Goals of a Multicultural Education Thrust

FOR STUDENTS:

• Promote problem-based learning so as to enhance the nature of science and mathematics understanding.
• To empower students through identification of positive aspects of their own culture.
• To aid students in understanding how cultures can shape or limit thinking, science, and technology.
• To assist students in the recognition of positive aspects of different cultures, so as to reduce cultural isolation.
• To provide students with analytical tools that precludes stereotypical thinking and enhances cross-cultural awareness and communication.
• Increase student awareness of how negative aspects of society can hamper life choices.

 

FOR TEACHERS:

• Acquire knowledge about the histories and cultures of diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and language groups within the nation and within their schools
• Examine effects of social privilege, economic oppression, and institutional racism, which contribute to reproduction of societal inequities and injustices, lower expectations, underachievement, and institutional discrimination.
• Enhance teacher awareness of attitudes, beliefs, and values towards their own ethnicity/culture and how that influences their teaching and science in general.
• Help teachers identify positive aspects of students’ culture, so as to reduce cultural isolation.
• Develop a critical pedagogy that questions whose beliefs, values, and interests get to be the foundation; that challenges the hidden curriculum that socializes students into the dominant culture
• Work toward a culturally relevant pedagogy that moves from a monoculture perspective (white, middle class, Christian, European heritage) to a multicultural perspective of education that respects all cultures and legitimizes all voices in a classroom.
• Develop the skills needed to translate culturally relevant pedagogy into effective instruction - construct and design relevant cultural metaphors and multicultural representations to help bridge the gap between what students know/appreciate and what they are to learn content-wise (problem-based learning).
• Utilize forms of transformative and social activist approaches.
• Provide time for teachers to analyze their beliefs and attitudes about the nature/origin of societal inequities, then share their changing teaching practices, so as to improve their efforts.
• Promote problem-based learning so as to enhance the teaching of the nature of science and mathematics.

Embrace as many cultures as you can and enjoy the differences.