Empowerment Through Multicultural Education: From Reproduction to Contestation of Social Inequality Through Schooling. (SUNY series, Teacher Empowerment and School Reform) - Softcover

"This volume is a powerful indictment of our public educational system. U.S. teachers and policymakers can no longer ignore issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and handicap in their teaching. We can no longer afford as a nation to stick our heads in the sand and label these issues as someone else's--their--problem. Teacher educators and others centrally concerned with schooling must directly address issues raised in this book." -- Mary Louise Gomez, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This book reframes questions about student diversity by probing the extent to which society serves the interests of all, and by examining the empowerment of members of oppressed groups to direct social change. It examines the empowerment of children who are members of oppressed racial groups, lower class, and female, based on the ideas of multicultural education. A series of ethnographic studies illustrates how such young people view their world, their power to affect it in their own interests, and their response to what is usually a growing sense of powerlessness as they mature. The authors also conceptualize contributions of multicultural education to empowering young people, and report investigations of multicultural education projects educators have used for student empowerment. Issues in teacher education are also discussed.