According to edchange.com, Multicultural Education is what connects one’s education has instructions in which are designed for a communities culture in which includes various races within an educational system. It is an approach to teaching and learning that leads to building respect and creating cultural pluralism in all racial societies around. This kind of education helps to increase and include all races in ones classroom environment.
In my opinion, I find that this is a very limiting definition to what Multicultural Education actually is. To me this definition is just includes what Multicultural Education is regarding race and I, myself know that it does not just regard that whatsoever.
On the other hand edglossary.org has a much more wide scale definition of what this type of Education actually is. According to edglossary.org, Multicultural Education is referred to any kind of education that includes multiple perspectives, histories, values, texts of individuals who come from different backgrounds culturally. Within the classroom level, culture can be defined in any aspects of which include one’s nationality, ethnicity, race, language, class, gender, religion and sexual orientation. Now this is the kind of definition I like to see regarding Multicultural Education. As an adult hard-of-hearing person, I feel that when I was a child, I did not get as many opportunities as I would of liked to explain to my fellow classmates what it meant to have someone in their class who had my disability. What I mean by this is that when I was growing up, all that there was to incorporate multicultural education would regard race and ethnicity, but nothing regarding gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, etc.
Although, I don’t think that I suffered from this loss too much but I do think that it would have been easier to understand others who are challenged differently from myself and for others to understand how I’m challenged differently from them as well. Thankfully there are other definitions out there that have improved over time and it makes me think that teachers out there are getting better at realizing that diversity is far less limited to just race and such, it’s something that applies to all individuals one way or another.
*Sources http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/keith.html#pros
http://edglossary.org/multicultural-education/
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