CURRICULUM ISSUE

Curriculum Issue

Curriculum Issue

Introduction

Multiculturalism is a philosophical stance that advocates for equal opportunity for individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. As such, multiculturalism affirms the rights of individuals to the pursuit of personal meaning, equality, social justice, and democratic participation, regardless of cultural background or composite cultural makeup. Based upon the great foundational documents of U.S. democratic government, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, multiculturalism strives to extend the rights portrayed in these documents to all cultural groups in the United States (Banks, 2007). Multiculturalism is sometimes viewed as an approach to studying culture in an effort to analyze the effects of various microcultural characteristics upon access to the normalized rights of middle-class individuals in the United States. This paper identify and describe a contemporary curriculum issue of Multiculturalism. It discusses historical and current political, social, and economic conditions that are influencing Multiculturalism.

Discussion

As such, multiculturalism has implications for leadership, policy, curriculum, and instruction in the formal educational settings of prekindergarten, elementary, secondary schools, and of colleges and universities. While diversity-related scholarship has traditionally focused upon the cultural characteristics of class, race, and ethnicity, present-day scholarship includes the additional microcultures of gender, sexual orientation, age, ability and exceptionality, religion, language, and geography, among others (Gay, 2006). The preponderance of current research, however, involves the microcultures of race, ethnicity, gender, language, and class, or some combination of these factors in support of multiculturalism as a foundational element in multicultural education as a field of study.

Content Integration

The first dimension, content integration, focuses upon the inclusion of content from a variety of cultures into the major concepts and theories of a discipline. This dimension also deals with the identification of components that should be a part of the standard curriculum of a discipline. Content integration research also includes scholarship about appropriate instructional methodology and arguments outlining where particular informational aspects of a discipline should be taught (Gibson, 2008).

Knowledge Construction Process

The knowledge construction process is a second dimension of multicultural education and focuses upon the degree to which teachers, in schools, colleges, and universities, assist students in analyzing how the underlying cultural assumptions, frameworks, and perspectives of a particular discipline contain biases that dictate how knowledge is constructed. This dimension challenges the tenets of empirical research and promotes analyzing the predominant assumptions of all disciplines through lenses of accepted social, cultural, and power positions. Promoting the stance that all writers are influenced by cultural assumptions that must be identified, this dimension teaches that all students should identify the biases of researchers and scholars of a field and make their own meaning out of the presentation of knowledge (Ginwright, 2008). Telling stories about personal experience is one means of making meaning.

Scholars in this area generally advocate for two approaches to curriculum reform, transformational and social action. Transforming curriculum encourages students to view curriculum content from the point of view of various ethnic and cultural groups. Social action encourages student understanding of how to engage in action for ...