Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of U.S. Curriculum

Within curriculum studies, a “master narrative” has developed into a canon that is predominantly White, male, and associated with institutions of higher education. This canon has systematically neglected communities of color, all of which were engaged in their own critical conversations about the type of education that would best benefit their children. Building upon earlier work that reviewed curriculum texts, this book serves as a much-needed correction to the glaring gaps in U.S. curriculum history. Chapters focus on the curriculum discourses of African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos during what has been construed as the “founding” period of curriculum studies, reclaiming their historical legacy and recovering the multicultural history of educational foundations in the United States.

Book Features:

• Challenges the historical foundations of curriculum studies in the United States during the turn of and early decades of the 20th century.
• Illuminates the curriculum conversations, struggles, and contentions of communities of color.
• Highlights curriculum historically as a site at the intersection of colonization, White supremacy, and Americanization in the United States.
• Brings marginalized voices from the community into the conversation around curriculum, typically dominated by university voices.

Wayne Au is an associate professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell and an editor for Rethinking Schools. Anthony L. Brown is an associate professor of curriculum and instruction in social studies education at the University of Texas at Austin. Dolores Calderón is an associate professor of youth, society, and justice at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University.

“(The authors) challenge the whitewashed master narrative of curriculum history with a text that foregrounds communities of color—namely Indigenous, Chinese American, Japanese American, Mexican American, and African American—as essential to the production of curriculum in U.S. education.”

—Democracy and Education

"This is such a timely and necessary volume. Discourses around 'multicultural education' often fail to engage the long and significant curriculum history and hard fought efforts that made the field viable, necessary, and intellectually powerful. This book should be on the shelf of every curriculum scholar."
—Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner Family Distinguished Chair of Urban Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison

"In this groundbreaking book, Au, Brown, and Calderón set the record straight—or, more properly, they excavate the record from extinction—concerning the role of communities of color in resisting and co-opting White supremacist notions of curriculum while at the same time creating life-giving curricular options for their people. Fascinating, innovative, and rigorously researched, Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of U.S. Curriculum will change how we think of the field of curriculum."
—Sonia Nieto, professor emerita, Language, Literacy, and Culture College of Education, University of Massachusetts

“As detailed by the authors of this book, it becomes deeply important to make sense of how our different peoples have produced and disseminated knowledges in strikingly different material and cultural-ideological contexts and with decidedly and differently imposed relationships to land, to the nation-state, to White people, to our own bodies.”
—From the afterword by Michael J. Dumas, University of California, Berkeley

"The need for diverse multicultural understandings of curriculum is perceptively illuminated by authors who courageously reveal ignored, suppressed, marginalized, and neglected insights from people of color. This exemplary book provides a turning point, it is sure to be a landmark contribution to curriculum studies for years ahead."
—William H. Schubert, professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago

2017 AESA Critics’ Choice Book Award