collin's Way). I know many teachers in our New York Stale Public Schools who are aware and attempt to pursue the classical dialectic, who attempt to educate rather than teach.

It is time our power brokers recognize there are alternatives (as suggested by Hicks, deNicholas and Collins) to the analytical descriptive theories of power, race, sexuality, intelligence, evolution, and child development. We have many teachers in our Mid-Hudson area who have the stature and success in educating represented by Marva Collins. I dare not list and celebrate their achievements lest, like Marva, they be punished. To expose and deny these theories of race, intelligence, evolution et al is to expose and deny multicultural education and the New Compact For Learning. This is legally and powerfully insubordination to power. It might well mean loss of employment, house, medical care, and all the vital physical necessities for a virtuous teacher, professor, regent and even commissioner?

Crayolas are real. The Crayola action plan is dangerous and destructive because it is based upon the orthodoxies and theories of the Enlightenment that are killing us and our children.

Theories such as "the Enlightenment" we each have been conditioned not to question, but to revere. Better that we rely upon the technologies to ease our pain and discomfort. When will the Regents recognize the strong legs Marva Collins says are most basic to teaching, and at least begin a dialogue? A dialectic would be perhaps too foreign as long as control and power (Cartesian), not truth (classical) is their goal. This would provide a balance to their almost exclusive reliance upon technology. Has technology truly become idealogy, as Neil Postman asserts? Will our power brokers accept even the possibility of its limitations and dangers?

If not, we must prepare ourselves for the desolation of more "Distance Learning" and school consolidation that the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have identified as dangerous missiles already launched primarily through the B.O.C.E.S puppets of "Albany".

Color me if you must with any of the ideologically labeled theories of economics, psychology, race, sexuality, culture, history, politics or others of your choice. These are politically correct, as they purport to be scientific. Fortunately they are correct, but not true.

"Divinest Sense"

Multi-cultural Education has based itself upon the assumptions of the Cartesian "Secular Democratic Consciousness" as it is manifested in the pseudo-scientific theories of Behaviorism a la Watson and Skinner. It accepts only this habit of mind. This limits Multi-cultural Education to the analytical. Analysis by itself is purely and divisively a narrowing activity which provides the advantage of a clear and precise focus upon a particle (particular). The tool of analysis is powerful. Power is its goal as well as its methodology. The microscope of the intellect becomes the technology. Ambiguity is removed.

For example, by analyzing the poet Emily Dickinson it would provide us with the illusion of having power over her. How does this happen? She must become a specimen--a VICTIM.

This of course is exactly what has happened to her through the dominating literary criticism of the deconstructionists. Once Emily is made into a victim she may be clearly understood. Her writing becomes clear to us. She is not mysterious and ambiguous. She is no longer a poet. She is our specimen victim to be placed under our intellectual microscope. Alas, she is no longer human.

Tragically under this pseudo scientific habit of mind objectivity has eliminated the need and possibility of the

spiritual. The anguish and joy of the human predicament has been

eliminated. The mysteries of the Divine as they flowered and bore

fruit in the spirit of Emily Dickinson have been eliminated and denied by the cynicism of objectivity. She is simply another victim in the "Quest for Certainty" as represented by the development and misuse of the social sciences when they scorn the "imagination" that Plato asserted is the goal of becoming human. Culture and education are inseparable.

The school reform being postulated now through "Multi-cultural Education" and the "New Compact for Learning" is deconstructing our American community in the same fashion of analysis utilized to deconstruct Emily Dickinson. Albert Shanker and Arthur Schlessinger, Jr., are among those who have sounded the alarm for the disastrous consequences that will surely follow. This warning

is furthered by David Hicks:

"One must ask, if our schools fail to believe in a common American culture and to teach it, what will become of us? This question would certainly perplex the ancient whose language, perhaps wisely, could not distinguish between education and culture. It is--as this book attests--the sacred duty of the school not only to believe in our common inheritance, but to teach the unfolding truth of that inheritance. Respect for truth--not the self-esteem of our students or our regrets about the past or our hopes for the future--must guide us in the quest to that common inheritance and in our definition of the curriculum."

(Norms And Nobility, p. ix)

Mr. Hicks deserves more attention than can be devoted here because he provides alternatives to the analytical and theoretical bureaucratic processes that generate curricular Frankensteins such as "Multi-cultural Education" and "Distance Learning". Cui'rently "Multi-cultural Education" is the main product of the munitions

factory. Will the technology of "Distance Learning" be next?

Jonah

Perhaps we need to relearn the story of Jonah and appreciate that we may now be in the belly of the same whale for the same reasons. Jonah wanted power and used the limitations of analysis to gain it. Fortunately the mysteries and ambiguities of truth prevailed. There were to be no victims. Forgiveness triumphed.

In the United States today a strong sense of justice prevails in our collective consciousness. It is ironic that this quest for justice tempts us to gain power by conveniently becoming a victim to a conveniently designated oppressor. If the cause is external to me, so is the solution. You, must provide the solution because you are the problem. If only my wife, dean or principal, my neighbor, my students, my God--would understand and appreciate me! The falaciousness of this proposition of course makes it

ridiculous.

Rather, I am here for a reason--to serve them--to serve you. This is why I am called a teacher. I am not proud to be a teacher; I am humbled by the opportunity.

But if we accept the posturing of "Multi-cultural Education" we are in the munitions factory (cogito ergo sum) or entering more inquisitions (credo et intelligam). The New York State Education Department and other proponents of "Multi-Cultural Education" have, like Jonah, Lun to Tarshish. We need to return to Niniveh and change our ways. No amount of analytical research or curricula are now necessary or desirable. This theoretical approach severs the vital link between knowing and doing. Either we accept the mysterious notion that we are all brothers and sisters in the Creator's image and be the family of man, or we reject the American dream and community. The dream (imagining) is our synthesis. The dominance of the analytical is the basis of cynicism. Its fruit is a curriculum that limits itself to behavioral objectives and measurement which lead to a focus on information processing. Crayolas are perfect for this.

"FSC-470-Standard Multi-cultural Crayons. Box of 8. $.64 each, 12 or more." Crayola has the solution to the problems of New York State schools and teachers, as defined by the Regents. Perhaps if we each buy a box and share with our favorite power broker, we can permit the teachers and school boards the opportunity to save millions of meeting hours and dollars that our children need and deserve.

"Straightway Dangerous"

If we accept being victims of the Cartesian culture of the Enlightenment, let us measure and describe our intelligence, material accumulation, physical parts and longevity: by the numbers please! Probably we should include our credit ratings and descriptions of houses, offices, titles, travels, and automobiles as well. Let us, however, introduce a little dissonance by playing Pete Seeger's recording of "Little Boxes" to make sure we get the picture. Then let us take out our crayolas and draw the accurate, objective, descriptive picture that the authorities in Albany need to sustain their egos and power. Perhaps "State Ed" or one of our major IBM type corporations (What is the difference?) will honor us with a grant to surpass the product that Crayola can provide!

"Multi-Cultural Education" as presented to us is neither multiple nor cultural. It is monolithic technological training and standardization. The powerful agencies attempting to impose it are the technolopists that Neil Postman has identified and appropriately labeled.

Descriptive analysis has replaced the prescriptive American Dream. Like Martin Luther King, could we stand for choice over chance? Could we dream as he did, impossible dreams for love and justice, the goal of classical education: virtue? This is prescriptive rather than Albany's and Crayolas descriptive habit of mind. It is difficult to even try to be virtuous. I fail every day. But is it not the vision or dream that we need? "Objectives" and "Compacts" do not appear to be adequate substitutes. Perhaps their power could be subordinated to that of the ideal?

Your soul is the same color as Martin Luther King's and Emily Dickinson's. What color is that? Color me that color, please. It hopefully will include the shades Martin utilized on the night before his death in Memphis:

"I don't know what my future is going to be. It does not really matter what happens to me because I have traveled to the top of the mountain. Like anyone else I would like to have a long life. Longevity has its place, but I am not concerned about it. I only want to do the will of God because He has allowed me to climb the mountain and from that mountain I have seen the promised land. I may not be with you going into that land, but I want you to know that we will get there. I am content. I

am not worried about anything nor do I fear anyone, for my eyes have Caen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION: NYSABE

The Sociological, Psychological And Pedagogical Implications Of Multicultural Education

Submitted By

Dolores M. Fernandez, Ph.D. Associate Professor Hunter College Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction

Overview

The recent impetus regarding multicultural education has stirred a debate not only in educational circles but in society as a whole. Those who oppose it argue that inclusion or infusion of multicultural content in various areas of the school curriculum, particularly in that of United States history, would be detrimental and misleading to future generations of Americans. They question the authenticity of contributions by certain ethnic groups or they question the importance of such contributions to the overall story of the making of this country.

Some simplify the process by determining that a focus on the language, foods, music, art forms, dances, dress and festivals of a group would satisfy the demands of the different groups who are asking for their group's inclusion into the curriculum of the schools. This simplistic approach to meeting the needs of inclusion of multicultural education into the overall curriculum of the schools is not only limiting in its scope of information and purpose, but it also tends to identify and focus on differences rather than similarities. But the real risk is that the possibility of cultural stereotyping, which is one of the things we are attempting to eliminate through this educational process, may be reinforced rather than eradicated.

In this article, the author outlines the complexity of this educational process by identifying a series of sociological, pedagogical and psychological building blocks that need to be addressed in order for the total restructuring of the school curriculum to occur. It is this author's contention that this fundamental and comprehensive structural change will form the solid foundation upon which a sound, long -term, redesigning of education will occur and the infusion of multicultural education will be successful.

Rationale For Multicultural Education

In 1914, in a work entitled, "Drift And Mastery", Walter Lippman wrote, "We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves."

That thought, expressed over 75 years ago, encapsulates the challenge behind the multicultural education initiatives across this country. This is a time when there should be no question about the necessity and value of a multicultural education. Educators have the responsibility of preparing youngsters to understand, appreciate and applaud diversity and in so doing, they will learn to define, strengthen, and foster the common bonds that all individuals share. The mission of a multicultural education program is to promote the development and implementation of a structured process designed to foster knowledge, understanding, and constructive intergroup relations among people of different cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds.

The recent impetus for multicultural education came from a growing awareness of the lack of equal educational opportunity for all children; not just for children who come from groups which society has categorized as "minority". Multicultural education is for all children and should be viewed from that perspective. At the heart of this movement is the belief that this approach can and should permeate every level of the educational process. Basically, all of education should be multicultural, and those involved in education must understand the complexity of the task at hand.

Every school system has the responsibility of providing its' students with equal educational opportunities. Inherent in these opportunities is the recognition that all students, regardless of their gender, social class, race, and culture, must be educated in an environment that allows diversity to enrich the educational process. In creating such an enriched cultural environment the sense of self-respect and self-worth of every member of the school community is increased and enhanced. The development and implementation of multicultural education as an integrated process is the educational foundation upon which all successful learning can be bui)t.

Educational restructuring for cultural diversity is not an issue that concerns only large urban schools. It should be undertaken by school systems throughout the nation regardless of size. In a country as culturally and linguistically diverse as ours, the need for intergroup knowledge, understanding, and respect is critical. A major priority for the schools must be to provide

the kind of education that prepares young people to appreciate the pluralistic nature of our nation and to view racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, sexual and linguistic diversity as a rich

resource. In this context students' experiences and prior knowledge must be recognized as an important base of learning. Concomitantly, the continued development of the linguistic, affective, and cognitive skills that enable a person to participate effectively in a democratic society must be developed.

Multicultural Education Defined

Hunter (1977) wrote that multicultural education values cultural pluralism and rejects the view that schools should seek to melt away cultural differences or merely tolerate cultural diversity; rather multicultural education accepts cultural diversity as a valuable resource that should be preserved and extended. It is a process which values cultural pluralism and rejects the perspective that educational institutions should seek to melt away cultural differences or merely tolerate cultural diversity. This educational process accepts cultural diversity as a valuable resource that should be preserved and extended. It is an all inclusive approach which also incorporates the notion of equity without regard to gender, age, disability, or sexual orientation.

This integrated, interdisciplinary process labeled multicultural education includes teachers, principals, assistant principals, district office staff, guidance, support personnel, central board staff, parents, children and the community at large. The interdisciplinary approach to teaching and infusing multicultural concepts into the curriculum requires a strong emphasis on the process of learning, learning styles, as well as content. Students learn history with all the significant contributions made to history by the many ethnic and cultural groups that make up the beautiful "mosaic" of our great country. Learning, higher-order thinking skills, respect and understanding for differences, no matter what those differences are, become internalized because the environment created in the classroom and in that school building encourages not only cooperative leakning but also intergroup respect, understanding and acceptance. Dr. Baker (1983) stated that if education is to become multicultural, the total environment must reflect this approach. No aspect can be overlooked because it is the entire educational setting in which a child functions that influences how the child thinks and behaves.

This structured process is designed to foster knowledge, understanding, and constructive, intergroup relations among people of many different cultures. Ideally, it encourages people to regard cultural differences as a source of learning and to respect diversity in the local, national, and international communities.

The Process For Change

Educating for cultural diversity is a teaching/learning process that capitalizes on the strengths of children. It recognizes and builds on the experiences, knowledge, and skills that differentiate children culturally and linguistically. This multicultural educational process also promotes the concept that linguistic diversity and cultural pluralism are sources of strength to be acknowledged and respected within our society.

It is generally agreed that the educational process involves the transmission of knowledge, skills and values that society rewards, and that these concepts are instilled during one's formative educational years in school. Consequently, the role of the educator is crucial, because if it is not performed appropriately, there will be grave consequences in terms of how their students behave as adults. According to Baker (1983), it is reasonable to assume that schools have a responsibility for facilitating this cransmission. The public school system of this country is charged with the responsibility of meeting the educational needs of all learners. However, given the statistics on drop-outs, especially those figures on minority populations, the system is failing and has been failing for some time; moreover, it will continue to fail unless significant changes are made. Therefore, in order to restructure for cultural diversity, it is necessary for a series of sociological, pedagogical and psychological building blocks be put into place in order to provide a firm foundation for future generations. (See Chart A)

Sociological Building Block Number One - Attitudinal Beliefs

Attitudinal beliefs of a society are ingrained from one generation to the next. Educators must acknowledge their own feelings about racism, sexism, ageism, religious bias, homophobias as prejudice and the stereotypes such biases create. Once and for all, the misconceptions that have tainted peoples actions must be left behind.

- .

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The language of a culture is a binding, very powerful force. Some terms in a language heal; others generate feelings which many of us would prefer to suppress. Racism and prejudice are words in the English language which make many feel very uncomfortable. Racism and prejudice are powerful, hurtful, harmful, and hateful

words. Racism is a disease and the prejudice it generates is

crippling to all societies. This country suffers and has suffered for many years and for many generations under the effects of both racism and prejudice. Racism and prejudice have affected each of us in different ways; some may have felt their sting because of ethnicity or race; some because of religious beliefs or because of a handicapping condition; some may have had to endure their ugly sting because of a preference for a different sexual orientation. Individuals may have had to endure them either actively as the recipients of the hurt they generate or some may have had to endure them passively because they have not reacted or moved to stop their spread.

These words are brought into the discussion of multicultural education because this pedagogical process has always been viewed as a "Black or African-American movement" in the field of education. Since it was and is viewed from this perspective, one must analyze critically whether racism and prejudice were the reasons why this educational process never received the scholarly respect that it deserved.

It is appropriate to also differentiate between racism, prejudice and stereotypes even though they may all occur concurrently. Stereotypes are rigid, overgeneralized beliefs about the attributes of ethnic group members. Racism and prejudice are attitudes and beliefs which are generated by personal experience, ignorance, misunderstandings and hatred. Aboud (1988) stated that two people may hold the same stereotype but, one be prejudiced and the other one not be prejudiced.

The field of education has had within its power the mechanisms to attack racism, prejudice and the stereotypes generated by these words in our language. The question arises whether as a discipline, the institutionalization of racism, prejudice and stereotypes has been facilitated by inactions in the area of curriculum and in the writing and selections of educational,texts. Educational institutions must examine the roles which such bodies played in the perpetuation of institutional racism and what this has meant to the stalemating of this educational process called multicultural education.

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Racism is multifaceted according to Jones (1954). He identified racism as individual, institutional and cultural and linked race prejudice to individual racism. He also stated that cultural racism is the intersection of cultural and racial differences where superiority on both factors is assumed. We are not born into this life racist. We do not inherit this trait from our parents; it is a learned behavior which is carefully taught. Jones (1954) stated that racism is a state of mind for some people, a set of values, and a constellation of behaviors and it is his belief that if racism has been perpetuated in this society, it is because the same states of mind, set of values, and constellation of behaviors have been handed down from generation to generation.

When institutions in this society set about establishing their rules, regulations and other significant criteria for operation and subsequently for their interrelations in this society, they may either intentionally. or unintentionally have designed these institutions so that they will have a negative effect upon a specific ethnic group of people. Again, these may be intentional or unintentional depending on what group is making the evaluation.

Jones defined institutional racism as those established laws, customs, and practices which systematically reflect and produce racial inequities in society. He stated that if racist consequences accrue to institutional laws, customs, or practices, the institution is racist whether or not the individuals maintaining those practices have racist intentions. Racism can be overt or covert with the latter being more difficult to confront. The same holds true for institutional racism. Racism and institutional racism can be intentional or unintentional; however, whether overt or covert, all forms of racism are intentional.

The educational institutions nurture a subliminal form of racism. Institutional racism was present overtly in the public schools when segregated schools existed. This ended, at least from an overt perspective, when the United States Supreme Court in 1954 acted and decided on Brown vs. Board of Education. The manifestations of institutional racism within schools today are subtler thali the blatant segregation practiced prior to the Brown decision. As it has become legally and socially unacceptable to support overt racism, the attitudes that were responsible for creating such situations have been driven underground. Despite superficial changes in behavior, underlying attitudes frequently remain the same. It is feasible to contend that a covert form of racism has existed, exists and will continue to exist if actions are not taken. Covert racism exists in school curriculums by the mere omissi.-n of information in the different curriculum areas taught to children. It is what can be labeled, "subliminal racism".

69 C

According to Dewey (1914), the general features of education

can be viewed as the process by which social groups maintain their

existence. However, the process is invalid unless changes in attitudes by those who implement and are responsible for educating

children occurs. If these attitudinal changes do not occur, this

results in children receiving double messages from the one institutional structure, school, which has a significant impact on their lives and how they perceive the world in which they live.

As the last decade of this century begins, it is still true that some educators may believe that some children are incapable of high academic performance due to their race, cultural background, handicapping condition, socio-economic status and/or gender. Thus

negative attitudes may show themselves in ways more subtle than segregation but no less destructive. In addition to attitudinal perceptions which are negative and which these children begin to understand and accordingly react to; there is also the subliminal message which is given. When educators accept and permit the omission of historical facts or the contributions of specific groups in various academic subjects, intentionally or unintentionally, there is a condoning of the subliminal racist message which such omissions generate. Omission of such data tells the child from the minority group that the contributions of their ancestors are not important enough to be included in the educational body of knowledge and as such that they are not important to society. Subliminal racist messages which impact significantly on the minority child's self-esteem and which covertly reinforce for the children who are members of the majority

group, the critiques, and stereotypes they may have heard either from their home or other environments with regard to such members of said minority groups. The seeds of racism and prejudice are reinforced by the very institution that has within its power the ability to plant the seeds to eradicate these social illnesses and

as Jones stated, racism is perpetuated because "the same states of

mind, set of values, and constellation of behaviors are handed down from one generation to the next" and the educational institution plays the most significant role in this scenario. Our own racial attitudes are a crucial ingredient in determining the success or

failure of the current multicultural education initiative in this

country. Many research studies have shown that there is a strong positive relationship between a child's perceptions of the teacher's feeling towards him/her and the child's perceptions of his/her own values (Davidson & Lang, (1960).

Kleinfeld (1979) in her study of Eskimo children found that schools and communities which have mutual respect for each other's values and which also exhibit openness and adaptability in their

interaction with one another enhance children's ability to function effectively as both members of an ethnic group and participants in American society at large. Kleinfeld's findings suggest that schools and communities which have a mutual respect for each other's values and which also exhibit openness and adaptability in their interaction with one another enhance children's ability to function effectively as both members of an ethnic group and participants in American society at large. (173)

Stereotypes are one of the end products of racism and prejudice. Aboud (1988) indicated that stereotypes justify the behavior that one group may have toward another group stereotypes rationalize a groups racist actions. According to Aboud, stereotypes do not necessarily cause prejudice; more often they justify prejudice, but in doing so they reinforce prejudice. It is difficult to separate one from the other. An individual may have a stereotyped view of a particular group which can result in prejudice toward that group. (5) Individuals may be prejudiced toward a group and as such conjure up a stereotype of that grc,up which will justify for the attitudes which they are feeling towards that group. Some of the stereotypes which exist with regard to particular groups may in some measure stem from the historical experiences and culture of the group or from the historical experiences and culture of the nations that had contact with the group; however, this is not always uhe case.

The institutionalization of multicultural education in schools will facilitate the elimination of "subliminal racism" in what and how children are taught. But a key factor in making this effort successful is for all individuals to seriously examine one's personal attitudinal belief systems. The enemy must be confronted, if this is not accomplished then it will not be possible to work openly and meaningfully towards a successful implementation for change in the schools and in the schools' curriculums.

Pedagogical Building Block Number Two - Curriculum

In education that is multicultural, the point of departure for learning and teaching is the child, and the curriculum is generated from what is culturally familiar. Within this context, curriculum is meant to encompass the articulated goals of instruction, the materials used to accomplish those goals, and the entire spectrum of planned school experience.

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Banks (1989) stated that "when students are able to view the

world from the perspectives of different groups, their views of

reality are broadened and they gain important insights into their

own behavior. We gain a better view of ourselves when we look at

ourselves from the perspectives of other cultures." A better

understanding of this country's history is gained when it is

interpreted from a multifaceted perspective.

The curriculum should be redesigned in all subject areas from pre-kindergarten through grade twelve, to reflect a multicultural

perspective. Essential learning outcomes by grade level that are

multicultural must be established and incorporated into all

subjects. These multicultural essential learning outcomes should be designed to help ensure that a variety of ethnic, racial, religious, cultural, and linguistic perspectives are included. The

curriculum should be organized around such themes and concepts as

culture/diversity, migration/immigration, struggle for equality,

and contributions. It should enable students to understand different ways of life and value systems. This expanded curriculum should deal with such topics as gender, class, age, ethnicity, race, linguistic background, religion, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, handicapping conditions, and giftedness.

For the purpose of this article, an analysis of curriculum from just a few areas is being presented as the complexity of such

a task would require volumes. American History traditionally begins with Columbus. In some texts there may be a brief mention

of the possibility of there being other Europeans who came before Columbus and some textbooks have come to detail how the Native American came to inhabit the North American continent and discuss the complexities of the many Native American nations. The variance

in the written text, and the inclusion or exclusion of certain historical data is influenced in many instances on the populations of the districts in which those texts are used and on the geographical area of the United States in which a text is to be

used. The relevancy of the contributions of all groups should be presented in a consistent manner whether the text is being used in the southwestern region of the country or in the northeastern region of the country. In researching texts from different parts

of the country, it was found that there was more emphasis on the Spanish expansion of the United States in the southwest while the emphasis on the English settlement was prevalent in the northeast and eastern part of this country. In these days when there are those who propose "national testing", shouldn't there be a national

American History text? Shouldn't the texts which depict the history of this country be consistent from coast to coast and from

border to border?

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The multicultural process to education presents the same event from different perspectives and encourages the discussions into the rationales behind each groups' action and then introduces the technique of cultural understanding and awareness rather than judgment by any group over another. But in order to follow this process, standardization of texts and information must occur so that if a teacher is teaching of the expansion of the United States, the content of the text used in New York City will correlate to a text used in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

In the presentation and discussion of Manifest Destiny to students, the same event in history must be interpreted as perceived by the Native American and the Mexican and what that same event meant to these two groups. The Mexican American will argue that it was not the Mexican who crossed the border of the United States but rather that it was the American who crossed the Mexican

border. If children are encouraged to think critically and to view situations from a multi-dimensional perspective, especially when mathematical and scientific skills and concepts are instilled then why are historical events not presented in a similar manner. It is

not in any way demeaning American History by having students analyze and discuss history from such a multidimensional perspective what is being encouraged is a process which encourages them to think critically and with more understanding for others.

This is not intended as a simplification of the complex task

of curriculum reconceptualization. These examples are merely examples of how this country's historical story could be presented from a multifaceted perspective. This is not to be considered as misinterpreting American History or writing it from an ethnic perspective but rather, it is presenting American History in a multidimensional way. In presenting history in such a way, it is

not compromised as some would argue but rather it is strengthened. A nation should not be intimidated by the mistakes made by it's founders but rather that a society has learned from those mistakes and as such has become stronger in the process.

Ps cholo ical Buildin Block Number Three - Cultural Awareness

The public schools must play an important role in helping young people develop a respect and an appreciation for their own cultures and for the cultures of others. Dr. Baker (1983) stated that, "the school's responsibility goes beyond academic achievement. The school must also assume the responsibility for helping students develop the skills necessary for learning to live successfully in a culturally pluralistic society."

Educators should learn about the cultures of their students. In a multicultural education program the intent is to build an awareness of one's own cultural heritage and an understanding that no one culture is intrinsically superior to another. The educational environment is conducive to acquiring analytical and communication skills that help one function effectively in

culturally diverse environments. Banks (1989) stated that, "during their socialization, student's develop multiple identifications." The school should help students develop three kinds of identifications that are of special concern to multiethnic education; an ethnic, a national, and a global identification. Not

only should we be concerned with the teaching of basic skills, but we must also learn how to teach them in ways that draw upon the students' cultural strengths. Good teachers adapt their teaching styles to the learning styles of the students and educators should be cognizant that learning styles vary from individual to individual. All individuals approach problems differently, ask different questions, and ask questions differently.

One's culture may influence an individual's learning style. It is the tea.her's responsibility to become knowledgeable about the student's cultural and ethnic backgrounds in order to accommodate a student's preferred learning style to the educator's

teaching style. Awareness of the potential effects of ethnicity on learning styles does not mean one can assume that a child of a particular ethnic group will behave in a particular way. No individual is representat:.ve of an entire cultural or ethnic group,

and no teacher should stereotype any student in that way. Culture and ethnicity may or may not have an impact on a child's learning.

Research conducted in Hawaii in the Kamehamecha Early Childhood Program--KEEP (Au, 1980; Au and Jordan, 1981; Jordan, 1978) indicated that successful educational programs for culturally diverse students are sensitive to the feedback patterns of the

students. These programs accept some of the language patterns of

the students but not all. For example, in KEEP children are permitted to overlap one another's answers and to receive help from

peers rather than the teacher. On the other hand, the teacher in

KEEP does not reinforce the Creolized forms of feedback used in the

children's homes. These programs attempt to reverse some of the children's feedback patterns so that children reared in a peer-affiliated milieu "become attentive" to the adult teacher. At

the same time, the teacher takes the time to observe and evaluate the children in his/her classroom without denigrating for the child his/her home language and culture. A sensitive, unbiased teacher evaluates and observes every student in the classroom without any preconceived expectations based on race, ethnicity,

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gender or other variables, and uses the information gained from such observations to provide the most appropriate learning experiences for that child. Learning environments need to be structured within a framework of respect for cultural and ethnic diversity. The responsibility always lies with the teacher. It is the teacher's responsibility to determine the preferred learning style for each student and as such plan that student's school experience accordingly after evaluating all the variables which may impact on that learning experience.

Psychological Building Block Number Four - Self-Esteem

As education is restructured for cultural diMersity, a very important component is one that addresses a child's self-esteem. All human beings need to know that they have a place in society. It is especially important for children to feel that they are important to the society in which they live.

In a multicultural educational system, all children must understand the importance of their relationship to society and to the world in which they lime. There is an abundance of research on the high correlation between a student's self-concept and achievement in school (Bandura, 1982; Clark, 1965; Cooley, 1967;

Kinch, 1972). Other variables that also have an effect on a student's self-concept and school achievement are the expectations of individuals whom that student determines to be significant in his or her life. Children will try to live up to the expectations that those significant individuals have for them. Ii expectations are high, the child will usually strive to reach those heights. If

they are low, the child will probably lack the will to prove them

wrong. It has also been documented that schools that strive for academic excellence, achieve academic excellence from their student

body. Baker (1985) stated that the schools' responsibility goes beyond academic achievement. The school must also assume the responsibility for helping students develop the skills necessary to

succeed in a culturally pluralistic society. Therefore, one of the major goals of any multicultural educational restructuring program should be the development of a positive self-concept for the students it serves. In order to achieve this goal, teachers must prepare activities to increase awareness and appreciation of every child's feelings and competencies. In a multicultural education program, each child's cultural, ethnic, and racial identity is incorporateC into activities that emphasize the similarities we share as well as how our differences enrich not only our classrooms

but our communities as well. In creating a learning environment that is designed to promote a positive self-concept among all

children, they are being empowered to believe in themselves and not to hesitate in setting their goals high.

Peda oical And Ps cholo ical Buildin Block Number Five - Lan a e

Language and culture are integral to each other. Language is the lens through which children see and make sense of their

world. It is the primary vehicle through which concepts are formed and refined, and through which cognition is enhanced. Respect for and compatibility with a child's aome language and traditions are integral components for a truly successful multicultural education

program. Making a program not only multicultural but also multilingual will bring linguistic enrichment to all children, but for those children who come from homes where English is not the native language, the incorporation of a child's native language into the curriculum will establish feelings of trust, belonging, and self-esteem which Erickson (1964) emphasized as crucial when we educate children.

Bilingualism or multilingualism is an important goal and component of any multicultural education program. Students who already have proficiency in a language other than English should be offered the educational programs which enhance the continued development of their native language as well as English; at the same time, native English speakers must develop proficiency in a language other than English. This design for the acquisition of more than one language will provide youngsters with the varied linguistic tools they will need to compete in a multicultural/ multilingual world.

The multicultural education program which is designed to enhance the child's identification with his or her own culture as well as the awareness, respect and understanding of other cultures and languages should act as a neutralizing force in assisting the teacher eradicate any racism, prejudice, and the resulting negative stereotypes which may have surfaced within the school environment.

Agents Of Change Through Multicultural Infusion

Educators must become agents of change (See Chart B) and enter into partnerships with others who are significant in achieving change; parents, community leaders, and administrators.

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Such agents of change are responsible for preparing youngsters to understand and appreciate diversity. It is the responsibility of the agents of change to strengthen the common bonds that are shared by all individuals in society.

In restructuring for cultural diversity, an infusion model rather than an additive model is proposed. "Additive programs" rely on special days, weeks or months for the recognition of particular groups: Black History, Hispanic History, Women's History, etc. Such programs convey a subliminal message that what is added on was not considered important enough to be included in

the overall curriculum. Chart C conceptualizes the full range of school practices that encourage infusion, diversity, mutual understanding and respect. Infusion is a process'which seeks to permeate multiculturalism into every aspect or variable which impact on the child; this includes the school and the community and those individuals from both of those environments who will come into contact and leave lasting impressions on a childs' understanding and respect for others. While there will still be special days, weeks or months in celebration of the contributions of specific groups, what this model proposes is that such contributions become an integral part of the daily curriculum. Infusion or inclusion gives a very positive message of value and importance.

This process of multicultural infusion implies many changes, and will provide all students in schools an equal opportunity to develop academic, vocational and citizenship skills. It is a process that must be modeled by administrators, teachers, parents and students as they move toward long and short term goals. According to Banks (1989), "multiethnic education is concerned with modifying the total school environment, so that students from all ethnic groups will experience equal educational opportunities. Educators must reform their total educational environments in order to implement multiethnic education." Multicultural education will succeed when it weaves its lessons throughout the fabric of our students daily education, when it prepares staff and parents to understand the value of cultural pluralism and the contributions each group has made to society.

Conclusion And Recommendations

The public school curriculum must be restructured. Administrative policies must be changed. Philosophies, procedures and more relevant and appropriate programs must be designed. Culturally diverse learning environments that are appropriate for public education in the 21st century must be created.

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In order to restructure for cultural diversity, multicultural concepts must be infused throughout the curriculum. This can be accomplished by making sure that some very important necessary aspects are in place:

1. a firm commitment to multicultural education

2. a district philosophy that is clearly multicultural

3. a district policy statement that institutionalizes multicultural educational initiatives

4. a well-organized, long-term, comprehensive plan

Such a program should emphasize staff development and training, parental involvement and training, and evaluation of curriculum, textbooks, and conflict resolution programs that have

an impact on the school environment. In order to meet individual training needs, each school within a district should have a coordinator who is responsible for the implementation and coordination of staff development and the utilization of technical assistance from the district offices with regard to the multicultural initiative.

Staff development and technical assistance should include but not he limited to the following:

1. conducting workshops dealing with the philosophy and history of multicultural education and cultural diversity.

2. establishing networks for the sharing of innovative ideas.

3. establishing a resource center containing printed and audio-visual materials.

Any district implementing such an initiative should be ready to make the fiscal commitment to support the development and implementation of multicultural education.

Public education is now being tested across the country. A measure of its' success will be how well students are prepared to understand themselves and work with others. A multicultural education program that stresses bilingualism and/or multilingualism is not only preparing its' children for a culturally diverse world but it is also preparing them for a linguistically diverse and

competitive world. Educators cannot deny their responsibility to restructure education for cultural diversity. It is within their power to alter the cycle of attitudinal beliefs by changing the states of mind, setting the values of cultural and linguist_J understanding and forming the positive constellation of behaviors so that what this generation passes down to the next generation is sensitivity and acceptance of cultural and linguistic differet Youngsters must develop self-esteem by recognizing and valuing their own heritage and the heritage of others. In addition, they must gain an understanding of those who are ethnically, racially, linguistically, and culturally different. A comprehensive multicultural education program will provide the learning environment that builds a students' self-esteem and challenges them to achieve their full potential while giving them the cognitive skills necessary for success.

The challenge is great but it is one that must be undertaken because it will give students the solid multicultural foundation they will need in order to lead with dignity and an understanding for all people.

REFERENCES

Aboud, F. Children And Preludice. New York: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1988.

Allport, G. W. The Nature Of Pre'udice. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1954.

Au, K. "Participation Structures In A Reading Lesson With Hawaiian Children." Anthropology And Education Quarterly, II, 1080, pp. 91-115.

Au, K. & Jordan, C. "Teaching Reading To Hawaiian Children: Finding A Culturally Appropriate Solution." In H. Trueba, P. Guthrie, and K. Au (Editors), Culture And The iilingual Classrooms: Studies In Classroom Ethnography. Nev York: Newbury House, 1981.

Baker, G. C. Planning And Organizing For Multicultural Instruction. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1983.

Baker, G. C. "The Role Of The School In .ansmitting The Culture Of All Leaders." Educational Leade_Jhip, 1978, November, pp. 134-138.

Banks, J. A. & Banks, C. A. McGee "Multicultural Education Issues And Perspectives." Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon, 1989.

"Approaches To Multicultural Curriculum Reform." Multicultural Leader, I, No. 2, 1988, Spring, pp. 1-3.

Multiethnic Education Theory And Practice (2nd edition). Newton, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon, 1988.

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Teaching Strategies For Ethnic Studies (5th edition). Newton, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon, 1991.

Clark, K. Dark Ghetto. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Cooley, C. "Looking Glass Self", in Jerome Manes and Bernard Meltzer, Editors, Symbolic Interaction, 2nd Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1967.

Davidson, H. H. & Lang, G. "Children's Perceptions Of Their Teachers' Feelings Toward Them Related To Self-perception, School Achievement, And Behavior." Journal of Experimental Education, 29, 1960, pp. 107-118.

Dewey, J. Democracy And Education. New York: MacMillan, 1916.

Erickson, E. "Eight Ages Of Man." In Childhood And Society (2nd edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1964.

Escobedo, T. H. Early Childhood Bilingual Education: A Hispanic Perspective. New York: Teachers College Press, 1983.

Fernandez, D. M. "Profile: New York City Public Schools." Multicultural Leader, 2, No. 4, 1989, Fall, pp. 11-14.

Hunter, W. A. Multicultural Education Through Competency Teacher Education (ed). Washington, D. C.: American Association For Colleges of Teacher Education, 1977.

Jones, J. M. Prejudice And Racism. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1972.

Jordan, C. "Teaching Learning Interactions And School Adaptations: The Hawaiian Case. In A Multi-disciplinary Approach To Research In Education: The Kamehamecha Early Education Program" (pp. 31-38) (Technical Report No. 181) Honolulu; Kamehamecha Schools/Bishop Estate, Center for Development of Early Education, 1978.

Kendall, F. E. Diversity In The Classroom. New York: Teachers

College Press, 1983.

Kinch, J. W. "A Formalized Theory Of Self-concept", in Jerome Manes and Bernard W. Meltzer, Editors, Symbolic Interaction. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972.

Kleinfeld, J. S. Eskimo School On The Andreafsky: A Study Of Effective Bicultural Education. New York: Praeger, 1972.

Lippman, W. "Drift And Mastery" (1914) in the Quotable Quotations Book. New York: New York: Lewis and Crowell, 1970, p. 257.

Mackey, W. F. & Anderson, T. Bilingualism In Early Childhood. Massachusetts: Newbury House, 1977.

Maslow, A. H. Motivation And Personality. New Yorl:. Harper & Row, 1954.

Ochoa, A. "Policy Issues On Multicultural Education: Dymstification Of Multicultural Education Social Contradiction Or Social Benefit." Paper presented at the National Association For Bilingual Education, Anaheim, California, 1980, April.

Ovando, C. J. & Collier, V. P. Bilingual And ESL Classrooms. New York: McGraw Hill, 1985,

LIBRARIAN - TEACHER PARTNERSHIPS:

Serving The English-As-A-Second-Language Students

Submitted By

Anne H. Filson

This paper was a presentation at a conference in Newburgh, New York, called "The Global Valley: Language, Culture, And The School Library Media Program", on October 24, 1991.

Introduction

I am both a librarian and a high school teacher of English-as- a-Second-Language. I have been a school librarian since 1974, but have been an ESL teacher less than a year, so one hat I wear is filled with experience, whereas the otlier, so far, has mostly only passion in it. I got into teaching ESL through my involvement in promoting multicultural studies in the Fairfax County, Virginia, Public Schools, where I have worked for ten years.

Last year I had the good fortune to be a full time graduate student at George Mason University. My colleagues in the ESL/Bilingual Education pro;ram were mostly practicing ESL teachers who were taking courses for recertification or were earning advanced degrees. Frequently, we discussed in class real-time problems they were dealing with. I found myself often asking, "Have you tried such-and-such series of books about families of different countries?" "Does your library have the filmstrip set on whatever?" "You know, there's a wonderful way for your students to use the Rainuree Science Encyclopedia to learn those reference skills." I found, to my surprise, that many of the teachers were not taking advantage of the wealth of materials in their libraries and the expertise of their school librarians.

So I did some research to try to discover how ESL students are or are not being served by their libraries; I asked questions of my colleagues, and eventually I came up with some ideas. They are what I will. share with you.

1 u

I will share Partnerships that librarians and teachers can form: partnerships that will enrich the experiences of your Limited English Proficient (LEP) students and will expand the vision of your own programs. First I will share about the librarian's role in this partnership. Then I will put on my other hat and write about the teacher's role. Finally I will share a few words about the essential foundation for any such partnership: collection development.

The Library Media Specialist's Role

The Library Media Specialist's role, as I see it, is to open the library resources to our teacher colleagues and to our students. I am assuming that librarians all agree on the goal that we will work to enable all students to attain independent library user status. After all, "information power" is the catchphrase of the 90's, and information power resides in library media centers. These immigrant students are here to stay. They bring the same hope and dynamism that the huge influx of immigrants brought at the turn of the century. We can meet the challenge of assisting them to become as excellent citizens of the United States as our own grandparents and great grandparents became.

Here are some things we can do:

ONE Post informational signs in the languages of the students, and have available vocabulary lists of library terms in those languages. Language should not be a barrier to using the library. What kind of signs? Signs that give circulation procedures, hours of operation, reminders of due dates. Signs that identify the parts of the collection. Signs that say, "Please ask the librarian for help!" Ask the students themselves, or their parents, or your school system support staff to help you make the signs.

TWO Establish a system for identifying books that are usable by the LEP students, or purchased especially for them. Whether to keep these books separate or to interfile them in the general collection has been a topic of debate. Librarians have interfiled them partly for the students' dignity and partly in the belief that the students will benefit in the long term by using the whole library. The books are often called "Quick Reads" and are color coded just as other collections such as "Historical Fiction" or "Mystery" are color coded. If your computerized circulation system permits it, you could keep circulation statistics on these special books in order to refine selection decisions.

THREE Encourage the LEP students to take ownership of the library by displaying classroom projects--their writings, art works, science projects. Train advanced level LEP students to be peer aides for the beginners, and allow total translations if necessary. The library focus is not English language learning, nor library access learning. Celebrate the holidays of all the countries represented in your school with colorful displays and music.

One really fabulous example of what a librarian did, to involve the language minority students in the library, is the Carrillo Heritage Center in a public elementary school in Tucson, Arizona. Four years ago, at the time of this story, sixty percent of the students were Hispanics or Native Americans. The librarian partnered with classroom teachers in a large reading/interviewing/ writing project that resulted in the publication of three student-written books of great vitality that are reminiscent of the Foxfire books. The books are Tales Told In Our Barrio, Celebration In Our Pueblo, Our Barrio, Celebrations In Our Pueblo, and Festival Of Foods. The Festival Of Foods includes information gathered in interviews with grandparents about desert plants and herbs used in folk medicines. Sales of the books helped pay for the project. In addition, the Carrillo Heritage Center includes books, audio-visual materials, historical photo collections, an art gallery, and a participatory Readers' Theatre program. This land of library media center obviously requires a librarian of energy and inspiration! It provides a model for partnership programs that can be developed between librarians and classroom teachers of ESL, art, photography, science, and drama.

FOUR Set up reading incentive programs in partnership with the classroom and reading teachers. Bend the usual rules by allowing books read in the students' own languages, visual format for reporting on books read, and way below grade level books. Also, if you run a book fair, insist that the company you deal with provides a good selection of books that the LEP students will buy with gusto and read with pleasure.

FIVE If you have an encyclopedia on CD-Rom, magazine files on databases, or microfiche readers, purchase printers for each piece of equipment so that the LEP students, reading in a foreign language, can print out what they need more time to read. Convince your local educational television station to give you a decoder to print closed captions that are on some television programs. The printed captions will compensate for lack of aural comprehension.

SIX Many students, not just LEP students, are "turned on" to

education by audio-visual media. Teach them how to operate the AV equipment, and make supplies available for them to produce their own filmstrips, and audio and video tapes. The

visual medium opens new avenues for expression and for demonstrating content learning. If you have an AV Club, involve the LEP students in the club. Helping to run the video camera at school concerts or football games, or even just delivering films to classrooms, will enable these students to feel a part of the school community.

SEVEN You can probably think of other Ideas. Here's one

more: If you as librarian are involved in inviting speakers to the school, invite people from the immigrant community to talk to any interested classes about cultural topics--dance, music, crafts--or about the immigrant experience, or history, or to tell folktales from their countries. When you do this, be sure parents of LEP students know about the event so that they can participate in a school program that they have a stake in. And on this theme, invite these parents to be volunteers in the library just as warmly as you invite the other parents. The initial awkwardness with language will quickly dissipate in the benefits you both will experience.

The Classroom Teacher's Role

Let's move on to the teacher's role in a partnership arrangement with the librarian. I think of our teacher role as that of advocate for our students. Librarians have incredibly fragmented jobs. They answer to teacher and student requests in

all curricular areas, to administrators' needs, to school system level goals for progress and networking; and they deal not only with nice, static books, but with increasingly complex and time consuming electronic equipment. So unless we wave our arms around a bit, our LEP stud.mts may not be a priority item for the librarian. Be an advocate.

Students need planned visits to the library for, essentially, two areas of learning. First, they need to learn how to use the resources available. These lessons include:

the overall organization of the library and how to use call numbers;

the location of books, magazines, newspapers, and media of interest and use to them;

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the use of the card catalog, computers, and any special technology;

the function and 7ses of reference materials;

the operation of video and other audio-visual equipment.

Second, students need planned visits to the library to establish habits of reading for pleasure and for learning.

Teachers can suggest and organize cooperative lessons plans with the librarian to teach the use of library resources. Be aware of the language used--simple syntax, simple and repetitive vocabulary, lots of visuals, analogies, hands-on direct experiences, and, when all else fails, laughter. The librarian may assume more aural competence than exists. We need to be explicit for the student about the focus of the lesson, and we need to write down in summary form what the librarian is teaching so it can all be reviewed back in the classroom.

Another part of the advocacy role is to remind the librarian about the backgrounds of students and their mental pictures, or lack of pictures, about a library. Know that many students come from countries where there were no libraries, or collections were outdated or censured, and the borrowing procedures discouraged any thought of taking a book home. Many libraries in third world countries have books only, no media. In many, the librarian is an authority figure, not to be approached.

In libraries, students may feel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of materials. They may feel daunted by the organizing patterns, the automated tools, and the complexity of indexes and catalogs. Library organization is built on alphabetizing using the English alphabet, which may still be a very foreign tool.

Now: we've brought the students into the library and introduced them to the resources. Libr..ries are not just places to read encyclopedias. We need to grapple with the necessity for encouraging habits of reading. Reseecch indicates that reading just reading--is the most efficient and effective way to acquire long-term retention of another language. Krashen, one of the most flamboyant second language acquisition researchers, insists,that "reading appears to be the best kind of comprehensible input for vocabulary development". A study by Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding found that "among all the ways children spend their time, reading books was the best predictor of several measures of reading achievement". Apparently vocabulary in context, grammar rules, and story structure are picked up by the eyes and sorted out in the brain when a person is genuinely engaged in the act of reading.

How do we convince students to read voluntarily? Teachers can invite the librarians into classrooms to do what they love to do: read stories to the students. Short stories, folktales, articles from magazines, parts of biographies, whatever. It's a good way for the students to meet the librarian on a friendly, non- authoritarian basis. The students experience, at first hand, the pleasures and benefits that reading brings.

What happens when the students then dash off to the library to partake of these pleasures? Are there reading materials for them? If not, you will agree that those students are denied equal access to the library. And that is a serious matter.

Collection Development

So we come to collection development. Its first topic is funding. Before despair sets in, let me tell you a true story that unfolded in Fairfax County.

One year one of the high schools got a new librarian. She looked around and found almost no books on the shelves that were appropriate for the population of LEP students who by then equalled one half of the school enrollment. One half of the students were shut out of the library resources. So she set out to find and apply for all the grants of money she could locate.

First, she realized that a rigorously constructed three-year development plan would give focus and legitimacy to requests for money. So she took stock of the collection and of the current and projected LEP student population. ESL teachers participated in this phase of the plan. Then she wrote proposals to the PTA, the school principal, the administrative area office, the central school system office, professional organizations, and even The Washington Post newspaper. Get ready to gasp. She found forty-five thousand dollars.

Then she had to spend it. No easy task. It was quite a struggle for a high school librarian to know what to buy for students reading on everything from a second grade level on up. The most important thing that happened was a paradigm shift in her thinking. One day she began to think of her school as School- instead of....High School. The library served all students, of every ability, not just people who happened to read above a seventh grade level. This was a very important mental shift, one that she recommends to us all.

Next, she invited several publishers' representatives to display their wares, and she invited the ESL classroom teachers to come to the display and select books. They said, 1000, I like that and that and that and that." She bought them all. She bought, for example, one hundred and fifty titles in the New True Books Series from Children's Press. She bought hundreds of nominally elementary school titles. Her goal was to buy books that were culturally and age appropriate and that were at every reading level in every content area.

I wish you could see the collection. It truly covers every aspect of the curriculum. There are books about the Bill of Rights, the AIDS and drug crisis, rainforests, gravity and magnetism, auto mechanics, theatre, and American history. Geography is examined from Landsat photos of planet Earth and from the individual lives of families in many countries. The texts, written at second grade level and up, are interesting and appropriate to the high school students. The collection is so filled with visually stunning books that even the Gifted and Talented, Advanced Placement, native English speaking seniors are excited. Everyone in the school has benefitted, not just the students she originally set out to serve.

The keys to this accomplishment, in a time of fiscal austerity, were a sound, multi-year plan and a vision of possibility founded on necessity.

Realistically, most of us don't have forty-five thousand dollars and cannot invite in publishers' reps to show all their offerings. How can you stretch your budget and where can you go to locate good materials?

Here's one example of stretching a budget : In Canada, in areas where bilingual immersion education requires that librarians purchase materials in both English and French, some libraries are attempting cooperative collection development and interlibrary loan between groups of schools. In Fairfax County it was suggested that this kind of networking be tried out between high schools and the elementary and intermediate feeder schools. Each library would have a replacement fund of, say, one to two hundred dollars to pay for borrowed materials that were lost. Public libraries already do interlibrary loans, and now that school libraries are computerizing their circulation systems, linking data bases is a logical next step. I know I am ignoring the personnel requirements, but we must have vision.

Now, where can you locate reliable materials to buy?

The review media, such as Booklist, Journal Of ' uth Services In Libraries, and School Library Journal, are the first sources. They periodically focus some reviews of books and media on certain immigrant groups. Organizations such as BETAC, The Consortium for Educational Equity, the Council on Interracial Books for Children, the Japanese American Curriculum Project (which deals with all Asia cultures, not just Japanese), the Network of Educators on Central America (in Washington, D.C.), and The Literacy Volunteers of New York City are also excellent sources. They all have annotated catalogs or lists of offerings.

You can also visit local elementary school libraries and ask the librarians for advice. Drop in the bookstores. Examine materials at vendors' displays at professional conferences, and collect bibliographies from conference presenters. In addition to the general book publishers, there are a dozen ESL publishers producing excellent materials.

Bring ESL teachers into the process. In Northern Virginia two years ago, the WATESOL Secondary Interest Group purchased more than a dozen series of Hi-Lo reading books, such as the Tom and Ricky, High Adventure, Everything's Different, Hopes and Dreams, and America Structural Readers series. ESL teachers from several school systems, including Fairfax County, had their students read the books and critique the series. Several groups of students critiqued each series. From this year-long Effort came a recommended list of Hi-Lo readers that was distributed to all the school librarians. This was a excellent example of partnership.

This leads us into the topic of what materials to purchase.

The downside of the Hi-Lo series is that, because they are published inexpensively to make them available in quantity, they are generally paperback books, quite small and flimsy, and difficult to keep track of in a library collection. Some librarians also question the quality of mass-produced series. But if we are going to offer the students lots of books they can read successfully--well, librarians and teachers need to get together and find acceptable compromises.

Finding suitable fiction remains a problem. For the reader to understand a story, a certain amount of speed in reading ha's to be built up, or else the reader's short-term memory cann-,t retain the essential information about what is going on. If a LEP student has to struggle with a great deal of new vocabulary that is not explained by the context, with flashbacks or foreshadowings in the storyline, with narrative and dialogue in difficult verb tenses, or with long, syntactically complex sentences, then the reading will fail.

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There are suitable fiction books to buy--and there are undoubtedly many on your library shelves now--it is just identifying them that proves difficult. Librarians and teachers must read a great deal and make lists of titles. Interestingly, an article in an autumn, 1991, issue of TESOL Journal reported a survey that showed that novels over seventy-five pages long are seen as too long to tackle by may LEP students.

Finding nonfiction an:1_ biographies is not a major problem. Look for new vocabulary to be defined in context or visually, for clear sentence structure, and for age appropriate illustrations. It is important that simplified factual information must remain accurate in its reporting, and that interpretations based on the reduced body of facts must not be skewed. Look for charts, tables, maps, timelines, and other visuals that convey large chunks of information outside of the sentence format. These serve the cognitive capabilities of the readers who are still struggling with English sentence structure.

Magazines are a inexpensive and lively medium that contain short, straightforward, engaging reading matter. Again, visit a good elementary school library. You'll fond Cobblestone, covering U.S. history, Calliope, covering world history, and Faces, covering cultural geography. All are superior monthly magazines at a third or fourth grade reading level, but of interest to any age person. As an example, the June 1990 Faces contained ten articles about ancient Mexico, ranging from architecture to mythology to popcorn.

Other magazines to look at are Current Science, Creative Kids, Plays, and Sports Illustrated For Kids.

Another purchase to consider is comic books. Why not? They are a medium rich in vocabulary that is defined by the illustrative context. The "Classic Comics" contain good tales. The "Asterix The Gaul" series will teach history (sometimes skewed but always amusing); and the "Tintin" series has achieved hardback respectability. ESL students may even decide to share comics from their home countries with their classmates. Now. that's reading!

Research shows that when students read in their own languages, their English reading is pulled along. The growth in underlying cognitive abilities in the students' native language facilitates the cognitive development that is so essential for tackling the academic studies. So buy some books in the students' languages, and, if possible, at different reading levels in those languages.

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Keep your feelers out for translations. For example, Permabound Books offers over eight hundred books translated into Spanish. Childrens Book Press publishes colorful bilingual picture books with illustrations done by native artists. Steck-Vaughn has a new, beautiful series of biographies of famous Hispanics; each page has the text in both English and Spanish. The Japanese- American Curriculum Project offers many books in several Asian languages.

Also, subscribe to foreign language magazines like Mas, a Spanish language magazine of fashion and culture, and Tu, a Spanish Seventeen, and Canh Tan, a Vietnamese language biweekly magazine. Look for newspapers published in the immigrant communities. Encourage the students to contribute magazines and newspapers their families have bought. The library can offer a refuge where kids can read and relax without the barriers of language. When the library serves the whole school population, this becomes a vision of the multicultural integration of students that is possible throughout the school.

Buy also books on cassette tape so that students can enjoy books that are beyond their comfort level of reading. Ask the Reading Teacher in your school to find excellent student readers to record books, and then package the tapes and books for check-out.

Establish a really excellent collection of study prints, photographs, and maps. Even consider realia: rocks and bones, historical memorabilia, art and other cultural objects. Building up such a collection could be the focus of a proposal for funds.

And finally, don't forget your professional collection. The ESL teachers can probably suggest books and journals that would keep them abreast of advances in the ESL/Bilingual Education field, and that would inform the general education teachers about methods of dealing with limited English proficiency students in their classrooms.

No one person can accomplish all these ideas, especially if the ideas are seen as tasks added on to already full schedules. But we can help each other, and ourselves and best of all, our students by forming partnerships. Partnerships to brainstorm ideas, define needs, and decide on priorities. Partnerships to set goals, to form action plans, and to share the work. Librarians and teachers. What better partners could there be?

REFERENCES

Allen, Adela A. Library Services For Hispanic Children: A Guide For Public And School Libraries. Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 1987.

Cribbet-Bell, Carol. "School library's Heritage Center: A Program You Can Make Your Own." American Libraries, 19, pp. 136-137, 1988.

Koehler, Boyd & Swanson, Kathryn. "ESL Students And Bibliographic Instruction: Learning Yet Another Language." Research Strategies, 6, pp. 148-160, 1988.

MacDonald, Gina & Sarkodie-Mensah, Elizabeth. "ESL Students And American Libraries." College And Research Libraries, 49, pp. 425-431, 1988.

Shanefield, Libby. "ESOL At The Library: How To Set Up A Collection." TESOL Newsletter, 10, pp. 1-2, 1986.

The Importance Of The Teacher To Multiculturalism

Submitted By

Maryann Fallek

If the whole truth is not told, is it lying? It could be. If

they did not know the whole truth, are they lying? If they forgot the whole truth, are they lying? If the people know the whole truth and chose to omit particular parts, are they lying? If they argue that the omitted parts are irrelevant or unnecessary, are

they lying? If they argue that in the interests of time, space or learning objectives such parts are best omitted, are they lying? If their arguments are valid, are they lying? If their arguments are invalid, are they lying? Maybe not. But regardless something very bad may well be happening.

However, in an effort to be positive, I make certain assumptions. First I assume that historians and teachers know and do what is necessary to remember their content--the whole truth. Second, I assume that many omissions result from careful and well-reasoned deliberation as to inherent value of the information and its relative importance in terms of time, space and learning objectives. Even so, it remains possible that some omissions may be inappropriate and some may even reflect conscious or unconscious bias.

Obviously, conscious or unconscious bias by omission is bad. However, omissions for whatever reason can have serious negative consequences. Some argue that because women and minorities have been oppressed that their individual achievements and contributions pale when compared to their counterparts. However, it is the very oppression that makes it wrong and unfair to compare or rank their respective achievements and contributions with those of men or non- minorities. Additionally, the fact that achievements and contributions were made despite the oppression underline the special skills and talents possessed by these women and minorities. It is important not only for women and minorities but all of us to learn about these gifted women and minorities. The message is loud and clear--women and minorities are not inherently inferior. The message is one of hope. This is why we teachers must be committed to knowing, remembering and telling the whole truth. We teachers must be inclusive. We teachers have a responsibility to help all young people develop a positive view of self, others and the world. That will not occur if women and minorities are excluded from what children are taught. It is equally important that what children are taught about women and minorities is the truth.

lIi

The curriculum must include women and minorities and that information should be the truth. It is inappropriate and unnecessary for the truth to be sacrificed in the inclusion effort. It is an outrage for any social studies teacher to be indifferent to the truth. It is unacceptable for a teacher to agree with attorney William Kunstler that "it is irrelevant whether Tawana Brawley had actually been abducted and raped by a group of white men...because the story had 'contextual validity' and was compatible with 'situated knowledge'." In other words, Kunstler and many others believe that because what happened to Brawley could have happened and would have accurately reflected existing societal raci2m, it matters not that it never actually happened. Such indifference to truth does not belong in a classroom.

However, it is not inappropriate for the State, as New York has done, to require inclusion of women and minorities and to include among its educational goals an understanding and appreciation for cultural diversity within the national identity. Nevertheless, reality requires choices. There is a lot to know and our children are ignorant. The children lack knowledge, skills and understanding. There often are pressures of time. space and the learning objectives. Choices as to what specifically to teach and learn must be made. A critical question sometimes arises as to who decides what specifically is taught and learned. Who should decide? The teacher? The central administration? The building administration? The student? The parents? The community? The business people? The board of education? The state education department? The state government? The federal government?

The teacher should decide. The teacher is responsible. The teacher is held accountable. The teacher is the expert. The teacher has the credentials and experience. The teacher is not indifferent to the truth. The teacher knows the objectives and goals for each and all the students. The teacher has no vested interest. The teacher has no hidden agenda. Certainly the teacher should be aware of and sensitive to the needs and concerns of the various stakeholders in education. Honest and open dialogue should occur. But in the end the teacher should decide and be held accountable for the decisions.

1. MacDonald, Heather. "The Sobol Report: Multiculturalism Triumphant". The New Critiorion (January 1992) Volume 10, No. 5: p. 13.

Maryann Fallek (PPSTA President) Social Studies Teacher (24 years) Poughkeepsie High School Forbus and May Streets Poughkeepsie, New York 12601 (914) 451-4850 Ext. 207

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NATIONAL SCIENCE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION

Goa e Is Never Good Or Bad But Thinkin Makes It So (Joos 1962)

Submitted By

Frances E. Blake

Introduction

Ms. Frances E. Blake is a second-year student in Education, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. Ms. Blake's interests lie in multilingual/multicultural education. (I received her permission to submit this article to NYSCEA for publication in the NYSCEA 1992 monograph: Multi-Culturalism: Perspectives, Challenges, Problems.)

Blake emphasizes in her article that the word choices you use may cause the listener to prematurely draw certain conclusions or judgements about you. Teachers need to come to grips with personal biases, and expand their cross-cultural awareness before they are able to accept and effectively work with culturally diverse students. Blake points out the need for teachers to be more concerned about the substance, or the underlying erroneous assumptions about the intelligence of the speaker if the form of

what is said does not meet the norms established for Standard English. Careful attention to the substance of Blake's assertions will enable teachers to work more effectively with students whose language usage varies greatly from what we hold to be correct and indicative of intelligence. Blake suggests as teachers "...we listen to what our students are saying instead of putting them in boxes labeled by our biases and limited knowledge about the nature of language."

Napoleon Adebola Bryant, Jr., ED.D. Director-Multicultural Science Education NSTA; Professor of Education Xavier University Cincinnati, Ohio

Usage Is Never Good Or Bad But Thinking Makes It So

Submitted By

Frances E. Blake

Do you watch your language in certain company? What word selections do you make when speaking to your boss, the president of an important organization, an acquaintance, a good friend, a lover, or a child? Do you fear your word choices may lead your listener to certain conclusions or judgements about you? Most people do--at least people who are conscious of their language use. To find out, the next time you're chatting with your best friend and your boss passes by, pay close attention to any shifts in tone, word choice, form or idiomatic expressions. What is your thinking behind the choices you make? What- are your assumptions about language use? What's the real meaning of "ain't"?

Last summer I participated in a grant workshop on cultural awareness and bias. We were told we had to become aware of our own biases before we could see other cultures in an objective light. The faculty members involved in the workshop all taught at a small, private liberal arts college in rural Ohio. We ali agreed that we needed to expand our cross-cultural awareness. I noticed an open mindedness and a willingness to examine oneself among my colleagues in the sessions on the Japanese and Arab culture, but when we began the section on African-American culture, I sensed some hostility in the room. This issue was definitely closer to home. English, my colleagues argued, was not a second language for African-Americans; they should learn how to speak English "right"!

One day, Sheila, a recent graduate from the small, liberal arts college, returned to share with the faculty her experience as a Black on a predominantly White campus. As she walked into the seminar room full of her former professors, she appeared stiff and uncomfortable yet determined to speak about her frustrations. She told the story of having to learn about slavery from an insensitive White male who used the Black students in the class as examples during class discussions. When she left, the other faculty members reasoned that what Sheila had to say was "inappropriate." In fact, they asserted, proof of her inappropriateness and lack of credibility was the language the used. "For example," they explained, "she pronounced the word 'ask' wrong; she said, 'aks'

instead of 'ask.'" I couldn't quite follow their logic, but

somehow they decided that she should know how to pronounce the word

"ask" by her senior year in college, and since she hadn't even learned that, she probably didn't pay attention to learn much else.

My colleagues reasoning seemed to be, "If the form isn't

appropriate, then neither is the message." As a linguist, I

realized the absurdity of their logic. From a sociolinguistic perspective, such thinking is illogical. On the other hand, I

thought, other factors could also contribute to the situation. For

instance, not only was the professor White, but he was male; or

should I say, not coly was Sheila Black, but she was female. Did

these "educators" really intend to discredit Sheila just because of the "mis"pronunciation of a word? I wondered if they would have

said this if they knew that the original pronunciation of the word

"ask" was "aks" centuries ago? But even if they didn't know the

derivation of the word, didn't they know that the pronunciation of

an utterance has little or nothing to do with its underlying

logic--or does it? This incident is a good example of biases about

language appropriateness and correctness. My colleagues didn't view Sheila as an individual who learned Standard English in school

but spoke another dialect of English at home. They expected her to

use Standard English as well as they did, coming from their White,

middle-class neighborhoods.

What about you? The last time you heard someone use the

expressions "ain't," "she don't," or "he nice," what did you assume about the intelligence of the speaker? Interesting assumption, but it's not based on the facts about language. Why else would there

be a difference between answering the phone, "this is she" and

"this is her"? When would you say, "I'm doin' good" and "I'm doing

well"? Probably we're all afraid to use "incorrect" forms in

certain company, the expressions that are "socially stigmatized" or

the ones that we couldn't say in front of grown ups when we were

kids. The fact is that, socially, the type of language we use tells a story about our social class, education, origin and

ethnicity. And, unfortunately, it leads people to reach certain conclusions about our credibility or aptitude for logical thinking.

So, language needs to be appropriately used within a given

speech community. Standard English forms are not inherently better because of the sounds of the words; they're better because our thinking makes them so. Any judgements as to the superiority or inferiority of language use reflect social biases, not conclusions based on any facts about the nature of language systems. Here are

some common facts about language. You can then, come up with your own conclusions in view of these facts:

1) All languages and varieties of language are equally logical (Wolfram 1970)

To illustrate, the expression, "I ain't got no time for nothin'" might be considered "illogical" by speakers of Standard English who don't want to allow for the use of double negatives. However, many other languages, such as French, Spanish and even German, employ double and triple negatives for emphasis. Further, in English literature of the 13th and 14th centuries, double and triple negatives were viewed as having "one underlying negative which is then 'spread' through the rest of the sentence" .(Wolfram & Fasold, 1974). With this in mind, the reasoning which considers the above utterance "illogical," is itself rejected as illogical by linguists.

2) All languages are self-contained systems which are perfectly adequate as communicative systems (Wolfram 1970)

Teachers who have heard the expression, "he nice," have concluded that the student in question was "cognitively deficient" becaus.. of the absence of the copula, the linking verb. These teachers also ignored facts from other languages, such as Russian, where there is no copula realization in the present tense. From the point of view of the linguist, it is again illogical to assume retarded language or cognition simply because this expression does not occur, or "should" not occur according to Standard English. In other words, the suggestion that diverse language forms have cognitive limitations is to ignore facts about language systems.

3) Language is learned in the context of the community (Wolfram 1970)

Children hear language and use language; they don't care about grammar. They learn the language that surrounds them in their every day activities, especially the language of the home. Even babies can assign meaning to language. Also, children are excellent imitators. The question is, "What exactly are they imitating?" Here's an example that illustrates my point. A teacher in an elementary school asked the students to write 'something. One student raised his hand and said, "Ain't got no pencil." The teacher, irritated at his "inappropriate" language

use, began a series of conjugations: "I don't have any pencils; you don't have a pencil; they don't have pencils ..." When the teacher finished her monologue, the child, perplexed, responded, "Ain't nobody got no pencils?" Like any other child, this child "heard" only the truth value of the utterance (Brown 1987:31). He had learned language in the context of a different community and the language which was "meaningful" to him was the language of the community of which he was a member. Standard English is not natural, everyday language in these cases. In fact, in cases such as this one, Standard English is much more like a second language.

4) Any normal child has the equipment to deal with the logical operations underlying language (Chomsky 1968)

As of yet, no factual evidence leads to the logical conclusion that different dialects impede the fundamental processes of human

thought. Nevertheless, some educators insist that these forms indicate "illogical thought," "underdeveloped language," "lazy minds." When teachers view children in this way, they might, in fact, be creating this reality for the children by discouraging them from "gifted" extra-curricular activities, by making judgements about the intelligence of their students entirely on the

basis of language usage.

This last assertion has been defied by many English teachers.

5) The surface form of expression has nothing to do with its underlying logic (Chomsky 1968)

Educators always ask about "ain't" and "got": "aren't they 'lazy' or 'bad' English?" Are we simply going to stand by and allow the English language to degenerate?" Clearly, I would agree that we need to teach these students Standard English because it is a prerequisite for Euccess in our society. This is the reason why, even with all this iisformation, I continue to "watch my tongue" in order to "fit in" with certain crowds and use language appropriate to my surroundings. What I am emphasizing here is that teachers take advantage of what linguists know about the nature of language

so that they can maintain a nonbiased attitude in the classroom. Then they will be less likely to conclude that students who speak nonstandard forms of English have a speech pathology or, worse yet,

102

low intelligence. These teachers will also be more skeptical of the results of standardized tests since such tests presume mastery of Standard English.

What linguists request is not that we alter Standard English, but rather that we change our attitudes and beliefs to establish a basic respect for all language varieties as linguistic codes within a social context. Each code, therefore, has independent linguistic capacity which is neither "better" nor "worse" than other codes. Instead, linguists focus on the underlying reason for communication: to convey messages. The most crucial contribution that linguists can make to education concerns teacher attitudes.

Let's listen to what our students are saying instead of putting them in bcxes labeled by our biases and limited knowledge about the nature of language. Sheila will never be heard by my fellow teachers because of their long-held beliefs about language and their fixed ideas about language correctness and appropriateness. The content of her message, however, reflected her frustration that the White male history professor continues, probably to this day, to teach racist views in his college level courses and, while doing this, treats his students of color with insensitivity when discussing their heritage.

REFERENCES

Brown, H.D. Principles Of Language Learning And Teaching. Second

Edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. 1987.

Chomsky, N. Interview With S. Hanshire in The Listener, May 1968.

Dillard, J. L. (Ed.). Perspectives On American English. New

York: Mouton Publishers, 1980.

Dillard, J. L. Toward A Social History Of American English. New

York: Mouton Publishers, 1985.

Fromkin, V. & Rodman, R. An Introduction To, Language. Fourth

Edition. Chicago, Illinois: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974.

Heath, S.B. "Standard English: Biography Of A Symbol." Standards And Dialects In English. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Winthrop,

1980.

Joos, M. "The Five Clocks." International Journal Of American Linguistics, 28 (2), p. 14, 1962.

Josephson, Irving. "Linguistics And Discovery Teaching." College English, 30 (5), 1969.

Knott, Glards P. "Developing Reading Potential In Black Remedial High School Freshmen," Reading Improvement, Winter, 1979, pp. 262-269.

Lavov, W. "The Logic Of Nonstandard English." Monograph Series On Languages And Linguistics: 20th Annual Round Table On Linguistics And The Teaching Of Standard English To Speakers Of Other Languages Or Dialects, No. 22, 1969.

Schmit, R. W. & McCreary, C. F. "Standard And Super-Standard English: Recognition And Use Of Prescriptive Rules By Native And Non-native Speakers." TESOL Quarterly, 11 (4), 1977.

Shuy, R. W. "Variability And The Public Image Of Language." TESOL Quarterly, 15 (3), pp 315-326, 1981.

Wolfram, W. "Sociolinguistic Premises And The Nature Of Nonstandard Dialects." The Speech Teacher, Sept. 1970; pp. 177-184.

Wolfram, W. Sociolinguistic Aspects Of Assimilation. Arlington, Virginia: Center For Applied Linguistics, 1973.

Wolfram, W. & Fasold, R. W. The Study Of Social Dialects In American English. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1974.

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figOCEIvole

Section II: NYSCEA CONSTITUENT ASSOCIATIONS AND AFFILIATES