Multicultural Resources for Children
America is a land of diversity: Almost everyone who resides here can be traced from somewhere else. It was commonly referred to as a melting pot, requiring of its new residents ideals of assimilation and a shedding of the culture, language, and customs of their homeland. The successes of the Civil Rights Movement birthed a new perspective: that each individual should be encouraged to express their cultural uniqueness; that to be an “American” didn’t require one to look, talk, and act like the majority culture.
Now, it is more common to equate our country to a salad bowl, with each individual component existing as a distinct part of a dynamic whole. This understanding encourages a more democratic and inclusive perspective of our nation. Find tools for ushering in these ideas to the classroom below and adapt them to your audience as necessary.
Importance
- Multicultural Education: A brief description of multicultural education, its perceived pros and cons, an overview of what a successful multicultural program might look like, what it hopes to achieve, and why it’s important. The author reflects on the diminished hate, fear, and intolerance that can accompany multicultural education, but also notes its possibility for divisiveness and increased animosity.
- A Synthesis of Scholarship in Multicultural Education: Geneva Gay’s article covers the vast topic of multicultural education. She offers varying definitions, highlights its need in the field of education, discusses its various approaches, and cites some of its recorded effects.
- Multicultural Education Introduction: A short article citing various sources that emphasizes the changing faces within our country, and thus, our classrooms. It argues that multicultural education serves to diminish the divisions that separate students along racial, cultural, financial, social, and gender lines to equalize the educational playing field.
- The Scope of Multicultural Education: Mary Stone Hanley’s article defines five different educational approaches to multicultural teaching, including an attempt to raise the scholastic success of a certain target group, the observation of social and cultural differences between groups without addressing other facts such as political or economic power, and using education as a tool to create a more egalitarian society through instilling in students the responsibility of being agents of change. She also touches on the necessary skills required to understand racial, cultural, gender, and power interactions: critical thought and analysis and the need for multiple points of view to obtain a more complete understanding of history.
- Effective Teaching for the Multicultural Classroom: A brief article by Lee Knefelkamp that touches on creating an equitable education experience while sensitizing students to multiple perspectives. He explains that tapping into different learning styles and exploring how these subjectivities affect individual viewpoints can help students relate and connect to others. He presents this exercise as a platform on which to discuss and analyze complex societal issues.
Learning Materials
- I Never Forget a Face Matching Game: A game in which players must flip over two of the same tiles in order to “collect” them – the player with the most pairs at the end of the games wins. This game generates awareness of the global community while teaching children the basics of memory and game playing skills.
- Passport to Culture Board Game: This game features trivia cards encompassing various countries. Children learn fun and random facts about different countries while stimulating critical thinking and increasing global awareness.
- Roots & Branches: A CD of 38 songs and singing games from artists from 23 different cultures. Featuring songs from Brazil, Cambodia, Iran, Ireland, and many others, this collection can be used in combination with the supplemental text to teach children about cultures around the world through music.
- Kids Around the World Flashcards: Flashcards designed to teach children about different cultures and countries. Covering 28 countries, each flashcard depicts a male and female child in traditional dress and offers fun facts about the country they represent.
- Exploring Culture through Art and Myth: A site dedicated to exploring world myths through art. This site covers multiple cultures and offers students a chance to compare and contrast two or more art objects along various channels in a printable essay.
Books
- 50 Multicultural Children’s Books: A list of recommended books compiled by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center. It is broken down by age group and covers a broad range of authors and cultures.
- Children’s Books For Holidays and Cultural History Months: The New York Public Library’s recommended children’s reading lists for several holidays and cultural history months. Included are Hispanic, Asian-Pacific American, and African American selections.
- Scholastic’s Guide to Choosing Multicultural Books for the Classroom and Recommended Readings: A list of multicultural books broken down by culture, offering guidelines on choosing appropriate books as well as notable authors. Each section also includes brief input from a selected author.
- Books Approved by the Notable Books for a Global Society Committee: The 2006 book list approved by the Children’s Literature and Reading Book Selection Program, ranging from elementary through high school levels. This is the most recent, complete list offered, but they have lists dating back to 1996. These books go through a rigorous approval process and are required to present, among other criteria, an accurate cultural and protagonist portrayal, rich inter-cultural interaction, have an enduring lifespan, and they must stimulate analysis and discussion.
- UnderstandingPredjuce.org’s Children’s Books Recommendations: A book list categorized by culture and target age group. Topics include the civil rights movement with sections on Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, interracial connections, and immigration.
Activities
- A New Perspective on the first Thanksgiving: A lesson plan and activity based on the book, 1621 A New Look at Thanksgiving. Geared toward children grades 5-8, the suggested lesson plan helps teach children about the subjective nature of history and the necessity of multiple perspectives to obtain a clearer understanding of its events. The supplemental activity is suggested for grades K-5 and helps students to understand the diverse reactions of the Wampanoag people by presenting a simplified oral version of European arrival to invoke personal student response.
- Why Frogs and Snakes Never Play Together: A three-act pourquoi play to be acted out, or for grades K-5, demonstrating the existence of prejudice and the positive results of overcoming that intolerance. Children are presented with discussion questions recapping what happened in the play and are offered the opportunity to write a more positive ending.
- What Can We Learn from a Box of Crayons: A physical representation of the beauty of diversity. Influenced by the book, The Crayon Box That Talked, this exercise demonstrates how bland our world would look without variation.
- Discussing Race and Combating Discrimination: A lesson plan designed for higher grades, as topics require a more advanced understanding and some of the material covered may be disturbing to a younger audience. Includes handouts and other sources to educate students on the topic of race, its underlying influences, and examples of institutionalized racism. The lesson plan concludes with several activities illustrating ways we can fight racism on a personal, local, and global level.
- Triangles Are Not Bad!: An in-class play to be acted out with shape cutouts, or, adapted for higher grades, 3-D models act out Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott. In a world of different shapes, all taught to dislike the other, a group of little circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles accidentally create something wonderful when they come together. Along with the discussion questions, children are taught to explore stereotypes about themselves and others and realize that these stereotypes are based on presumptions, not on factuality.
- America’s Melting Pot: A year-long, student-driven project designed to highlight the different cultures that make up the class’s, and ultimately, America’s, diversity. Students are asked to talk about their cultural background over the course of a month, presumably sharing more and more with each sharing session. The class then decides what they’d like to learn more about within each culture, and each is explored through different activities focused on dance, music, foods, and oral history.