Saturday, September 5, 2009

Multicultural Teaching


Many people consider South Florida to be a multicultural stew. Compared to other parts of the country, South Florida is much more culturally diverse than lets say West Virginia. I came to this country from a young age. Spanish was my language at home and everywhere else. My elementary school was dominated by mostly hispanic-americans. Being hispanic myself I can remember noticing the many differences in cultures.
There were different versions of Hispanic cultures and I learned that speaking the same language did not necessarily mean having the same culture. Throughout my school years, my teachers incorporated multicultural teaching methods. The additive approach and the contribution approach were the only two that I remember clearly being used. The contributions approach, in which the teacher would teach the importance of a hero’s contributions like Booker T. Washington, was used in cohesion with the additive approach. During February the classrooms and topics would concentrate around african american heritage. October centered around Columbus’ voyages and other hispanic topics.
Throughout the years that I was in school, multicultural lessons were always taught the same way, with a month dedicated to specific studies. I noticed that it was always the same “black history month” and “hispanic heritage month.” I never had a “Haitian heritage week” or “European heritage day.” It seemed to me that by having students learn about other cultures, they only taught the related cultures. I feel like the point in multicultural education is lost when you only include two cultures each and every time. There are probably less students that know about asian cultures than there are asian students in our south florida classrooms.
I believe that our education system is going in the right direction towards incorporating multicultural education but there is significant progress to be made. Perhaps incorporating more foreign language classes at the elementary school level would inspire students to lean more about other cultures. For now we can continue to hope that the current state of multicultural education is doing its job and helping students of all cultures appreciate other ones.

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