Critical Multicultural Education : Theory and Practice

“Sleeter effortlessly weaves together analyses of personal narratives, anecdotes, history, case studies, and political events and social movements to argue for a reanimated critical multicultural education theory and practice; and in doing so, Sleeter shows just how deep the roots of the multicultural education tree lie.” ―Teachers College Record

This volume collects Christine Sleeter’s core work focusing on critical multicultural education, situating culture and identity within an analysis of power and racism.

Multicultural education arose in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and, in its inception, shared with that movement a focus on eradicating both interpersonal and systemic racism. The problem this book takes up is that, over time, many people have come to understand and enact multicultural education in ways that evade grappling directly with racism. This dilution has happened for several reasons, including White teachers’ rearticulations of multicultural education as “getting along” or learning to be colorblind and neoliberal reforms that have reduced it to a celebration of cultural diversity while maintaining silence about racism.

Critical Multicultural Education includes ten of Sleeter’s articles that explicitly locate multicultural education within critical understandings of race, racism, and colonialism, offering both theoretical and practical discussions of what that means.

Book Features:

• Brings together, in one volume, the full arc of work by a leading scholar in multicultural education.
• Offers a unique focus on why multicultural education needs to be critical and what it means to be critical.
• Directly connects theory with practice by offering vignettes of practice following theoretical or conceptual discussions.
• Examines how the power of Whiteness and racial capitalism has forestalled progressive education and social change.
• Spans multicultural education from its inception in the 1970s through the current attacks on Critical Race Theory, showing how it has been targeted, ignored, or misused.

Christine E. Sleeter is professor emerita in the College of Education at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her books include Critical Race Theory and Its Critics, Transformative Ethnic Studies in Schools, and Un-Standardizing Curriculum.