Where we have been and where we are going...

7 years ago I was a post-baccalaureate student working on my teaching certification at Texas Tech University. Everyone has to take a multicultural class as part of the curriculum to become a teacher. I took mine in the summer before my student teaching from a professor name Dr. Anderson. I don’t remember much about the class, but I do remember liking it, liking Dr. Anderson and learning that you should not judge a student based on the name on the roll, even if you want to. So, in short, I didn’t learn much.

In one session of this class, my interest has already been piqued. I am a current world geography teacher, a former US History teacher, and I have a political science degree. So, last class was very interesting to me.

As a world geography teacher we talk a lot about what is culture? What does it look like? What does it sound like? How can you define it? How is it diffused? What part of it is diffused? It is a major part of my curriculum. As a culminating culture unit project, my students must bring in a cultural artifact and share it with the class, not unlike what we did last week in our own class. It is always surprising to me what my students choose to bring in as a class and last week was no less interesting. You learn a lot about someone, rather quickly, by simply listening to them talk about a cultural item they have chosen as the most important artifact in their culture. It is fascinating to learn where people come from and where they are now.

I think that is history; learning about the past so we can understand the future. I believe that is what we talked about in class last week. We must learn about the past so we can understand where we are in multicultural education and where we are going in multicultural education.

Beginning with Brown v. Board of Education, our country has a rich, and troubling, history of multi-cultural education. As a history person, it is important that we start with the facts of what happened and discuss those first.

In the first selection of chapter 1 Joel Spring goes through all the different forms of school segregation and cultural and linguistic genocide that were central issues in the civil rights movement. (pg. 1) Through this writing, we were able to begin to piece together the history of the civil rights movements and the pieces of information that goes with them and remind ourselves, or re-learn some key pieces of information that will help us understand where we are going.

I am excited to get into more dialogue on the history of multicultural education and where we are going in multicultural education.