To know, to care, and to act. Multiculturalism: Where do we go from here?

Abstract

This study explored the multicultural nature of the curriculum in the Department of Culture and Literacy Studies, an interdisciplinary graduate program in education at a major research institution in the Southwest United States. Initiated in response to my own experiences of cultural discontinuity as a student in the department and fueled by reports of similar experiences from other foreign and minority colleagues, the study considered the notion of multiculturalism in academia from several different perspectives. First, it used traditional process/product methodology to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the content of course syllabi, texts and other resources. Second, it used the phenomenological process of focused life histories to look closely at the extent to which culture and history impact a student's perception and experience of a multicultural curriculum. Third, the study explored Slaughter's (1997) suggested relationship of social movement theory to post-secondary curriculum development by linking the themes emerging from the narrative professional life histories of professors to concepts and practices reflected in their course syllabi. The study sought to situate the multicultural CLS curriculum within the larger social context with which it interacted, and examine its impact from the multiple perspectives of faculty, students, and institutional curricular structures. I established a theoretical framework for this study's examination of multicultural education curriculum with three major dimensions: content, process and orientation. The results of this study provide a basis for understanding the impact of the prior experiences of teachers and students in constructing and responding to curriculum, and may be used to inform departmental policy and classroom practices in university classrooms. The study particularly contributes to curriculum studies by bridging the fields of higher education and multicultural education, by offering a new way of looking at curriculum and curricular practices, and by providing new evaluation criteria that others can use to examine the impact of curriculum and curricular practices on teaching and learning.