Becoming Multicultural: Personal and Social Construction Through Critical Teaching

This book argues that becoming multicultural is a process of recursive cycles that must involve confrontational dialogue for change. Multicultural education texts often describe multiculturalism as a process where a person develops competencies of perceiving, evaluating, believing, and doing in multiple ways. However, the dynamic, fluid and changing qualities central to the process of interpersonal interaction often results in mastery of a product, focusing on lists of static features of generalized groups rather than on the individuals who make up those groups. Rather than listing and describing objectified features of cultural groups from a theoretical view, this book details the interactions of 21 ethnically diverse individuals through one classroom experience. First, the personal histories and meanings constructed from lived experience are detailed and analyzed to reveal the ways in which personal identity constructions influence learning events in a singular classroom context. Second, from this analysis, the author develops a conceptual model for the process of becoming multicultural. Then the author applies the model to herself and describes specific ways in which interaction with these individuals has influenced her present teaching strategies for expecting and facilitating confrontational dialogue toward developing education that is multicultural. Specifically the book addresses the questions: 1) What does it mean to become multicultural? 2) What does it mean to be culturally sensitive? 3) How can the process of multiculturalism be facilitated in a classroom setting? 4) What is the teacher's role in the multicultural classroom? 5) What are some expected/predictable outcomes of a multicultural classroom? Includes bibliography and index.