Multicultural education

Multicultural educational strategies were developed to assist teachers trying to solve the diverse problems imposed on their classrooms by rapidly changing demographics and, at times, crisis-filled society.

Today, teachers in most urban areas face students from a variety of social classes and cultural and language groups. Often, European American children are a minority group. In many rural areas, such as the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, the central valleys of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Georgia, and Mississippi, and the Appalachian region, the majority of students do not share the middle-class, European American culture common to most college-educated teachers. Teachers find large numbers of English as a Second Langague students in their classes from Iowa to Virginia, and from Utah to Nevada.

Multicultural educators seek to substantially reform schools to give these diverse students an equal chance in school, in the job market, and in contributing to building healthy communities. Banks (2008), one of the leaders in the field of multicultural education, describes these dimensions of multicultural education; 1) content integration, (2) the knowledge construction process, (3) prejudice reduction, (4) an equity pedagogy, and (5) an empowering school culture and social structure.