0.4 Multicultural education  (Page 4/12)

Assignment 1: multicultural reflection

Classroom exercise and practice

This activity has several steps. (Different combinations of these steps will be suitable for different audiences fromelementary-school students to teachers.) Here are the steps to follow:

1. Defining "Multicultural" - Start by underlining the prefix "multi" and ask your students what this prefix means. Responseswill include "many," "varied or various," "different," etc. Affirm all answers, and then sum them up. This portion should take only a couple ofminutes. Next, move on to "cultural." What does this term mean? Encourage students to define "cultural" both in terms of a dictionary-typedefinition and what it means to them individually.

2. Drawing Out the Dimensions of "cultural" - Tell thestudents you would like them to explore the understanding of "cultural" more deeply. Ask them to suggest all dimensions of culture they can think of,encouraging them to reflect on their own culture and the dimensions of that culture with which they identify. There are several effective ways ofaccomplishing this task. You can either have students call out these aspects of culture when they think of them (perhaps even using a studentvolunteer to list them under "MULTICULTURAL." You might also decide to simply go around the room, person by person, asking for suggestions.

There are literally endless dimensions to culture, and this will be reflected in the answers. It is likely that an influx ofanswers will come right away, but then the rate of response will slow down considerably. This often happens after some of the more surface-levelcultural aspects are suggested such as music, food, etc. Prod the students to think a little more deeply about how they define their culture. Allow forsome short silences, or suggest some deeper dimensions, including faith, religion, values, language, family structure, and others.

It will be important to get as many suggestions for this list as possible. Be sure to note that this part of the activity could go onindefinitely, highlighting the complexity of "culture." Also, point out how intertwined some of the dimensions are, illustrating how simplistic itis to make a judgment about somebody based on one cultural dimension of the person. This step should take 10-15 minutes.

3. What's Missing? In our experience, 4 out of 5 times this activity is used, several interesting cultural dimensions are notmentioned by participants. Ironically, these are the very dimensions that are most often associated with multicultural education: race, gender,sexual orientation, social class. If your class or workshop does not suggest one or more of these items, point this out only after the list has been generated and ask the participants why they didn't think of these dimensions. It is often the casethat when participants are suggesting items for the list from their own experience, and thus through how they define themselves, identifiers suchas race, gender, etc. do not come directly to their minds. But, if they are suggesting items for the list based on how OTHERS define them, or how theydefine OTHERS, these items immediately come to mind.