Multicultural Education Chapter Summary

Chapter one’s main idea was to provide a basic definition of multicultural education and provide the reader with insight on how the multicultural education movement has developed and progressed throughout the years.
Banks and Banks define multicultural education as an idea stating that all students, regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity, language, culture, social class, religion, exceptionality, or sexual orientation, should experience the same educational equality in school. I completely agree with the statement in this chapter that several schools’ characteristics provide one or two main groups a better chance to succeed in school than students from other groups or minorities.
The Multicultural Education reform movement was designed to bring about a transformation of schools in order to provide an equal chance at success for all genders, cultures, languages, and ethnic groups. The movement required a variety of changes of the schools, including school policies, instructional materials, attitudes, assessment methods, and teaching styles. It is important that all major components of schools be changed in order to create a multicultural environment rather than only changing one or two components and expecting such a major change.

Multicultural education also focuses on the demand that students from all backgrounds acquire the democratic skills and knowledge necessary to become active citizens of society. Like most goals and processes, multicultural education is a continuing process that in reality may never be fully achieved.
Another important topic of chapter one includes microcultures in the United States.

The United States has a dominant culture, also referred to as a macroculture, as well as several microcultures. Microcultures are specialized subgroups that are specially marked with their own languages, rule expectations, and characteristics. Such microcultures share common core values, but such core values can be and often are interpreted differently within each culture. There is a strong belief in individualism in our nation’s dominating macroculture that is not as strongly endorsed by other microcultures and can be viewed as rather estranged. Individualism rests on the belief that an individual’s hard work is morally good and laziness is

sinful.
Too often Native Americans, Latinos, and African Americans experience problems due to the school’s highly individualistic learning environments and biased teaching styles. By continuing to strive for a multicultural education and implementing cooperative teaching strategies to enhance students’ learning opportunities, such problems may begin to dwindle.
During the last four years of college I have had several opportunities to observe, co-teach, student-teach, and sub in multiple school districts and in various cities throughout Illinois and Iowa. Growing up and graduating from a small town school with not as much diversity as some of the larger cities and schools, I was very surprised when given the chance to learn about educational diversity on a deeper level and observe how different schools are operating and working to transform their schools to support multicultural education.
While it takes time, a lot of focus and hard work, I have noticed that a majority of the schools I have been to and taught in lack change in all of the major components of the school in order to transform and support educational equality, but rather have chosen to focus on one or two main variables that they believe can help to transform the school. So many schools want to be considered multicultural, but may not have all of the necessary information, funding, or tools to successfully implement such education.