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TopMulticultural Education: An Ethical Perspective
Longley (2020) defines multiculturalism as the way a given society deals with cultural diversity. He notes that multiculturalism expresses the view that society is enriched by preserving, respecting, and even encouraging cultural diversity. In theoretical terms, two models of multiculturalism have been metaphorically described as the “melting pot” and the “salad bowl” theories. Historically, these terms were used to describe the assimilation of immigrants into the United States. The “melting pot” theory assumes that various immigrant groups will tend to “melt together,” abandoning their individual cultures and eventually becoming fully assimilated into the predominant society (Longley, 2020). On the other hand, the “salad bowl” theory describes a heterogeneous society in which people coexist but retain at least some of the unique characteristics of their traditional culture. According to this theory, it is not necessary for people to give up their cultural heritage to be considered members of the dominant society. However, it has been argued that maintaining cultural identities under the “salad bowl” model might induce discrimination and prejudice and could lead to “cultural silos” in different communities.
The education sector, embracing formal and higher levels, has been a key example of multiculturalism in action in view of the evolving concept of “multicultural education.” Banks (1997) notes that multicultural education tries to create equal educational opportunities for all students by changing the total school environment to reflect the diverse cultures and groups within a society and within the nation's classrooms. Banks identifies five dimensions of multicultural education: content integration, the knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, an equity pedagogy, and an empowering school culture and social structure (Banks, 1995a). Content integration deals with the extent to which teachers use examples and content from a variety of cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts, generalizations, and issues within their subject areas or disciplines. This knowledge construction process describes how teachers help students to understand, investigate, and determine how the biases, frames of reference, and perspectives within a discipline influence the ways in which knowledge is constructed within it (Banks, 1996).
Arguments advocating multicultural education incorporate a range of ethical, intellectual, social, and cultural values and objectives. Among other things, these include ideals of inclusiveness, pluralism, and mutual respect for all peoples and cultures, integration of facts, histories, cultures, values, structures, perspectives, and contributions of many peoples into the curriculum to build a richer, more complex, more complete, and more accurate knowledge of the human condition. They also embrace fostering comparative analysis, ethno-relative understanding, and informed judgments of the differences and similarities among diverse cultures and peoples and challenging unexamined, biased, and false assumptions about human difference and commonality (Multicultural Resources, 2001). According to Gay (1995), multicultural education is characterized by four developmental stages: inclusion, infusion, deconstruction, and transformation. In addition, multicultural education is argued to incorporate teaching multicultural content within strong historical, as well as regional, contexts, supporting students’ developmental growth in relation to cultural diversity, usually with strong ethical and social dimensions, developing faculty multicultural and interdisciplinary competence across different subject areas and evolving strategies to enhance “referential and conceptual complexity” (Gay, 1995).