Christine E. Sleeter is professor emerita in the College of Education at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her books include Critical Race Theory and Its Critics, Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools, Un-Standardizing Curriculum, and most recently, Critical Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice.
I began teaching in the early 1970s in Seattle. At the time, Seattle Public Schools was undergoing voluntary desegregation, which among other things involved workshops for teachers, around 95% or more of whom were white. The workshops showed teachers how to add content about non-white groups to their curriculum, involve their students in talking about and appreciating their ethnic and gender diversity, and treat their students of color as intellectually capable. I attended a couple of workshops and was probably no more receptive than the other white teachers. But I got to know some of the Ethnic Cultural Heritage Program staff, who put on the workshops and wrote curriculum resources for teachers, and through personal relationships, I began to learn.
“Since its beginning, multicultural education has grappled with how to get people like me—white educators—to understand how racism manifests itself in schools.”
I first encountered the term “multicultural education” when, in the context of a Masters degree course, I read “Encouraging Multicultural Education” by the ASCD Multicultural Commission, published in Educational Leadership in 1977. I was so excited by what I read! The article reinforced the work of Seattle’s Ethnic Cultural Heritage Program. So, I decided to shift my plans for doctoral work from special education to multicultural education, a field that was just coming into being.
In short, I’ve been with the field since its beginning. Although initially I was a green (and white) novice, I learned as much as I could from not only the ECHP staff in Seattle, but also from Carl Grant, Geneva Gay, James Banks, Donna Gollnick, Carlos Cortes and others. Over time, multicultural education became an integral part of who I am.
The Problem
“She was cherry-picking what she heard to fit what she already did, then declaring herself to be ‘doing’ multicultural education.”
My book Critical Multicultural Education takes up the problem of the gradual watering down of what multicultural education is about.
Multicultural education arose from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, with its direct challenge to the racism that pervades systems and beliefs within the U.S. While teaching in Seattle, I began to develop awareness of how racism impacts on students of color and their families in the context of school desegregation. I saw in multicultural education bold attempts to re-envision schooling in a racially diverse society. At the time, because I arrived in Seattle racially illiterate, I began to augment my Eurocentric education by reading histories and literatures by and about African Americans, American Indians, Chicano/as, and Asian Americans—ethnic studies books that center race as the core problem that needs to be addressed. This informal re-education gradually gave depth to my growing understanding of multicultural education.
Since its beginning, the field has grappled with how to get people like me—white educators, the great majority of our teaching force—to understand how racism manifests itself in schools, then become agents of school and societal transformation. That ambitious task has presented a conundrum for the past fifty-plus years because in order to get white educators to listen and engage, multiculturalists very often frame antiracist work in terms that are palatable to white people (i.e., without focusing on racism or any other oppressive power relationship). As a result, what I and many others in multicultural education saw happening over time was a filtering of what multicultural education can mean through white ways of seeing the world.
I recall an incident years ago, while gathering data on a multicultural education professional development program I had helped to design. During an interview with a white elementary teacher who had voluntarily signed up for the program, I asked what she was getting out of the program and bringing back into her classroom. She said she realized she was already doing what the workshop facilitators suggested. Her classroom was colorfully decorated—something one of the facilitators had said would ignite children’s attention. I realized that she was cherry-picking what she heard to fit what she already did, then declaring herself to be “doing” multicultural education, even though my observations led me to a different conclusion. Because of such filtering and watering down, many educators don’t connect multicultural education with challenging racism.
Why Critical?
By about 2000, I became frustrated with the superficial understanding so many white inservice and preservice teachers seemed to have about multicultural education. I, along with others, began to add the term “critical” to my work as a way of drawing attention to the field’s grounding in an analysis of and commitment to challenging racism––grounding that had seemed obvious in the 1970s.
“Multicultural education theory continued to develop, deepen, and expand, while practice at the school level seemed to stall.”
As Geneva Gay observed in her 1995 article “Bridging Multicultural Theory and Practice,” multicultural education theory continued to develop, deepen, and expand, while practice at the school level seemed to stall. I felt that dichotomy between theory and practice keenly as I delved into history and theory from critical traditions, and particularly from critical ethnic studies, all the while trying to get preservice and inservice teachers to grapple more deeply with racism as it intersects with other forms of oppression. For example, Rodolfo Acuña’s book Occupied America (1972) completely reframed my understanding of the U.S. Southwest through the lens of colonization. Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992) opened me to viewing racism as permanent but still demanding of resistance. Manning Marable’s The Crisis of Color and Democracy (1992) helped me to see how racism is intertwined with capitalism.
In Critical Multicultural Education, I attempt to connect theory with critical practice, showing how each needs the other in order for substantive change to happen. Several chapters contain vignettes of rich school and classroom antiracist, critical practice.
Where We Are Now
“Critical multicultural education is a movement that attacks cannot kill.”
Currently, multicultural education is under attack. This is not new. Multicultural education has always been under attack in some quarters. For example, school desegregation was accompanied by textbook wars, most famously in Kanawha County, West Virginia in the mid-1970s. During the early 1990s, a national campaign orchestrated by conservative think tanks sought to eliminate multicultural education and Afrocentrism.
Today’s attacks are new mainly in the extent to which they have expanded through social media, and the extent to which efforts to eliminate multicultural education have played out in a coordinated way through state legislatures.
But all over the country, teachers, parents and youth, particularly youth of color, are fighting back. I have been heartened by the activism of teachers and youth to make ethnic studies a part of the school curriculum. I have also been heartened by the work many ethnic studies teachers are doing in their classrooms. Critical multicultural education is a movement that attacks cannot kill.