Defining and Designing Multiculturalism

Pepi Leistyna

Description

Just outside a major urban center on the east coast of the United States an activist group struggled to create a system-wide multicultural education program. Through a seven-year qualitative study, Pepi Leistyna documents and interprets—via a critical pedagogical lens—this group's work with professional development, curriculum and instruction, faculty and staff, and community outreach. Through engaging examples, stories, and participant voices, Leistyna offers a comprehensive, accessible ethnography with implications for others who might attempt similar sorts of systemic change.

Foreword
Multiculturalism Revisited: Pepi Leistyna's Politics of the Concrete
Peter McLaren

Introduction

Part One: Theoretically and Historically Contextualizing the Study

1. Critical Mulicultural Education: What is It?
2. A History of Changeton and its Public Schools
3. Facing Oppression: Youth Voices from the Front
4. The Formation of the Multicultural Central Steering Committee (CSC): Its Basic Processes, Functions, and Structures

Part Two: The Work of the Multicultural Central Steering Committee

5. The Development of the Multicultural Central Steering Committee's Mission Statement
6. Professional Development: Raising Consciousness among the Faculty and Staff
7. Curriculum Development and Instruction
8. Diversifying the Faculty and Staff
9. Creating a Partnership between the School and the Public

Part Three: The Impact of Multicultural Education in Changeton over the Years

10. In the Aftermath: A Dialogue with Three Changeton Teachers
11. Two Letters to Changeton Educators
12. Challenges for the Future

Appendix / Research Methodology
Notes
Bibiliography

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791487983
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Defining and Designing Multiculturalism

SUNY series, The Social Context of Education –Christine E. Sleeter, editor

Defining & Designing

Multiculturalism

  ’ 

Pepi Leistyna

                            

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2002 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, eletrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207

Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Anne M. Valentine

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leistyna, Pepi. Defining and designing multiculturalism: one school system’s efforts / by Pepi Leistyna. p.cm.—(SUNY series, the social context of education) Includes bibliographical references (p. 303) and index. 0–7914–5507–6 (alk. paper)—0–7914–5508–4 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Multicultural education. 2. Critical pedagogy. I. Title. II. SUNY series, social context of education 1099.45 2002 370.117—dc21 2002017612

This book is dedicated to all the kids in this world who are disgracefully offered so little, blamed for so much, and yet still manage to dream so high.

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Contents



Foreword Multiculturalism Revisited: Pepi Leistyna’s Politics of the Concrete, by Peter L. McLaren

Acknowledgmentsxix Introduction 1

ix

Part One Theoretically and Historically Contextualizing the Study Chapter 1 Critical Multicultural Education: What Is It? 9

Chapter 2 A History of Changeton and Its Public Schools: Taking a Sociohistorical Perspective 34

Chapter 3 Facing Oppression: Youth Voices from the Front

67

Chapter 4 The Formation of the Multicultural Central Steering Committee: Its Basic Processes, Functions, and Structures 97

Part Two The Work of the Multicultural Central Steering Committee Chapter 5 The Development of the Multicultural Central Steering Committee’s Mission Statement 109

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viii | Contents

Chapter 6 Professional Development: Raising Consciousness among the Faculty and Staff

Chapter 7 Curriculum Development and Instruction

Chapter 8 Diversifying the Faculty and Staff

198

168

Chapter 9 Efforts to Create a Partnership between the School and the Public 219

123

Part Three The Impact of the Multicultural Central Steering Committee in Changeton over the Years Chapter 10 In the Aftermath: A Dialogue with Changeton Teachers in the Trenches 241

Chapter 11 Two Letters to Changeton Educators

Chapter 12 Challenges for the Future

281

Appendix:Research Methodology Notes293 References303 Index317

266

287

Foreword

Multiculturalism Revisited Pepi Leistyna’s Politics of the Concrete



Once held to be the divining rod that would lead humanity to a new democratic imaginary of diversity and inclusion, multiculturalism today resembles more a forked stick in the hands of a boy scout than a magic wand capable of bringing about a social revolution. While it arrived on a flood tide of vibrant ideas about re- kindling the relationship between racial equality and democracy, multiculturalism largely remains a domesticated agenda, riding to national prominence on the cur- rent wave of buttoned-down progressive reformism and neoliberal educational policy making. Multiculturalism seemingly has lost its relationship to wider class and social struggles, and has been debarred from serious consideration as a tool of the left. And it doesn’t take much in the way of analysis to realize that the current state of ambivalence toward multiculturalism serves the interests of the dominant class. The question, therefore, has to be raised: To what extent does mainstream multiculturalism reflect the cultural logic of late capitalism? Mainstream multiculturalism has become the bellwether of ever shifting cur- rents of bourgeois liberal opinion and a marker for the diminishing tide of revolu- tionary class struggle. Largely an unprincipled fusion of corporatism, incremental reformism, and bourgeois humanism, mainstream multiculturalism has become a perennial cauldron of competing factions pursuing counterposed lives dictated by conflicting notions of identity. The juggernaut of global capitalism (and its social equivalent, imperialism) and the demise of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc socialist regimes have sent the educational left into a tailspin. It appears that no local or global proletarian inclination to organize currently exists that has the potential to bring about a massive world-historical challenge to capital. Consequently, the

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