Trade Journal Articles

1. David Brandwein & Christopher Donoghue: A Multicultural Grassroots Effort to Reduce Ethnic & Racial Social Distance among Middle School Students
2. Nichole A. Guillory: Moving toward a Community of Resistance through Autobiographical Inquiry: Creating Disruptive Spaces in a Multicultural Education Course
3. Darius Prier: Combating stereotypes in educationhttp://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/10/15/08prier.h34.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mrss

Writing for Education Week, Darius Prier, assistant professor at the Pittsburgh Duquesne University School of Education, broaches the critical questions for how ethnically holistic education can enter the everyday of teacher consciousness: “How do we weigh hip-hop youth culture in relation to the punishment of young people’s identity? Where do we, as educators, learn the stereotypes, prejudices, and biases toward students that need to be unlearned? What proactive, practical strategies might we as educators take in writing new scripts for how we think about African-American males, different from what the mainstream media tell us?”[1] In his research experience interviewing and studying young African-American males, Prier has found that misconceptions and stereotypes fed to educators regarding black youth culture impede understanding of their own students beyond their cultural veneers. Closing the distance between perception and unique reality is critical to prevent damaging feelings of isolation in already marginalized students.

David Brandwein and Christopher Donaghue make the case in their study “A Multicultural Grassroots Effort to Reduce Ethnic & Racial Social Distance among Middle School Students” that elementary and middle schools are positioned to make the most impact on preventing and intervening in ethnic prejudice, which foments in children an early age if they are exposed to prejudiced thinking. Though, lamentably, “[V]erifiable success stories in multicultural education are few in number,”[2] both Prier and Brandwein et al. offer concrete methods for improving educator-student relations and, more importantly, for giving visibility to students’ own valid and multifaceted cultural realities. Brandwein et al.’s study focuses on a Multicultural Mosaic used by a small private school, whose effectiveness is notable for decreasing social distance based on race and ethnicity—especially for reducing ethnic prejudice by white students, given that 63% of the students studied were white. A school-wide supportive approach in which multicultural learning was incorporated into lesson plans, involved multicultural parents and their expertise, creating a several-year rotation cycle for in-depth focuses on different cultures, and the implementation of a steering committee specifically devoted to the propagation and perpetuation of a lens of multicultural education. Using both the Brandwein Universal-Diverse Orientation measurement and Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale-Short Form (M-GUDS-S) developed by Fuertes, Miville, Mohr, Sedlacek to test students before and after they were involved in the Multicultural Mosaic program, racial distance decreased in realistically significant ways at the studied : “The level of comfort with difference increased from a mean of 24.65 (sd=4.03) to 24.88 (sd=3.59) and the total M-GUDS score increased from a mean of 68.51 (sd=9.82) to 69.88 (sd=8.74).” While the study acknowledges its own limitations at a mostly white private school, hoping that this kind of model can be applied to public schools, as well, engaging not just students but their community members in the development of curricula and multi-ethnic lessons within and outside of the classroom.

Similarly, Prier’s strong and serious suggestions for educators address the residential segregation often faced by educators who wish to bridge cultural gaps with their students. To combat distorted racial stereotypes so easily adopted at first glance and interaction with students bringing marginalized social capital to the table of education, Prier says that educators need to critically explore race, masculinity, and media literacy with their students, to enable their students to teach educators and other adults veiled by misperception. Prier has invited socially aware hip-hop artists and community activists into the classroom to both validate and expand the cultural discourse that his students occupy. As Prier insists on making the effort to attend and engage in community events that teachers might not otherwise be aware of, and to use urban student cultures as a way to broaden classic curricula for pre-service teachers, as well, another teacher educator, Nicole A. Guillory at the Bagwell College of Education in Kennesaw State University, Georgia, insists unequivocally on challenging teachers in training to refigure their deficit mentalities about urban students: “I am not the mammy figure they need in a teacher educator, someone whose pedagogy is nonthreatening and allows them to hold on to their unexamined assumptions no matter how problematic they might be for their future students.”[3] Of her 63 examined participants, 61 were white—plus one African American woman and one Haitian man—and gaining sometimes their first exposure to deconstructing the superficial buzzword-packed vision of their teaching preparation.

Changing future teachers’ perceptions of underserved or underrepresented students also inevitably and necessarily involves, according to Guillory, autobiographical changes in their self-perceptions regarding identity as connected to race and place. As a professor of education in a Southern school—in one of the most conservative districts of the country with strong Confederate and creationist standpoints—with mostly white, racially-secluded students, using autobiographical assignments and work in teacher preparation offers a space for the pre-service teachers to identify and confront their racial privilege in ways they have never been asked to do so before. Using bell hooks’ theories of talking back and making homeplaces sites of resistance, Guillory creates a course in which teachers in training must confront they way their culture—their assumed and familiar referential “norm”—fits into multicultural teaching. Fieldwork as tutors for English Learners in public schools in Atlanta offered Guillory’s pre-service teachers the opportunity to overlap their own self-critical lens with the realities of the places of their future students.

[1] Prier, Darius D. “Where Do Biases Start? A Challenge to Educators.” Education Week, Commentary. 13 Oct. 2014. Web.

[2] Brandwein, David, and Christopher Donaghue. “A Multicultural Grassroots Effort to Reduce Ethnic & Racial Social Distance among Middle School Students.” Multicultural Education. Fall 2012.

[3] Guillory, Nicole A. “Moving toward a Community of Resistance through Autobiographical Inquiry Creating Disruptive Spaces in a Multicultural Education Course.” Multicultural Education. Spring 2012.