Publication Date: July 26, 2024
Pages: 192
Series: Multicultural Education Series
This volume collects Christine Sleeter’s core work focusing on critical multicultural education, situating culture and identity within an analysis of power and racism. Multicultural education arose in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and, in its inception, shared with that movement a focus on eradicating both interpersonal and systemic racism. The problem this book takes up is that, over time, many people have come to understand and enact multicultural education in ways that evade grappling directly with racism. This dilution has happened for several reasons, including White teachers’ rearticulations of multicultural education as “getting along” or learning to be colorblind and neoliberal reforms that have reduced it to a celebration of cultural diversity while maintaining silence about racism. This volume includes ten of Sleeter’s articles that explicitly locate multicultural education within critical understandings of race, racism, and colonialism, offering both theoretical and practical discussions of what that means.
Book Features:
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, and Un-Standardizing Curriculum.
“A book for practitioners, researchers, theorists, and policymakers across disciplines, time, place, space, race, and worldview, Sleeter has produced a deeply researched, contextualized, and nuanced account of multicultural education.”
—H. Richard Milner IV, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Education, Vanderbilt University, author of The Race Card
“Christine Sleeter has been a brilliant and courageous thought leader in critical multicultural education (CME) for over two decades, breaking with white solidarity long before it was acceptable in mainstream discourse. I consider her a foundational mentor whose work has had a profound influence on how I understand and articulate the dynamics of systemic racism and the role of white people in achieving racial justice. This beautiful and intersectional volume traces the trajectory of CME from its inception to the present time, delineating the resistance it has faced and speaking back to current forms of backlash with clarity and nuance. Critical Multicultural Education needs to be required reading in every school of education.”
—Robin DiAngelo, author of Is Everyone Really Equal?, White Fragility, and Nice Racism
“As conservatives across the country launch all-out attacks against any form of diversity in schools, Christine Sleeter’s Critical Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice is an important intervention on the side of racial justice in education.”
—Wayne Au, editor, Rethinking Schools, and professor, UW Bothell School of Educational Studies
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