NIUSI

part of the Education Reform Networks

Learning

• Ethics, Power, and Privilege: Salient Issues in the Development of Multicultural Competencies for Teachers Serving African American Children with Disabilities
  This article addresses educators' ethical responsibility for recognizing the inherent dignity and worth of African American students with disabilities. It opens with a brief overview of multicultural education and continues with a three-pronged model for addressing multicultural competencies: awareness, knowledge, and skills.
• "There Is No Way To Prepare for This:" Teaching in First Nations Schools in Northern Ontario--Issues and Concerns
  The author of this qualitative study examined the experiences of 10 mostly inexperienced, female teachers working in two geographically isolated Native communities in northern Ontario. Findings focus on teachers' uncertainties about appropriate pedagogical goals, the relationship of teachers to First Nations communities, living in the North, cross-cultural and multicultural teaching, and teaching English as a second language.
• Changing Selves: Multicultural Education and the Challenge of New Identities
  The author of this paper noted general challenges to this paradigm and uses data from an ethnographic study of a multiracial South African high school to critique multicultural education's treatment of identity, suggesting alternate theoretical paradigms, research strategies, and pedagogical practices after introducing identity and discussing how it has been used in multicultural education.
• Creating Opportunities for Emerging Biliteracy
  The authors outline instructional principles upon which classroom practices in a fourth grade and in a kindergarten class are based that contribute to students' success, love of literacy, and emerging biliteracy. They discuss creating a socioculturally supportive learning environment that (1) affirms the cultural and linguistic resources of all students; (2) provides opportunities for inclusion and choice; and (3) involves parents in their children's learning.
• Multicultural Education: Powerful Tool for Preparing Future General and Special Educators
  The author of this article argued that multicultural education is a powerful and necessary tool for preparing future general and special educators to provide services to students with disabilities from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. the author presented ideas for educators willing to assist multicultural learners in maximizing their fullest potential in inclusive settings.
• Multicultural Teacher Education for the 21st Century
  The authors discussed multicultural preservice teacher education, recommending that preservice programs be more deliberate about preparing white Americans for teaching diverse students because of the increasing division between white teachers and minority students. The authors examined preservice teachers' fear of diversity and resistance to dealing with race and racism, proposing a two-part program for preparing teachers to work with diverse students.
• Action Research and Practical Inquiry: Multicultural Content Integration in Gifted Education: Lessons from the Field
  This article includes of an informal survey of 71 teachers of the gifted participating in an in-service course on gifted education. The authors suggested that many teachers had goals and experiences related to multicultural curricula for gifted children.
• Safeguarding Our Children: An Action Guide
  This jointly developed Action Guide to help schools and communities prevent school violence was produced by the U.S. Department of Education and Department of Justice released.
• School organizational structures: Effects on teacher and student learning
  In this study, the authors attempted to explore the relationship between teacher learning and student learning under different school structural conditions. Some 1,330 teachers from twenty nine secondary schools of different community backgrounds and student academic abilities in Hong Kong were surveyed, using instruments from diverse conceptual sources.
• Addressing diversity in schools: Culturally responsive pedagogy
  This paper is one of the short practitioner-oriented pamphlets produced by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt). This practitioner brief deals with how to address educational needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students.
• Black English in a Place Called Waterloo
  For many black students, the school language differs significantly from the home language, but preservice education rarely examines this issue. The author of this article examined implications for teaching children who use two different forms of language to navigate the demands of their contrasting sociolinguistic speech communities.
• Inclusion, diversity and leadership
  Drawing on research from a longitudinal case study of a large urban secondary school, this article examines senior leadership of and in a school struggling to be inclusive. The analysis focuses on the effect of senior leadership on: the ways in which inclusion is conceptualized and practised in this school, in particular by teachers; student intake profiles and diversity; teacher motivation and educational outcomes.
• Why are so many minority students in special education? Understanding race & disability in schools
  Scholars have discussed the overrepresentation of minority students in special education programs for high-incidence disability categories since long before the first federal law P. L.
• The Effectiveness of Minority Teachers on Minority Student Success
  The author of this paper examined the shortage of minority teachers and explores the high priority that exists among parents, teachers, and the business community to work toward a diversified teaching force, focusing on the U.S. Hispanic population and investigating whether minority teachers in the classroom can result in minority student success in school.
• (Dis)Integrating Multiculturalism with Technology
  The author examines whether K-12 teachers are prepared to use technology in innovative and effective ways to authentically present multicultural education. He discusses the potential inability of teachers to provide an authentic version of multicultural education in the presence of technology as both an individual decision and as the result of generally underconceptualized teacher preparation in the instruction of multicultural education.
• A story of change: Growing leadership for learning
  The author of this article examined the process of change in 22 schools which participated in a three year study of leadership spanning seven countries. Quantitative and qualitative measures were used to establish a baseline in each of the schools, providing a basis for discussion at follow up workshops, and offering agendas for schools to work on and to refer to in face-to-face and virtual networking.
• Overrepresentation of Minority Students in Special Education
  The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the professional literature related to the overrepresentation of minority students in special education programs, and of the remedies used in court ordered remediation programs. Specifically, it reviews reasons for overrepresentation of minority students in classes for students with various learning disabilities and the under representation of these same students in classes for students who are gifted.
• 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.
• Multicultural Perceptions of 1st-Year Elementary Teachers' Urban, Suburban, and Rural Student Teacher Placements
  The authors investigated the effects of student teaching in urban, suburban, and rural settings on beginning teachers' attitudes about success, multiculturalism, and interactions with diverse parents. They noted the effect of a program for facilitating school-home relationships and improving urban education.
• When Should Bilingual Students Be in Special Education?
  The authors focus on the challenges in special education for culturally and linguistically diverse students in the U.S. They discuss overrepresentation of diverse students in special education, exclusionary clause included in the definition of learning disabilities under the Individual With Disabilities Education Act and factors that affect the test performance of diverse students.
• Beyond Convictions: Interrogating Culture, History, and Power in Inclusive Education
  The article presents a critical exploration into various foundational conceptions and ideologies behind the inclusive schools movement in U.S. educational policy.
• How racial identity affects school performance.
  Today in the United States, race still affects where we live, pray, go to school, and socialize. It seems that for many years to come, race will undoubtedly continue to be a significant source of separation within our society.
• 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.
• 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.
• Providing a Culturally Relevant Curriculum for Hispanic Children
  A culturally relevant curriculum lets Hispanic students learn from a familiar cultural base and connect new knowledge to their own experiences, thus empowering them to build on personal knowledge. Teachers must understand Hispanic culture to help students embrace the authentic information they receive.
• At Issue: Do video games significantly enhance literacy?
  The article presents a discussion on the educational contributions of video games in terms of literacy. It presents the views of James Paul Gee and Howard Gardner regarding the issue.
• Second Language Study in Elementary Schools
  To help students compete in a global economy, American teachers must begin teaching children a second language at an early age. The author describes the advantages of learning a second language at the elementary school level, highlighting three currently-used language programs (immersion, Foreign Language in the Elementary Schools, and Foreign Language Experience) that facilitate second language learning.
• Children of War: A Curriculum
  The authors emphasized the importance of examining the position of children in war as they provide insight into the conflicts themselves that cannot be attained elsewhere. They presented a secondary curriculum entitled "Children of War" designed to promote an understanding of the phenomenon of children in war from multiple perspectives, including sociocultural, historical, and personal.
• Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics
  Did affirmative action programs solve the problem of race on American college campuses, as several recent books would have us believe? If so, why does talking about race in anything more than a superficial way make so many students uncomfortable? Written by college instructors from many disciplines, this volume of essays takes a bold first step toward a nationwide conversation. Each of the twenty-nine contributors addresses one central question: what are the challenges facing a college professor who believes that teaching responsibly requires an honest and searching examination of race? Professors from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and education consider topics such as how the classroom environment is structured by race; the temptation to retreat from challenging students when faced with possible reprisals in the form of complaints or negative evaluations; the implications of using standardized evaluations in faculty tenure and promotion when the course subject is intimately connected with race; and the varying ways in which white faculty and faculty of color are impacted by teaching about race.
• Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. Multicultural Education Series
  The author of this volume made the case for using culturally responsive teaching to improve the school performance of underachieving students of color. Key components of culturally responsive teaching are discussed.
• Do increased levels of parental involvement account for social class differences in track placement?
  The author of this report examined whether increased levels of school involvement among socially advantaged parents account for children's advantage in track placement in United States high schools.
  Download the document here .
• Local theories of teacher change: The pedagogy of district policies and programs.
  The author examined district officials' theories about teacher learning and change, identifying and elaborating three perspectives (i.e.,behaviorist, situated, and cognitive) based on a study of nine school districts. The behaviorist perspective on teacher learning dominated among the district officials in the study.
• Cultural identity and teaching
  This paper is one of the brief practitioner oriented pamphlets called On Points produced by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). We selected this particular On Point for all teachers who want to explore issues around teacher’s identity, culture, and teaching.
• From individual acquisition to cultural-historical practices in multicultural teacher education
  This article applies to all teacher educators, teachers, and pre-service teachers. Due to poor school performance among minority students in U.S.
• Swimming: On Oxygen, Resistance, and Possibility for Immigrant Youth under Siege
  Researchers have shown that in today’s fast changing world and globalized economies, bilingualism and hybrid cultural identities of immigrant students may make them more successful in the U.S. and around the world.
• The social worlds of immigrant youth
  This article applies to all of you who know that your classes are filled or are soon to be filled with minority and immigrant students. In many states and schools districts this is the reality.
• Understanding Factors that Contribute to Disproportionality
  The authors presented a study involving 12 elementary schools investigated hiring and placement decisions of school district-level personnel and principals. The authors found that inequities in the quality of leadership and instruction in the inner-city schools exacerbate efforts to reduce disproportionate placements of culturally and linguistically diverse children into special education.
• Useful Practices of Inclusive Education: A Preliminary View of What Experts in Moderate to Severe Disabilities are Saying
  The authors examined the opinions of experts in the field of moderate to severe disabilities on useful practices for inclusive education across nine categories of practices: promoting inclusive values in the school; collaboration between general and special educators; collaboration between educators and related service providers; family involvement; choosing and planning what to teach; scheduling, coordinating, and delivering inclusive services within the school; assessing and reporting student progress on an ongoing basis; instructional strategies; and supporting students with challenging behavior.
• Multiculturalism and Severe Disabilities
  This article discusses the need for educators to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to help students with severe disabilities from mainstream groups to develop cross-cultural knowledge, values, and competencies. It outlines goals for multicultural understanding for educational researches, for teacher educators, and for school leaders and teachers.
• Identity as an analytical lens for research in education
  Students' identities, academic engagement and learning are found to be closely connected. Since Erik Erikson, psychologists believe that identity formation of children and youth plays a central role in human development to have an intimate, satisfactory and productive life as adults.
• Identity and Learning: Student Affairs' Role in Transforming Higher Education
  Self-definition plays a crucial role in complex learning. This article offers a framework for making identity central in learning to promote learning and self-authorship.
• Making science accessible to all: results of a design experiment in inclusive classrooms
  The authors of this article presented their findings from a study of four elementary classrooms. They indicated that with advanced instructional strategies to support special needs students, all students demonstrated significant learning gains, and that special needs and low-achieving students in three of four classes showed changes in understanding comparable to those of normally achieving students.
• 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.
• Meeting the Needs of English Language Learners
  The authors discuss key questions reflecting research in first/second language acquisition and whole language principles: is curriculum organized around "big" questions?; are students involved in authentic reading and writing?; are students given choices?; is content meaningful?; do students work collaboratively?; do students read, write, speak, and listen during learning?; are students' primary languages and cultures valued?; and do learning activities build self-esteem? .
• Reimagining Race in Education: A New Paradigm from Psychology
  The author discusses paradigms underlying current approaches to multicultural education, introducing a typology of philosophical assumptions that has been used to classify approaches to multiculturalism in the field of psychology. The author discusses racial identity theory as an important psychological component of a race-based perspective for understanding race and culture in education and examines how racial identity affects educational thought and practice.
• Pedagogy, Politics, and Schools: Films about Social Justice in Education
  The authors review six films about issues related to multicultural and social justice education in the United States: "It's Elementary: Talking about Gay Issues in School"; "Starting Small: Teaching Children Tolerance"; "In Whole Honor?"; "Children Talk about AIDS"; "Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary"; and "'Good Morning Miss Toliver.'" .
• Culturally Responsive Literacy Instruction
  This paper is one of the practitioner-oriented briefs produced by the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt). It applies to all teachers of culturally and linguistically diverse students who are interested in improving literacy instructions.
• Three Ways To Achieve a More Equitable Representation of Culturally and Linguistically Different Students in GT Programs
  The author of this article indicated that increasing minority teachers in gifted and talented (GT) programs will lead to an increase of minority students in GT programs. The author discussed the ways to recruit and prepare minority teachers, as are multicultural and bilingual options for GT programs.
• Instructional leadership challenges: The case of using student achievement information for instructional improvement
  This article is about the instructional leadership. It applies to educational leaders.
• A Proposed Remedy for Disproportionate Special Education Placement and Underinclusion in Gifted Education
  The authors of this article examined the root causes for the overrepresentation of African American students in special education classes and their underrepresentation in gifted and talented programs in America's public schools. The authors (a) provided a historic overview of the legal struggles for educational equity, (b) examined key issues surrounding the academic status of African American students, (c) discussed multicultural education as a remedy, and (d) recommended an appropriate course of action for educators and policy makers.
• Cause or Effect? A Longitudinal Study of Immigrant Latino Parents' Aspirations and Expectations, and Their Children's School Performance
  The authors of this article discussed how much formal schooling for their children immigrant Latino parents aspire to and expect, if parents' aspirations or expectations influence children's school achievement, whether aspirations or expectations diminish the longer parents are in the U.S. and if they experience discrimination.
• Reinvented inclusive schools: A framework to guide fundamental change
  The authors of this report presented a systemic change framework for creating inclusive urban schools. They explained that if a key feature of reform focuses on multicultural education as a fundamental social and educational transformation, then opportunities for all students to achieve educational equity will be realized in U.S.
• Working with Asian Parents and Families
  The authors discussed how teachers can enhance the experiences of their Asian American students, examining the importance of understanding Asian American parents and families. They included the following suggestions for working with Asian American parents and families; respect immediate and extended family members, understand diversity within Asian ethnic groups, consider parents' English proficiency, combat stereotypes, and encourage children to be bicultural and bilingual.
• Give Us a Taste of Your Quality! A Report from the Heartland on the Role of the Arts in Multicultural Settings
  The authors of this article discusses the role of the arts in multicultural education, explaining how diverse students react to and need support in the arts in order to succeed. They focuses on the efforts of urban elementary and secondary schools in Madison, Wisconsin.
• "The Politics of Location": Text As Opposition
  In this opinion paper, the author foregrounded issues of race, ethnicity, and education, and ties together two important issues in teaching basic writing: how social and pedagogical issues in higher education shape possibilities for bicultural students' writings, and how these students can use their developing sense of literacy and their texts to explore identity. The author discussed ethnographic research conducted in a writing course, focusing on texts a student wrote.
• General and Special Educators' Perceptions of Teaching Strategies for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students
  The authors of this article presented results from a survey of 403 general and special education teachers. They found most had received no training in multicultural education even though most reported that cultural knowledge would help them understand the influence of their students' verbal and nonverbal learning/behavioral styles.
• From Our Readers: Preparing Preservice Teacher Candidates for Leadership in Equity
  The author describes the importance of moving beyond identity labels like Black, Hispanic, or female to examine how gender intersects with other social memberships like race and class. By considering more inclusive, individualized ways of viewing multiculturalism, educators can forge more meaningful conversations with students about diversity and equity.
• Towards Equal Educational Opportunities for Asylum-Seekers
  The authors interviewed and surveyed staff, asylum-seeking/refugee English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students, and ESOL students who came for other reasons at one British college, examining why the college's ESOL provision featured separate programs for the two groups. The authors discuss: the consequences of this divide; teacher discourses; alternative pedagogies; labeling of students; integrated provision; and multicultural education.
• Inclusion as social justice: Critical notes on discourses, assumptions, and the road ahead
  This article applies to all teachers both in general education and special education who are to teach students with disabilities alongside their peers without disabilities. This is generally called inclusion.
• The Relationship Between Teacher Effectiveness and Teacher Attitudes Toward Issues Related to Inclusion
  The inclusion of students with special needs in regular education classrooms has become a major focus of current educational reform, and regular education teacher's acceptance is a critical component in how this type of service delivery will play out. The author of this study reexamined the results of a study which indicated that more effective teachers were less willing to include students with special needs in their classrooms.
• On...Transformed, Inclusive Schools: A Framework To Guide Fundamental Change in Urban Schools
  This paper is one of the brief practitioner oriented pamphlets called On Points produced by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI).The authors of this On Point presented a systemic change framework for creating inclusive urban schools. They explained that if a key feature of reform focuses on multicultural education as a fundamental social and educational transformation, then opportunities for all students to achieve educational equity will be realized in U.S.
• Educational needs and barriers for refugee children in the United States: A review of the literature.
  Today around globe, 20.8 million refugees are striving to seek a safe place in more than 150 countries. Approximately, half of the refugee population in the world is younger than 18 years old.