Review of Volume 13 Number 1 January 9, 2010 Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education : An Essay Review Elsie M. Szecsy Arizona State University Banks, James A. (2009). The Routledge International Companion to Multicultural Education. NY: Routledge. Pp. 571 ISBN 0-41596230-7 Citation: Szecsy, Elsie M. (2010, January 9). Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education: An essay review. Education Review, 13(1). Retrieved [date] from http://edrev.asu.edu/essays/v13n1index.html. Reviewed by Elsie M. Szecsy Arizona State University January 9, 2010 re schools agents of social reproduction, or are they agents of social mobility, change and transformation? What purpose does education serve for democracy? Of what value is democratic society? Scholars and practitioners in education have pondered these questions throughout history (Collins, 2009; Cook, 1939), and each A http://edrev.asu.edu/essays/v12n13index.html Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 2 attempt at an answer has resulted in a different understanding of what school is about and for, which has led to multiple attempts at reshaping of teaching and learning in school. This grand challenge is not necessarily peculiar to the form of democracy known in the United States. The Routledge international companion to multicultural education provides for consideration of this important challenge through a broader, global lens. This volume is a comprehensive reference work on multicultural education around the world. Its forty chapters are divided into ten parts, each of which focuses on a particular theme. The first part focuses on theoretical perspectives and issues on multicultural education. The focus of the second part is multicultural education and diversity across nations. The chapters in this part deal with historical realities, ongoing challenges, and transformative possibilities for multicultural education globally. The theme of the third part is race, intergroup relations, and schooling. The fourth part focuses on cultural influences of teaching and learning and relationships between socialization, literacy, and empowerment. Part Five focuses on the education of indigenous groups in the United States, Peru, and New Zealand. Part Six’ theme is citizenship, immigration, and education. The seventh part relates language, cultural, identity, and education in its three chapters. The eighth part relates religion, culture, identity, and education. Part Nine’s theme is the education of ethnic and cultural minority groups in Europe, notably migrant minority groups in Germany, ethnic, racial and cultural minority groups in Spain; and ethnic and cultural groups in Russia. The theme of Part Ten is the education of ethnic and cultural minority groups in Asia and Latin America. Given the comprehensiveness of this volume, this review will focus on a number of concepts and issues that the contributors point out in their respective chapters. These concepts and issues are not exhaustive, but are included to illuminate what are arguably the most important but generally overlooked aspects of multicultural education policy and practice in the global context. These concepts and issues are organized in three overarching aspects of multicultural education when examined through a global lens: historical roots of multicultural education as it has been James A. Banks is Kerry and Linda Killinger Professor of Diversity Studies and Director of the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a past president of the American Educational Research Association and the National Council for the Social Studies. Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 3 understood; dynamic relationships among language, culture, religion, and identity with a multicultural education that is becoming an agent for social justice and c ivic engagement; and examples that suggest a need for a new multicultural education. A Global History of Multicultural Education In the first chapter of the volume, James Banks reminds us of a liberal assimilationist ideology that historically has been the foundation on which multicultural education in the United States has been grounded. Its emergence during the 1970s was in response to the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the purpose of multicultural education, initially, was to protect mainstream educational practice from the culturally different. In that light, multicultural education has progressed through a number of paradigms: ethnic additive, self-concept development, cultural deprivation, cultural difference, language, cultural ecology, protective disidentification, structural, and anti-racist. All were well intended, but all led to unintended consequences that maintained cultural separation rather than leading to integration of newcomers and others who are different into the mainstream with their differences intact. Banks proposes instead that a multi-factor paradigm of multicultural education be embraced, a holistic paradigm that takes into account accommodative and acculturative influences on education and that recognizes individuals in cultural, national civic, and global community contexts. Stephen May points out that “multiculturalism has been plagued by an idealistic, naïve preoccupation with culture at the expense of broader material and structural concerns” (p. 34), which leads to cultural essentialism where all within a group are seen as the same as each other. This view ignores the reality of cultural hybridity through such processes as mestizaje and creolization, a reality that Marcelo Suárez-Orozco & Carola Suárez-Orozco echo later in the volume: Immigrants are a heterogeneous population that defies generalization. Mays calls for the development of a critical multicultural paradigm that works to acknowledge unequal power relations, critique constructions of culture, and maintain critical reflexivity (with own and others’ cultures). Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 4 Stephen Castles outlines the development of multiculturalism over time from an assimilationist tool to the integrative tool that is currently emerging globally. He points out challenges for education, including those related to temporary sojourner immigrants who in some places have no right to education at all, or receive support in maintaining language and culture of origin, with the implicit understanding that they will return to their homeland. Both forms of multicultural education are exclusionary and inferior. Also of concern is a practical problem about multicultural education: by focusing on cultural differences, there is a risk that time will be taken away from work on core subjects needed for job success later. Multicultural education models still focus on educating legal migrants; it rarely take into account new political economy and educating children of those in the informal, exploitative economy. Suárez -Orozco & Suárez-Orozco echo this observation later in the volume by pointing out what matters in multicultural education: family background: family education, poverty, undocumented status, and segregation in schools. In the second part of the volume, the contributors move from the theoretical to the practical in their explanations of multicultural education within national settings and needs for its redevelopment for the 21 st century global economy. Sonia Nieto calls for newer epistemologies and methodologies for multicultural education in the United States that do not reinforce stereotypes about marginalized groups by focusing on such matters as food, music, and holidays. This theme is also evident in chapters about multicultural education practice globally, especially in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, the European continent, South Africa, and Japan, where each has experienced a number of educational challenges related to societal diversity brought about by immigration, colonialization, or other factor related to intergroup contact. In Canada, Reva Joshee notes that Canadian multicultural discourse constructs diversity as a problem to be addressed in limited and one-sided way by groups having difficulty with the existing school system. Also, Christine Inglis observes in Australia, that earlier multicultural education provisions lacked emphasis on language and cultural maintenance, but more recent policy emphasizes harmony, tolerance, and being an active citizen by all of Australia’s residents. Sally Tomlinson reports on an absent multicultural education policy in the United Kingdom, where focus on community cohesion lacks acknowledgement that British society has always been divided along lines of social class, wealth, gender, race, religion, and region, and where education is a means to assimilation, though the national system is not expected to promote the values of immigrant groups. What is now needed in the United Kingdom, Tomlinson maintains, is political courage and leadership, and educators who look beyond a narrow National Curriculum to a global, intercultural curriculum which can prepare the next generation both with marketable Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 5 skills and with knowledge and understanding of their multicultural, interdependent world. Christina Alleman-Ghionda reports on the policy of intercultural education, an umbrella that includes multicultural education, antiracist education, and the education of minorities, but an umbrella that she criticizes that does not allow room for change and that neglects socioeconomic factors. The next stage of the evolution of intercultural education would be to emancipate it from the minority versus majority dichotomy and from the narrow focus on cultural difference. Regarding South Africa, Crain Soudien describes an educational system that places schools as central players in the struggle between old (apartheid) and new (inclusive) educational policies: “Knowing” continues to mean reading the “other” in deficit terms, but is prosecuted not on the basis of a universalized cosmopolitanism. Instead of the politi cal authority of the state, the White school now turns to the authority of the global market. […] The interesting outcome of this is that former White schools remain sites of assimilation and that stereotyping forms of multiculturalism continue to be the order of the day. (p. 155) Yasumasa Hirasawa elucidates on the purpose of education for multicultural living-together (in contrast with a multicultural education that does not imply social integration) in Japan, where a multicultural reality was not general ly acknowledged. For example, resident Koreans were not generally perceived as creating cultural diversity because they looked and behaved like mainstream Japanese. Assimilation-oriented policies in Japan gave them the ambiguous identity of “outsiders with in.” (p. 159). Education for multicultural living-together implies peaceful coexistence of differences and social harmony and involves teaching about many different cultures. Interactions Between History and Multicultural Education for Social Justice and Civic Activism Having set the stage through an acknowledgement of a global purpose for multicultural education and acknowledgement of a global failure to achieve a truly multicultural approach to achieving educational equity and excellence for all studen ts, regardless of their circumstances, the contributors continue through discussion of various interactions associated with education in globalized contexts. David Gillborn and Deborah Youdell propose the place of critical theory in multicultural educational policy and practice. Critical theory and critical pedagogy acknowledge that education is part of the apparatus by which state maintains control of the masses in the interests of the ruling class. They also cite Gramsci who argues that culture, politics and the economy are organized in a relationship of mutual exchange Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 6 with one another, a constantly circulating and shifting network of influence. Thus, critical pedagogy equips students to actively deconstruct and resist dominant forms of oppression. Nonetheless, it is also important to note that critical theoretical multicultural education in not merely a dry, intellectual activity; it also has a purpose to challenge inequality and bring about social change. Rebecca Bigler and Julie Milligan Hughes explore developmental intergroup theory (DIT) as a constructivist model of the formation and maintenance of stereotyping and prejudice among children. According to DIT, children do not necessarily learn all of their prejudices from adults; four basic processes a re involved: establishment of the psychological salience of person attributes; categorization of encountered individuals by salient dimension; development of stereotypes and prejudices concerning social groups, and application of a stereotype filter to encountered individuals; and the nature of children’s racial attitudes as a means toward understanding more deeply children’s complicity in the continuation of prejudicial behavior in schools. They recommend further research in this area, especially with regard to childhood and adolescent racial attitude development, to move toward more integrative and comprehensive approaches to understanding this topic. Frances Aboud follows with a discussion of promising prejudice reduction interventions, especially among White young people, who according to his research have the highest levels of prejudice. Such interventions work best when they entail some form of friendship or indirect connection through a friend. “[T]hese forms of friendship work because they reduce intergroup anxiety, increase intimacy and trust, expand one’s identification, and inform about norms of acceptance” (p. 206). Zvi Bekerman reports on a case-in-point, in which intergroup dialogic encounters between Palestinians and Jews in integrated bilingual schools in Israel reduce prejudice and stereotyping between groups. Patricia Ramsey notes that it is never too early to start. Early childhood education should also be responsive to complex social, political and economic challenges through play. However, the potential of early childhood education to address these issues before they become large is often undermined because of education policies in many countries that under-fund early childhood education and considers it expendable. Carol Lee notes that cognitive orientations have traditionally focused on individuals as agents of learning; now education professionals increasingly acknowledge the fundamentally social nature of learning; humans learn in social settings; in interactions with other people, and with cultural artifacts that embody the ideas and beliefs of other humans. The social organization of routine practices in and out of school can influence goals, effort, and the structure and deployment of knowledge. Knowledge of various configurations of social organization of practice, especially those of non-Western cultural origins, can assist in uncovering hegemonic beliefs of the West Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 7 that inform institutional practices in Western schools, but are not necessarily accessible to migrant students who bring with them different norms and practices. Thor Ola Engen’s chapter follows up on Lee’s discussion through a case -study on education in Norway, where education professionals have long practiced a unilateral, mainstreaming approach. “ A monolingual mainstreaming strategy may lead to integration, but only when the school’s unilateral majority cultural influence is balanced by parents who are in a position to compensate for, supplement, and mediate the schools’ effort with home cultural perspectives” (p. 253). The book continues with an examination of the education of indigenous groups in the United States, Peru, and New Zealand. In the first instance, Donna Deyhle and Karen Gayton Comeau point out that before the arrival of the European explorers and settlers, American Indians were educating their young people. They lost control during the U.S. colonialization to a government that intended to “Americanize” them, and only recently have begun to come full circle by returning to a self -determination and indigenous ways of knowing through revitalization of their languages and cultures. María Elena García reports a similar situation in Peru relative to their “Indian problem” that was addressed during the colonial period in a way that was not helpful in preserving indigenous self-determination. A recent turn to intercultural bilingual education is a promising development toward eradicating poverty in indigenous communities and demanding social, cultural, economic and political rights. However, these advancements face significant challenges rooted in history (e.g., old problems of paternalism), scarcity of resources, or national policies that still lack an adequate approach to overcoming a dichotomous approach to education that separates indigenous (rural) and non-indigenous (urban) students. Likewise is the situation in New Zealand, reports Wally Penetito, between the European settlers and the indigenous Maori who endured over 200 years of colonialization by English-speaking European settlers and are working to reverse the damage done to them culturally, socially, and economically and achieve dual cultural identity. Banks describes in the next part the assimilationist, liberal and universal conceptions of citizen education. Given the 21 st century’s transnational and migrant population, he states why these concepts should be interrogated and argues that citizenship and citizenship education should be expanded to include cultural rights for citizens from diverse racial, cultural, ethnic, and language groups. Citizenship education should incorporate recognition of group-differentiated rights. He recommends a transformative citizenship education that equips students to challenge inequality and stratification in the larger society. Eva Lemaire reports on the use of French language as a tool for integration in France, where secularity is the founding value of education. The teacher’s role has been to remove public institutions from the influence of the church. France tries to find a Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 8 place for the cultural diversity characteristic of French society and to integrate the idea of an identity and of a citizenship which should not be reduced to a mythical national identity, in which “identity” and “identical” have been confused for so long. Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey contrast approaches to national identity and diversity in France and in England. In both countries, new programs of education for citizenship aim to reinforce and strengthen democracy. The French version is based on Republican values, particularly human rights, and rejects racism and discrimination. The English version espouses a more pragmatic approach that emphasizes social and moral responsibility and active engagement with society. Despite these and other differences and similarities, and populations that are increasingly secular but also increasingly multi-faith, there is little evidence that minority groups participated in the formulation of either nation’s educational programs. Osler and Starkey maintain that until curricula and discourses on citizenship are responsive to minority as well as majority perspectives, they are likely to remain exclusive. Starkey & Osler also report on democracy, antiracism, and citizenship education between England and Sweden. In Sweden, antiracism is linked to preserving and promoting democracy. Its policy of openly confronting expressions of racism and xenophobia stands in sharp contrast with the British approach, where there is no explicit national, formally agreed-upon set of basic principles on which to base education policy and practice. Starkey and Osler maintain that only when racism is actively brought out into the open and combated can antiracism genuinely be mainstreamed within education. Antiracism is critical to education policy for all rather than a feature designed to ameliorate disadvantage among minority students. Hristo Kyuchukov reports that citizenship education and intercultural education are new terms for most educators in Bulgaria where there are a number of minority groups, most notably Turks and Roma. Minority group students benefit from intercultural education to learn about minority culture, but majority group students are not at all involved with intercultural education. There is resistance among educators to majority students participating in intercultural education. Citizenship education is new and undeveloped and narrowly viewed. There is no emphasis placed on knowledge about minorities, their human rights, and how diverse citizens in one nation can live together. Instead, minorities are seen as people who create problems in a society. Suzanne Romaine points out that “language-equals-culture equals identity” is too simple to account for linkages between languages and cultural identities. The once prevailing idea that identities and cultures are essential and stable throughout life has given way to thinking that they are constructed, dynamic, and hybrid. She recommends a rethinking of national identity in more pluralistic and inclusive ways to accommodate new ways of thinking about belonging within culturally and linguistically diverse communities. Hassana Alidou and Saran Kaur Gill expand on Romaine’s thinking by Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 9 reporting on how this rethinking plays out in Francophone Africa and Malaysia, respectively. Nasar Meer, Valérie Sala Pala, Tariq Modood, and Patrick Simon report on contrasting models of multicultural education with the increasing number of Muslims residing in their countries. Religious minorities in England seek an expansion of schools with a religious ethos in the state-maintained faith sector. In France, a rigid conception of secularity (laïte) and an assimilationist backlash at the beginning of the 21st century have created a hostile environment to accommodation of religion in the schools. Ethnic diversity is seen as a threat against republican values. In England, multicultural education controls religious plurality; In France, schools remain the main agencies for reproducing an exclusive French national identity. Reva Joshee and Karen Sihra report that the three main foci of multicultural education in India, where this is a long history of religious and linguistic diversity, address disadvantages faced by marginalized groups. While under British rule, government did not support any religious instruction. Toward the end of colonialization, policymakers reached the conclusion that religious education should be a part of all schools, but not a required part, so that students can reflect on issues such as human rights, gender, caste, and religion as they relate to everyday life. Mukhlis Abu Bakar reports a different approach in Singapore, where up until the 1990s little attention was paid to religious education. In Singapore, the government has raised the status of Muslim religious madrasah education to provide students with knowledge related to the economy. This change expands the scope of these schools to produce both religious scholars and Muslim professionals. Joel Kuipers and Ella Yulaelawati report on yet another approach to religious education in Indonesia, through the use of equivalencies that focus on relationships between different kinds of educational experiences, including Muslim religious schools, which constitute a major presence in the archipelago, to common, shared standards of competence (p. 457). Though technically a means to minimize perceptions of elitism, critics have argued that equivalency legitimizes class and ethnic differences by providing a framework in which distinctions can be perpetuated and justified. Educational Outcomes for Ethnic and Cultural Minorities The book concludes with a discussion of the education of ethnic and cultural minority groups in Europe (Germany, Spain, and Russia), Asia (China), and Latin America (Brazil and Mexico). Sigrid Luchtenberg reports that the German system, which may have worked in the 20 th century with a relatively homogeneous population, no longer serves the diverse student population that includes Turks and others who now are more likely to be children of permanent residents than of the temporary Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 10 workers that once was the norm in late 20 th century Germany. Despite outreach efforts to students’ countries of origin, Teresa Aguado Odina notes that Roma immigrants are at a disadvantage in Spanish schools. According to Isak Froumin and André Zakharov, he Russian educational system is taking on the nearly impossible task of providing universal education to the country’s multi-confessional, multi-ethnic population that is generally in conflict with each other on religious or ethnic grounds, disseminating and developing ethnic cultures and languages, and integrating ethnically heterogeneous society into a united supranational community with a common system of values. They attempt to accomplish this task without benefit of education policies that harmonize competing interests, a single strategic orientation, or educational methodologies that support the development of tolerance in an intolerant society. With respect to China, Gerard Postiglione reports that the diversity that exists among its people is only partially reflected in school textbooks, despite the fact that minority languages are emphasized in many regions. In Latin America, the situation is similar, but the root cause may be different, with social class an additional determining factor that blocks equitable educational opportunities for all. Martin Carnoy reports that most Latin American countries are characterized by some of the highest levels of income equality in the world (p. 512). Petronilha Beatriz Gonçalves e Silva and Sonia Stella Araújo-Olivera take turns leading chapters on how such disparities play out in Brazil for Indigenous peoples and Blacks and in Mexico for ethnic minority groups in Mexico. In the former the authors give voice to Brazilian Indigenous and Black descendants of Africans’ call for the teaching of their respective histories and cultures throughout the educational system. They seek this objective not for recognition or reparation, but to affect and influence the education of all Brazilians to include multicultural perspectives. High quality education for all, where multiple worldviews and perspectives enrich each other. The Brazilian state has begun to take measures to establish a just society for all of its people, but not without the resistance of educational systems and institutions accustomed to organizing work for a monocultural population. In Mexico, one of the consequences of a Eurocentric rationality has been the marginalization of the country’s indigenous populations. Araújo-Olivera and Gonçalves e Silva report that Mexico experienced both a military and cultural invasion by Eurocentric rationality. “[T]he Spanish forced the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to accept their lifestyles, beliefs, rituals, and values” (p. 541), and the Indigenous peoples came to be known as less than human. The Eurocentric rationality totally disregarded the educational systems already in place before the arrival of the conquistadores. Everyday life in indigenous communities is still conditioned by this reality, and the version of interculturality reflected in Mexican public policy derives from those in power and is still sustained by their conceptions. It is the authors, not Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 11 Mexican people, who call for opportunities for the needed face-to-face interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups, so that the non-Indigenous people in Mexico come to know the “Other”. They also warn that without such interaction, no dialogue, negotiation, or democratic life will be possible in Mexico. Conclusion David Labaree (2009) has posited that American education has failed to meet it s mission to support society in achieving the goals of democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility among its people. He tells us: … We have set our school system up for failure by asking it to fix all of our most pressing social problems, which we are unwilling to address more directly through political action rather than educational gesture. Then we blame the system when it fails. Both as a society and as individuals, we vest our greatest hopes in an institution that is manifestly unsuited to realizing them. In part the system’s failure is the result of a tension between our shifting social aims for education and the system’s own organizational momentum. We created the system to solve a critical social problem in the early days of the American republic, and its success in dealing with this problem fooled us into thinking that we could redirect the system toward new problems as time passed. But the school system has a mind of its own, and trying to change its direction is like trying to do a U-turn with a battleship. (p. 1) This reference book provides for deeper understanding of relationships between politics and schools and new directions for multicultural education in the 21 st century. James Banks has brought together an impressive array of scholarship. It responds to concerns about educational institutions’ capacity across the globe to continue to serve societal missions during times of great upheaval and change through a form of multicultural education that makes sense for 21 st century, globalized contexts. In chapter after chapter, the contributors demonstrate how history has shaped multicultural education and schooling in many places around the world. The contributors also explicate the importance of recognizing, respecting, and separating historical versions of multicultural education that reflected the intercultural politics of an earlier time from emerging 21st century approaches to multicultural education that are situated in a completely different set of politics. This book is an equalizer in that it reminds readers that their local version of multicultural education is not necessarily the only version. It also illuminates our understanding of multicultural education by pointing out how political action and Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 12 educational gesture collide to shape an approach to education that may have shown great promise originally, but in hindsight also had some shortcomings. This book is essential reading for educators, policy makers, researchers, and scholars interested in the promotion of a multicultural education that is truly participatory, that involves all of their respective constituencies in shaping and benefitting from education for the greater good. Its scope is especially critical for a time when the migration of so many people globally makes it ever more necessary not only to understand one’s local context, but also the context from which newcomers to the community come. Given its price, this book should be made available in academic libraries, or an electronic version should be made available to provide for equitable dissemination globally. References Collins, J. (2009). Social reproduction in classrooms and schools. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38, 38-48. Cook, L. A. (1939). Democracy as an agency of social control. The Elementary School Journal, 40(1), 15-27. Labaree, D. F. (2009). What schools can’t do: Understanding the chronic failure of American school reform. Lecture given September 4, 2009, at the doctoral colloquium on “Schools and Education in Modern Times: Historical Research” at the University of Berne, Switzerland. About the Reviewer Elsie Szecsy is a research professional in the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. Dr. Szecsy has developed curriculum for middle and high school languages other than English, as well as for innovative approaches to graduate study in educational administration that integrate information and communication technologies into their design. She also taught courses in curriculum and assessment, philosophy and history of education in the United States, and introduction to research and evaluation in education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her current areas of interest include innovative practice in second language Szecsy: Banks’s International Companion to Multicultural Education 13 program administration and leadership; and engaging second language learning modalities, such as service learning, task-based language learning, and technology mediation to support equitable access to excellent education. Additional research interests include intersections between language and globalizat ion in education and language and equitable access to educational opportunity. Dr. Szecsy is proficient in Spanish and German. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. Editors Gene V Glass Arizona State University Gustavo Fischman Arizona State University Melissa Cast-Brede University of Nebraska, Omaha http://edrev.asu.edu