Critical multicultural education (CCE) is a term that has recently been used by many educators to describe a range of teaching practices which incorporate diversity into their classes.
In the UK, the CCE curriculum, which is now in its fifth year, is a mixture of traditional and contemporary subjects and focuses on the promotion of the idea that all students should be given equal opportunities. But CCE is still a controversial area in the UK, and many schools are unsure whether to allow it to take place, or to even go through the process at all.
Schools are being forced to adopt a more critical approach to multicultural education, and it’s a bit like the UK’s multicultural education debate. We’ve talked about this a lot on our blog (see our blog archive for the links), and it’s a good thing that schools are being forced to think critically about the subject.
To get a taste of what a multicultural education is like, check out this short, but very informative video. Even if some of the kids in the video are pretty bad, they are still the minority group you are most likely to encounter in any school when you go there. Its the ones you meet in the playgrounds and the ones you spend hours talking to while waiting for your lunch.
In the video, there are teachers talking about how multicultural education forces them to change the way they think and the way they teach, which is a scary thought. I can’t imagine that any of these teachers have any idea that they are teaching in a class so filled with kids who come from the same cultures as them. And if they have, they are trying hard to teach students who don’t understand what they are teaching.
Maybe we have it backwards. The multicultural education we are now getting used is not necessarily the same from the teachers who taught the students. It is the students who are taught in a way that is biased against them. We are the ones who are getting this biased education. The teachers are trying hard to get these students to understand the differences, but they cant. It is the students who are always the ones who have to be the ones to blame when something goes wrong.