Abstract
Teachers often think of curriculum as a static set of written content. However, in college level multicultural education (ME) classes, this kind of curriculum rarely provides the student input necessary for authentic transformation. As a result, pre-service teachers lack the ability to understand how their biases and assumptions negatively impact their students. This phenomenon coupled with pre-service teachers' negative associations with terms like “white privilege” and “deficit perspective” beg the question: How can White educators provide positive experiences that result in high levels of cultural competence among White teachers, who make up the workforce majority? With this question in mind, the author set out to create the “red bandanna experiment,” a lived curriculum-as-racialized-text experience in present time that relies on both teacher and student input. Ultimately, the experiment allowed for her own critical engagement with curriculum artifacts and also gave students a positive outlet for engaging with their own biases and assumptions.
TopIntroduction
On an ordinary Tuesday night, a qualitative methods professor at a southern university asked her doctoral-level class to describe the images conjured in their minds from the brand “Coca Cola.” Answers varied from “America” to “those polar bear commercials” to “freedom and childhood.” In Qatar where the professor frequently conducted research, this exercise resulted in wildly different reactions. Women in Qatar responded angrily to the Coca Cola symbol and discussed oppression and war, a vision of the United States that would make any patriotic person cringe, despite their understanding that these things have been part of United States history as well.
The following Tuesday night, a teacher educator from the qualitative methods class interviewed a regional manager of custodial services at the same university, who mentioned near the interview’s end that people’s perceptions of others are static and cannot be changed. The teacher educator disagreed: Her job as an instructor for a multicultural education class was to help students identify negative perceptions and beliefs they possessed about students of color and reject their previously held deficit perspectives. “That’s a societal issue though, right? That’s pretty much how we’ve all been raised,” the regional manager replied (Anonymous, personal communication, March 31, 2020).
He was right about one thing: From their first years in formal schooling, children have already begun to develop stereotypes and biases regarding gender, race, and ableness (Bigler & Wright, 2014; Skinner & Meltzoff, 2019). Yet daily objects they take for granted can have significant meaning when analyzed through a lens other than the worldview they have adopted either through training or self-selection; daily objects act as curricular artifacts when infused with the values and decisions of the person analyzing them (Remillard & Kim, 2020). Based on the concept of lived curriculum (Aoki, 2005), this positioning of commonplace curriculum materials as historic artifacts has the potential to reinforce the teacher educator’s belief that societal issues can be improved through education. Scholars used to think of curriculum as static and unchanging (Pinar et al., 1995), but a shift in the last decade toward using curriculum as a dynamic tool for equity acknowledges authentic contexts that students embody, propelling them toward deeper self-reflection and understanding of others (Tilley & Taylor, 2013).
It was the fusion of these ideas that resulted in this teacher educator’s focus on creating an experience in her classroom, made up of mostly White preservice teachers and herself, around stories of K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade secondary school) students and the symbolism surrounding a red bandanna. Brown et al. (2015) suggests that “teaching and curriculum are situated in sociocultural contexts that operate inequitably and differently value the knowledge, experiences, values, and identities possessed by students and the communities and families in which they exist” (p. 2). She wanted to create a lived experience to understand the complexities that contribute to her preservice teachers’ resistance to equity topics and motivate them to be educators who care about racial justice in their classrooms. This chapter 1) outlines the background of multicultural education as a discipline; 2) synthesizes curriculum as racialized text embedded within multicultural education; 3) provides an analysis of the vignette the teacher educator wrote to capture the lived curriculum around the cultural artifact of the red bandanna; 4) suggests a definition of curriculum based on these components, and 5) offers a practical application for teacher educators of preservice teachers to enact lived curriculum and increase multicultural literacy in their own classrooms.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Metacognition: Ability to think through your own thought processes, resulting in both self-awareness of your creations and your own identity formation, biases, and assumptions.
Curriculum-as-Lived (Lived Curriculum): Teachable moments or lessons with intentional concepts but that are lived out in real time as real students affect the outcomes.
Implicit Curriculum: Part of curriculum-as-lived that teachers do not intentionally add to their plans that can have both positive and negative impacts on student learning (i.e., the state of school upkeep that sends students the message their education is not worth investing in).
Vignette: A short piece of writing that leaves readers with an evocative impression of the author’s feelings and experience of one particular event.
Multicultural Education: Field of study that acknowledges the growing diversity of the United States and attempts to recognize and be more inclusive to people of color.
Curriculum-as-Plan: Structured plans made by a teacher before a class period that guide students through a series of instructional activities to accomplish a set of learning objectives.
White-Washed: Refers to curriculum that tells narratives from the perspective of White people without including perspectives from people of color or that centers White middle to upper class cultural norms.
Pre-Service Teachers: K-12 teachers in training who have graduated from high school and are in the certification process to become teachers.
Urban Education: Field of study historically focused on schools in dense, metropolitan areas but has more infamously been used as a proxy for schools where predominantly Black and Latinx students attend.