Teaching for Social Justice in Multicultural Classrooms

Abstract

Drawing on my work in the U.S., I briefly discuss four related hallmarks of teaching for social justice in diverse classrooms, supported by research on their impact on students. They include explicitly recognizing and working with students' culture as a basis for learning, teaching key concepts in the curriculum through content and examples drawn from more than one cultural group, involving students in structured dialoguing across their differences about social justice issues, and preparation young people to act collaboratively on social justice issues. I then illustrate what teaching for social justice actually looks like in classrooms through vignettes of three classroom teachers. The research and vignettes are based in the U.S., which is a limitation for an Asian audience. I conclude by urging readers to develop classroom-based elaborations and case examples of multicultural education teaching in their own contexts.

Fostering Teachers’ Multicultural Competence for Chinese Ethnic Minority Education: An Analysis of Teacher Education Programmes, Syllabuses and Teacher Educator Perceptions

“…Finally, the current ideology of educational equality, which derives from a recognition of the uneven socioeconomic development in China, focuses on distributive equality of teacher quality and quantity. Teaching for social justice which is extensively discussed in multicultural education scholarship requires teachers to recognise culture as foundation of learning for facilitate diverse students’ academic performance, to teach key concepts through different cultural groups’ contents and examples, to guide equal inter-ethnic communication between students from different cultural groups for eliminating discrimination ( Sleeter, 2013 ; Cho, 2017 ; Darling-Hammond, 2017 ). However, it should be noted here that a prerequisite of social justice is distributive equality in resources and rights ( Miller, 1997 ).…”

Embracing to Creating Curriculum: Levels of Engagement Among Student Teachers

“…They gather background information and cultural resources to blend this knowledge into the school curriculum. Students learn best when their teachers can relate and teach authentic, meaningful, intellectually engaging, and culturally relevant lessons (Brown, 2002; Cochran-Smith, 2004; Delpit, 1995; Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2001, 2014; Noddings, 1992; Sleeter, 1996).…”

A framework for literacy education in multicultural, multilingual, and multiliterate classrooms

“…Teachers and students can engage in instructional activities, such as charting a visual display or holding "book talks" that place texts from different eras, cultures, language traditions, and genres side by side. A literature unit on social or political writing would support that form of social justice writing (see Sleeter, 2012, for rich description of teaching for social justice in multicultural classrooms). In a recursive manner, such academic work further promotes teachers' and students' ideological becoming and internalized stances (Ball, 2009) on how diverse texts can support students' academic and cultural development.…”