This volume collects Christine Sleeter's core work focusing on critical multicultural education, situating culture and identity within an analysis of power and racism. Multicultural education arose in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and, in its inception, shared with that movement a focus on eradicating both interpersonal and systemic racism. The problem this book takes up is that, over time, many people have come to understand and enact multicultural education in ways that evade grappling directly with racism. This dilution has happened for several reasons, including White teachers' rearticulations of multicultural education as "getting along" or learning to be colorblind and neoliberal reforms that have reduced it to a celebration of cultural diversity while maintaining silence about racism. This volume includes ten of Sleeter's articles that explicitly locate multicultural education within critical understandings of race, racism, and colonialism, offering both theoretical and practical discussions of what that means. Book Features:Brings together, in one volume, the full arc of work by a leading scholar in multicultural education.Offers a unique focus on why multicultural education needs to be critical and what it means to be critical.Directly connects theory with practice by offering vignettes of practice following theoretical or conceptual discussions.Examines how the power of Whiteness and racial capitalism has forestalled progressive education and social change.Spans multicultural education from its inception in the 1970s through the current attacks on Critical Race Theory, showing how it has been targeted, ignored, or misused.
Christine E. Sleeter is professor emerita in the College of Education at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her books include Critical Race Theory and Its Critics, Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools, and Un-Standardizing Curriculum.
ContentsSeries Foreword James A. Banks ixIntroduction 1Pivot Points in My Biographical Journey 1Why Critical? 5Part I: Defining Critical Multicultural Education1. Critical Multiculturalism: An Introduction 13With Stephen MayThe Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism 15Critical Responses to Multiculturalism 19Critical Multiculturalism 222. Critical Pedagogy, Critical Race Theory, and Antiracist Education: Implications for Multicultural Education 25With Dolores Delgado BernalCritical Pedagogy and Multicultural Education 27Critical Race Theory and Multicultural Education 33AntiRacist Education 41Discussion 463. Capitalism and Caste 50Roots of Caste and Capitalism 50Racial Capitalism 52Marxism as a Western European Totalizing Theory 53School Reform, Curriculum, and Public Consciousness 55Conclusion 57Part II: Critical Multicultural Education and School Reform4. Challenging Racism and Colonialism Through Ethnic Studies 61Minoritized Youth and Historical Amnesia 62What Happened to Multicultural Education? 63Curriculum: Still Through White Points of View 65Ethnic Studies as a Decolonial Project 67Ethnic Studies Praxis 70Implications 735. Critical Race Theory as the New Villain 75With Francesca A. LópezThe Bastardization of Critical Race Theory 75Efforts to Make Curriculum More Inclusive 77Reactions to Equitable Education Endeavors 79What the Critics Are Saying 81How We Respond to the Critics 83CRT as the Villain 85Conclusion 896. Diversity, Social Justice, and Resistance to Disempowerment 90Diversity, Social Justice, and School Reform Under Neoliberalism 91Curriculum That Disempowers 93Curriculum That Empowers 95Confronting the Education Reform Paradigm 977. Equity and Race-Visible Urban School Reform 98The Problem With Color-Blind Solutions to Urban School Challenges 99Race-Visible Pedagogy in the Classroom 101Race-Visible Teachers 105Race and Class Visible Equity in Access 107Conclusion 1098. Teaching for Social Justice in Multicultural Classrooms 111Four Hallmarks of Teaching for Social Justice in Multicultural Classrooms 111Framework for Designing Classroom Teaching 114Conclusion 120Part III: Personalizing Critical Multicultural Education9. Situating Oneself in a Critical Multicultural History 123Family History as an Entrée into History 124Benefiting From Colonization 125Implications 12710. Multicultural Curriculum and Critical Family History 129Approaches to Family History Research 129Theoretical Lenses for Critical Family History 130Tools for Researching Critical Family History 133Teaching Multicultural Curriculum With Critical Family History 136Conclusion 139References 141Index 167About the Author 178
“Sleeter effortlessly weaves together analyses of personal narratives, anecdotes, history, case studies, and political events and social movements to argue for a reanimated critical multicultural education theory and practice; and in doing so, Sleeter shows just how deep the roots of the multicultural education tree lie.”—Teachers College Record