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: Brings together, in one volume, the full arc of work by a leading scholar in multicultural education. Offers a unique focus on why multicultural education needs to be critical and what it means to be critical. Directly connects theory with practice by offering vignettes of practice following theoretical or conceptual discussions. Examines how the power of Whiteness and racial capitalism has forestalled progressive education and social change. Spans multicultural education from its inception in the 1970s through the current attacks on Critical Race Theory, showing how it has been targeted, ignored, or misused.
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.
Contents Series Foreword James A. Banks ?ix Introduction ?1 Pivot Points in My Biographical Journey ?1 Why Critical? ?5 Part I: Defining Critical Multicultural Education 1. ?Critical Multiculturalism: An Introduction ?13 With Stephen May The Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism ?15 Critical Responses to Multiculturalism ?19 Critical Multiculturalism ?22 2. ?Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Antiracist Education: Implications for Multicultural Education ?25 With Dolores Delgado Bernal Critical Pedagogy and Multicultural Education ?27 Critical Race Theory and Multicultural Education ?33 AntiRacist Education ?41 Discussion ?46 3. ?Capitalism and Caste ?50 Roots of Caste and Capitalism ?50 Racial Capitalism ?52 Marxism as a Western European Totalizing Theory ?53 School Reform, Curriculum, and Public Consciousness ?55 Conclusion ?57 Part II: Critical Multicultural Education and School Reform 4. ?Challenging Racism and Colonialism Through Ethnic Studies ?61 Minoritized Youth and Historical Amnesia ?62 What Happened to Multicultural Education? ?63 Curriculum: Still Through White Points of View ?65 Ethnic Studies as a Decolonial Project ?67 Ethnic Studies Praxis ?70 Implications ?73 5. ?Critical Race Theory as the New Villain ?75 With Francesca A. Lopez The Bastardization of Critical Race Theory ?75 Efforts to Make Curriculum More Inclusive ?77 Reactions to Equitable Education Endeavors ?79 What the Critics Are Saying ?81 How We Respond to the Critics ?83 CRT as the Villain ?85 Conclusion ?89 6. ?Diversity, Social Justice, and Resistance to Disempowerment ?90 Diversity, Social Justice, and School Reform Under Neoliberalism ?91 Curriculum That Disempowers ?93 Curriculum That Empowers ?95 Confronting the Education Reform Paradigm ?97 7. ?Equity and Race-Visible Urban School Reform ?98 The Problem With Color-Blind Solutions to Urban School Challenges ?99 Race-Visible Pedagogy in the Classroom ?101 Race-Visible Teachers ?105 Race and Class Visible Equity in Access ?107 Conclusion ?109 8. ?Teaching for Social Justice in Multicultural Classrooms ?111 Four Hallmarks of Teaching for Social Justice in Multicultural Classrooms ?111 Framework for Designing Classroom Teaching ?114 Conclusion ?120 Part III: Personalizing Critical Multicultural Education 9. ?Situating Oneself in a Critical Multicultural History ?123 Family History as an Entree into History ?124 Benefiting From Colonization ?125 Implications ?127 10. ?Multicultural Curriculum and Critical Family History ?129 Approaches to Family History Research ?129 Theoretical Lenses for Critical Family History ?130 Tools for Researching Critical Family History ?133 Teaching Multicultural Curriculum With Critical Family History ?136 Conclusion ?139 References ?141 Index ?167 About the Author ?178
"Sleeter effortlessly weaves together analyses of personal narratives, anecdotes, history, case studies, and political events and social movements to argue for a reanimated critical multicultural education theory and practice; and in doing so, Sleeter shows just how deep the roots of the multicultural education tree lie." -Teachers College Record
