Empowerment through Multicultural Education

Edited by Christine E. Sleeter

Subjects: Education
Series: SUNY series, Teacher Empowerment and School Reform
Paperback : 9780791404447, 340 pages, November 1990
Hardcover : 9780791404430, 340 pages, November 1990

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Table of contents

INTRODUCTION:
Multicultural Education and Empowerment
Christine E. Sleeter

PART I: Schooling and the Disempowerment of Children from Oppressed Groups

1. Doing School in an Urban Appalachian First Grade
Kathleen Bennett

2. Mapping Terrains of Power: Student Cultural Knowledge Versus Classroom Knowledge
Christine E. Sleeter and Carl A. Grant

3. Peer-Proofing Academic Competition among Black Adolescents: "Acting White" Black American Style
Signithia Fordham

4. Disempowering White Working-Class Females: The Role of the High School
Lois Weis

PART II: Strategies for Empowerment through Education

5. A Curriculum for Empowerment, Action, and Change
James A. Banks

6. Empowerment through Media Literacy: A Multicultural Approach
Carlos E. Cortes

7. Cooperative Learning as Empowering Pedagogy
Mara Sapon-Shevin and Nancy Schniedewind

8. Teaching Children about Social Issues: Kidpower
Valerie Ooka Pang

9. Classroom Use of African American Language: Education Tool or Social Weapon?
Selase W. Williams

10. The Empowerment of Language-Minority Students
Richard Ruiz

11. Changing Our Ideas about Ourselves: Group Consciousness Raising with Elementary School Girls as a Means to Empowerment
Lee Anne Bell

12. Who Is Empowering Whom? The Social Construction of Empowerment
Susan R. Takata

PART III: Empowerment and Teacher Education

13. The Rationale for Training Adults as Teachers
Martin Haberman

14. The Power to Empower: Multicultural Education for Student-Teachers
Renee Martin

Notes and References

Notes on Contributors

Index

Description

This book reframes questions about student diversity by probing the extent to which society serves the interests of all, and by examining the empowerment of members of oppressed groups to direct social change. It examines the empowerment of children who are members of oppressed racial groups, lower class, and female, based on the ideas of multicultural education. A series of ethnographic studies illustrates how such young people view their world, their power to affect it in their own interests, and their response to what is usually a growing sense of powerlessness as they mature. The authors also conceptualize contributions of multicultural education to empowering young people, and report investigations of multicultural education projects educators have used for student empowerment. Issues in teacher education are also discussed.

Christine E. Sleeter is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. She is co-author of After the School Bell Rings, Making Choices for Multicultural Education, and Turning on Learning.

Reviews

"This volume is a powerful indictment of our public educational system. U.S. teachers and policymakers can no longer ignore issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and handicap in their teaching. We can no longer afford as a nation to stick our heads in the sand and label these issues as someone else's—their—problem. Teacher educators and others centrally concerned with schooling must directly address issues raised in this book." — Mary Louise Gomez, University of Wisconsin-Madison