Trampling the sacred: multicultural education as pedagogical racism

Abstract

The following paper is a critical examination involving the misuse of sacred cultural tools and practices in the name of multicultural education. Native American practices are identified to illustrate how such inappropriate usages promote pedagogical racism. The misuse continues the hegemonic distribution of social capital. Through the irresponsible portrayal of complex and sophisticated cultures, American education continues to perpetuate pedagogical violence against children who are already socially and educationally disenfranchised. Using Freire, Giroux, Deloria, and Grande, this paper will identify strategies of communication and education necessary to eliminate pedagogical racism and begin to reverse the violence against children.The spiral of violence begins as a spiral of distorted communication that leads through the spiral of uncontrolled reciprocal mistrust, to the breakdown of communication. If violence thus begins with a distortion in communication, after it has erupted it is possible to know what has gone wrong and what needs to be repaired. -Habermas (Borradori 2003, 35) In this statement, Jurgen Habermas was referring to the events of 9/11, but the violence to which he refers can be experienced at all levels in our society. The "distortion of communication" begins with the first step into a classroom. The violence that occurred on this day has highlighted the need for cultural understanding and dialog in order to possibly avoid similar future events. For those who teach in areas of higher education, it also brought to light the need to increase the focus on investigating non-Western knowledge systems. The unfortunate academic result of 9/11 is that much of the effort has remained focused on Arab and Muslim cultures. While these certainly deserve exploration, there are cultures beyond these that are experiencing generations of violence that continue to be ignored. The creation of multicultural pedagogical programs has been put in place largely because of the events of the 1960s and 1970s. These early programs focused largely on black and African-American interaction with white and European American communities. The limited focus of multicultural programs seems to be a result of media and political agendas. Such myopic approaches relegate other racial and ethnic groups to the *

For Our Children: A Study And Critical Discussion Of The Influences On American Indian And Alaska Native Education Policy

“…Rather than seeking to explain inequities between this population and others, a task several scholars have attempted to tackle (Knowles, 2012;Lovern, 2012;Mackey, 2012), this study examines change agents. Through the lens of indigenous education experts, we seek to determine the baseline influential studies, organizations, information sources, and people for American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) education policy.…”