Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

224 Language Diversity in the Classroomreflects anything more than some vague feel-good factor? Are we tounderstand, for instance, that in non-multicultural classrooms, children’sexperiences are not drawn upon by sensitive teachers, and that culturalincompetence is raging, even perhaps among those who teach history andsocial studies? Passing over the (presumably related) implication that theselection of teachers on racial, cultural and linguistic grounds is of apriority higher than the traditional search for skills in knowledge andpedagogy, I note that any (indirect) mention of knowledge for pupilsnow, rather than for their teachers occurs only at the very end of theAssociation’s statement. It refers to ‘educational opportunity’, which wemight charitably assume does in fact mean something to do with actualcontent learning, but the piece quickly returns to, and concludes with,the formation of junior social critics.I do not want to be misunderstood here. I am, of course, interested inschools inculcating in their charges cross-cultural sensitivities, defencesagainst intolerance and prejudice, critical capabilities that will alert themto social inequities outside the school gates, and so on. But I am deeplysuspicious of attempts to formalize this, particularly when thoseattempts are phrased in language that reveals little real sensitivity itself,and when the classroom is apparently seen more as an indoctrinationcenter than a place of learning. 4 Here, Olneck (2000: 318) describesmulticultural education (a force, he says, that ‘aims to resist and todisplace Euro-American cultural domination’):Multicultural education integrates content and perspectives originatingin the experiences of nondominant racial, ethnic and linguisticgroups into the curriculum; it enables students to recognize the roleof power in the construction of knowledge; it aims to cultivatedemocratic attitudes, values and behaviors among students; itutilizes culturally congruent pedagogy; and it reorders the schools’status and cultural systems to make them fair to those previouslydisempowered by Euro-American dominance.It would seem that the production of junior cultural commissars leaveslittle time for arithmetic, literature and geography.Setting aside the more bizarre expressions of multiculturalism-ineducation,I believe that the many virtues of that enterprise have alwaysbeen educational virtues, and that beneath them is a critical capacity forindependent and disinterested analysis a quality, again, that has alwaysbeen the cornerstone of education. Here is a representative list of theessential components of effective multicultural education: ‘the promotionof good reasoning, the development of concept of person [sic], the