NIUSI

part of the Education Reform Networks

Engagement

• Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. Third Edition
  This book examines the meaning, necessity for, and benefits of multicultural education for students of all backgrounds, providing a conceptual framework and suggestions for implementing multicultural education in today's classrooms. It presents case studies, in the words of students from a variety of backgrounds, about home, school, and community experiences and how they influence school achievement.
• Shared Control: Community Voices in Multicultural Service Learning
  A field experience involving community service learning was linked to multicultural education for preservice teachers. The authors found that community service learning motivated, engaged, and gratified community leaders, tapping into local community associations.
• Ethics in Qualitative Research: Multicultural Feminist Activist Research
  The author explores a self-reflexive effort to engage teachers, administrators, and community leaders in qualitative inquiry within a multicultural feminist framework. In graduate courses emphasizing feminist pedagogy and research in urban settings, students conducted research projects designed to transform existing social inequities in their lived experiences.
• Overrepresentation of bilingual and poor children in special education classes: A continuing problem.
  The authors investigated factors affecting the overrepresentation of poor and bilingual children in special education classes. They discussed the lack of educator knowledge in language learning and association of bilingualism with disability, poor educational policy in assessing of bilingual children and influence of bilingualism on special education classroom.
• Breaking Racial Stereotypes by Reconstructing Multicultural Education
  Racial stereotypes and discrimination have destroyed many bright futures by limiting the possibilities of people of color in America. The author describes two initiatives that can be implemented in schools in order to help destroy negative images of race and reconstruct a more healthy foundation to build on: multiculturalism across the curriculum and multicultural awareness inservices for teachers.
• Preparing K-12 Teachers To Teach for Social Justice: An Experimental Exercise with a Focus on Inequality and Life-Chances Based on Socio-Economic Status
  The author describes a preservice multicultural education and social foundations course designed to expand awareness of and encourage an appreciation and respect for diversity, highlighting an experiential exercise that focuses on institutional inequities of socioeconomic status and that promotes critical thinking, cooperative group work, and making use of multiple intelligences.
• Conducting Focus Groups to Develop a Comprehensive School Portrait
  This paper is one of the brief practitioner oriented pamphlets called On Points produced by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). This On Point is for all teachers who want to explore issues around conducting focus groups to develop a comprehensive school portrait.
• Rolling Up Our Sleeves in Social Justice Research: A Collaborative Study of School-Based Coalitions
  The author examined the shared experiences of student and teacher activists in light of current theoretical and political contexts of interest to social justice activists. The study involved collaborative in-depth interviews with and observations of seven student and four teacher activists in Alberta, Canada.
• Teachers Leading Teachers: Enhancing Multicultural Education through Field-based Partnerships
  The authors argue that partnerships between early childhood teacher preparation programs and public school teachers will strengthen the discourse on multicultural education and its institutionalization. They present strategies for gaining a personal connection to multicultural education ideals, including developing cultural biographies, examining stereotypes and prejudices, examining the construction of a personal identity, and critically examining the media.
• Teacher Quality and Student Performance in New York City's Low-Performing Schools
  The authors evaluated achievement data on low- and high-performing urban elementary and middle school students and data on teacher characteristics, investigating relationships between teacher quality and student achievement. While poverty and minority status may have negatively influenced school achievement, they were exacerbated by stresses created by the school system.
• Dismantling White Privilege: Pedagogy, Politics, and Whiteness. Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, Vol. 73
  The author of this book critically interrogated whiteness across contexts, from the experiential level to the different ways in which whiteness is deployed in contemporary cultural politics. The editors and contributors contend that "marking" whiteness is an important step in dismantling white privilege within the context of concerns for equity and social justice.
• Reflections on the "White Movement" in Multicultural Education
  Gary Howard responds to an essay that examined the role of whites in multicultural education and reviewed three books, critiquing five of the essay's assumptions (e.g., there is a white movement in multicultural education, attention to whites' role in multicultural education is very recent, and the focus on white identity development in multicultural education signals a shift away from equity pedagogy).
• Mrs. Boyd's fifth-grade inclusive classroom: A study of multicultural teaching strategies.
  The author presents a case study of one exemplary multicultural fifth-grade classroom teacher provides educators with accommodation activities that support and encourage all students without limiting or impeding their academic or social development.Results are provided in the areas of classroom management, instructional strategies, and teacher-student-parent interaction.
• African American and White Adolescents' Strategies for Managing Cultural Diversity in Predominantly White High Schools
  The authors examined 3 strategies used by 77 African American and 138 White high school students to manage cultural diversity: multicultural, separation, and assimilation strategies. They discuss results in relation to forces supporting adolescents' strategy development and the implications of strategy use for adjustment in predominantly white schools.
• How Multiple Intelligences Theory Can Guide Teachers’ Practices: Ensuring Success for Students with Disabilities
  This On Point was produced by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). It is about the Gardner's multiple intelligences (MI) theory and it is implications for Special Education.
• Prejudice and Pride: Japanese Americans in the Young Adult Novels of Yoshiko Uchida
  The author discusses five books for young adults by author Yoshiko Uchida. He notes that these books, accessible to children in grades 5 and above, describe the prejudice against Japanese Americans, internment camps, and upheaval, sorrow, and anger spawned by the American government's racist actions.
• Building inclusive school cultures using school-wide positive behavior support: Designing effective individual suppport systems for students with significant disabilities.
  This article is about school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) and its applications for students with significant disabilities. It applies to all teachers, educational leaders and parents of children with significant disabilities.
• Essentializing Dilemma and Multiculturalist Pedagogy: An Ethnographic Study of Japanese Children in a U.S. School
  The author examined Japanese children's experiences at a U.S. elementary school, noting their teachers' pedagogical responses.
• Breaking the Silence: The Stories of Gay and Lesbian People in Children's Literature
  The author discusses how for gay or lesbian youth, the issues of identity and acceptance that are ignored both in life and in literature are not only profound but also dangerous. She notes that books that include gay or lesbian characters usually elicit a strong negative reaction to their content by vocal conservative groups.
• What Constitutes Effective ESL Instruction: Common Themes from the Voices of the Students
  In this study, the author asked students at an intensive English program to participate in interviews in which they were asked to respond to questions about classes they were attending and they defined as effective to redress the perceived gap in the definition of effective language instruction. The author conducted discourse analysis on the transcripts of several interviews.
• Diversity Education in Administrator Training: Preparation for the 21st Century
  This article investigates the impact and necessity of multicultural training in administrator-preparation programs, and the extent to which administrators can ensure that teachers honor diversity. The importance of the quality of the administrator's training is emphasized.
• Diversity Within Unity: Essential Principles for Teaching and Learning in a Multicultural Society
  The authors discussed 12 essential principles to help schools teach democratic values in a multicultural society. They derived from findings of the Multicultural Education Consensus Panel to review and synthesize research on diversity, principles are organized into five categories: Teacher learning; student learning; intergroup relations; school governance, organization, and equity; and assessment.
• Reflections on Multicultural Education: A Teacher's Experience
  The author describes a high school-level multicultural course designed to challenge the predominantly white students to reflect upon system power inequities that benefitted many of them directly. Students engaged in social action projects, working with people unlike themselves in organizations that had social justice orientations.
• Teaching Social Studies Multiculturally: Implications for Teachers
  The changing demographics in U.S. institutions have contributed to the increasingly multicultural nature of classrooms.
• Preparing Teachers of Color at a Predominantly White University: A Case Study of Project TEAM
  The authors examined the experiences of preservice teacher participants in Project TEAM, an initiative at a predominantly white university to increase the number of minority students who completed teacher education and became teachers. Case study data highlight three themes: developing a sense of community with minority student peers, developing a stronger ethnic identity, and working for social justice through multicultural education.
• Inclusion of Students with Moderate or Severe Disabilities in Educational and Community Settings: Perspectives from Parents and Siblings
  The authors of this study used qualitative research methodology to investigate parent and sibling perspectives on the educational and community inclusion of school aged students with moderate or severe disabilities. Based on the interviews with parents from twenty-one families, they identified the type and extent of inclusive educational and community settings in which the student and his or her parents and siblings were involved.
• The Relationships between Situated Cognition and Rural Preservice Teachers' Knowledge and Understanding of Diversity
  The authors of this study examined the influence of situated knowledge embedded in 17 rural preservice teachers' autobiographies on their perspectives on diversity and future classroom practices. The authors found four emerged themes in interviews: situative cognition in rural contexts; cultural groups being together but existing apart; understanding group similarities and differences; and desire to teach in a small rural school.
• Text and Context: Using Multicultural Literature To Help Teacher Education Students Develop Understanding of Self and World
  The authors of this study compared the responses of black and white preservice teachers as they engaged about a young adult novel which addressed racial and sexual diversity. Student teachers used young adult literature with protagonists from diverse backgrounds as one means of coming to understand and value children of all backgrounds.
• The Critical Literacy Process: Guidelines for Examining Books
  The author recommends that children, teachers, and parents critically read children's literature to identify and clarify ideological perspectives. She lists types of books for multicultural collections, presents guidelines for critical discussions about books, and identifies types of biases in books.
• Recommended Books about Latinos for Children and Adolescents
  The author reviews children's and adolescents' literature on the influence of Latinos in the United States, focusing on books in the following categories: the arts, fiction, literature, simple and interesting, and reference materials.