Research Paper

The Hunger for Art and Multiculturalism in Classrooms

 

What is being seen as society observes the majority of classrooms today? Colors. The variations of colors that permeate through the skin. From satin, peach pearl, to different values of earth tones, and rich chocolate coat these human beings with potential. These human beings are titled students, who are active participants in education and successful future contributors of society.

            Students that dominate the classrooms reflect their own culture and background. Each face is a mirror image of their heritage. As these students savor their history, they feed society with cultural knowledge to have a better understanding of the world. What better way to assert cultural knowledge and human understanding than in a classroom? This is the practice of multicultural education, an aim to create equal educational opportunities from diverse social, economic, and racial backgrounds. Therefore, educators have responsibilities to attain and execute historical studies, concepts, and challenges to their students. This is an immense task to follow through in an urban community as they suffer social economics and the decline of test scores. How do educators trigger their students’ imagination and teach problem solving? The answer is though the creative process. In essence, the arts are a vital tool in a multicultural education practiced in elementary schools.

            Multicultural education has been redefined throughout the decades and is reaching a new light. According to James Banks, the most prolific writer of textbooks for teachers on multiculturalism used the term “multiethnic” education until 1986. Earlier there was “cultural pluralism” and “intercultural education” in which cultures of immigrant and minority groups was treated (8). The mission of a multicultural education is to have students acquire the knowledge and skills in interacting with a diverse and ever changing community. Even today, lesbian, gay, and women studies are making a big impact. Multicultural education promotes America as a melting pot instead of a salad bowl, in which minorities maintain their own characteristics.

           

The term multiculturalism becomes a new image of a better America, without prejudice and discrimination, in which no cultural theme linked to any racial or ethnic and complex intermingling of themes from every minority ethnic and racial group, and from indeed the whole world (11).

           

Gollnick and Chinn addresses the proposes of a multicultural education and how it is essential to learning through self-concept by understanding a low degree of stereotypical thinking (including cultural groups from all over the world), the ability to perceive cultural and national interpretations perspectives on events, values, behaviors, taking pride in oneself, and respecting all people (Gollnick and Chinn). There is a hunger for self-identity though self-discovery in multicultural education. The question of how the methodology of multiculturalism is going to be successfully practiced is in a new category of its own.