Varieties of Multicultural Education: An Introduction

Burnett, Gary "Varieties of Multicultural Education: An Introduction". ERIC Digest 98.

The article discusses multicultural education and to an extent veins in which it has changed education. Multicultural education is identified as having been the result of 1960's race centered social turmoil--that it was an attempt to bring minorities under the influence of the greater American culture. This would develop into content centered multicultural education, which the article describes as adding content or modifying curriculum to include material that demonstrates an acknowledgment of students' cultures. The next vein of multicultural education lies in student-centered action , which the article describes as grouping student by their cultural groups--with the hopes that they will be benefit from an education influenced by only their cultural background. The final model of multicultural education is that which prepares students for encounters with multiculturalism through content.

The article brings up a very important question--now that we've agreed that some form of multicultural education is needed, what is the best way to go about such and what does that even mean? Content only multicultural education, from my experience has seemed nothing more than a superfluous exercise. I never really gathered much multicultural understanding from them. Student oriented multicultural education, from my meeting students that had experience, prepares students for understanding their own culture and carrying on cultural ideas, but does not seem to accomplish what I always took the goal of multicultural education to be--that being educating students in multiculturalism. The encounter based education seems to be the form that succeeds at this the most. Students are led to develop broader understanding of multiculturalism and a maturity that would be needed to handle such a subject.