Affirmation, Solidarity and Critique: Moving

¶ … Affirmation, Solidarity and Critique: Moving Beyond Tolerance in Education" by Sonja Nieto. The author seems to have an extensive background in aspects of multicultural education and I found the article to be very informative and instructive. The author presented four levels of multicultural education:

Tolerance

Acceptance

Respect & Affirmation

Solidarity

The objective of this work was to assess how the article's content applied to my particular school in regard to the school' support base for diversity. How the article applied to my school was immediately considered while I was reading it. I am currently an ESL teacher but I have only worked for my particular school for a short 3 months. Our program is far from a monocultural program. "Monocultural education describes a situation in which schools structures, policies, curricula instructional material and even pedagogical strategies are primarily representative of only the dominant culture. In most United States schools, it can be defined as 'the way things are.'" (Nieto)

Quite the opposite, my school's level of multicultural education may be considered to be extremely diverse because the majority of our students are Korean, some Japanese, some Turkish, a few Russians and a few Arabic students. Because of this mix, we have had to work in a well established and diverse program. We have an International Day on an annual basis where students and teachers bring different kinds of foods from their own or different cultures. These are seen as very successful and the students look forward to them. I believe there is also a great deal of respect and acceptance which in turn promotes solidarity in the school.

Our teachers are diverse so they are also very tolerant in regard to the various needs of students. but, even with our diverse student base, unfortunately our curricula still falls into a base described by Nieto. For example, our Social Studies programs are focused on teaching our students disconnected facts about mostly dead White men. Our students "learn virtually nothing about the contributions, perspectives, or talents of women or those outside the mainstream culture" (Nieto, 2002).

I believe our programs could do more than an annual get together. I suggest that parents become more active participants where they may present to various classes or event the entire school some cultural insights about how and where they grew up. Because our programs have such great diversity, we could literally become aware of many new cultures. I think that the parents could also do more volunteer work with or for the school. Classroom aides or lunch aids could help children see other' at work and in the school setting. But the most important, is that the schools address the lack of diversity in the text books. For example, we teach almost nothing about Muslim or Middle Eastern cultural perspectives in our curriculum. We are not trying to convert students, only make them more aware.