Introduction
Multicultural education is an area of study that aims at providing educational equality for all the students irrespective of the ethnic, racial, social and cultural groups they belong to. It further undertakes the task of creating a civic and moral community that works for the common benefit of all and also interacts, negotiates and communicates between people from different groups. One of the most significant goals is to assist students for acquiring knowledge, developing attitudes and skills that are required for the efficient functioning of a pluralistic democratic society.
The web article entitled Multicultural Education gives an important idea about multicultural education, and recognizes it as “a field of study designed to increase educational equity for all students that incorporates, for this purpose, content, concepts, principles, theories, and paradigms from history, the social and behavioral sciences, and particularly from ethnic studies and women studies.” (Multicultural Education, n.d.).
Review of the two articles about multicultural Education
The article titled ‘Teaching with a Multicultural Perspective – ERIC Digest’, states that multicultural education makes children capable of understanding about their own culture as well as that of others. The author is of the opinion that caregivers and stereotypes play an important role in forming mental attitudes so the teacher has a great role in avoiding stereotypes by providing them different materials and group activities so that they can improve creativity and also have awareness about group identity. The teachers must consider children’s cultural identity and also accord equal importance to all without any discrimination based on religion, caste, and language. Role-play is an important strategy for developing culture and lifestyle. It helps the children to understand various customs and manners. (Gomez, 1991).
The second article ‘Varieties of Multicultural Education: An Introduction. ERIC Digest 98’ deals with the different orientation strategies to develop multicultural education including content oriented programs, student oriented programs, socially oriented programs and so on. The content oriented program intends to increase students’ knowledge by including the content about different cultural groups. The student-oriented program seeks to improve the academic achievement of different groups and socially oriented programs emphasize the relevance for improving the racial tolerance and help to reduce bias. This topic is relevant on the following grounds.
Firstly, it provides equal opportunity to all students without any discrimination and it supports the student to develop his or her creativity and potentiality through different strategies. Secondly, the experts related to this field can make use of this in the classroom by providing different strategies such as group discussion, problem solving and leadership. There are three things that one can learn from analyzing the article. Firstly, the realization of one’s own culture and others.
Secondly, the need of group activities and finally, the importance of role play and also about various orientation programs have been discussed. There are two questionable things about this topic. One is explained with the help of a quote from an article which states that “it pays little or no attention to teaching people how to recognize it when culturally and racially different groups are being victimized by the racist or biased attitudes of the larger society.” (Gomez, 1991). It gives less attention to teaching people who have to identify different groups from a large society. There is no effective multicultural education foundation through which children can learn to accept others and hence an effective multicultural education procedure is required to be implemented in this system. (Burnett, 1994).
On analyzing the articles it appears that the section discussing the feedback lacks enough explanation. The feedback of multicultural education is very important in existing educational procedures. Therefor if it includes more details it would help a reader to understand the topic in a better manner.
Conclusion
It is obvious that, an effective multicultural education foundation is an imperative factor for executing this system. Its goal is to teach not only about the groups and countries but also to study different life styles, languages, cultures and point of view. Its aim is to provide a positive outlook to multicultural experiences to make them more valuable.
References
Burnett, G. (1994). Varieties of Multicultural Education: An Introduction. ERIC Digest 98. Web.
Gomez, R A. (1991). Teaching with a Multicultural Perspective. ERIC Digest. Web.
Gomez, R A. (1991). Teaching with a Multicultural Perspective: Promoting a multicultural perspective. ERIC Digest. Web.
Multicultural education: Banks and Banks define multicultural education. (n.d.). North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. Web.