Sara Mechraoui                                                                                                                     

Dr. Edwina Helton

ENG-W 682
February 20, 2020
Discussion Post V-Analyzing Author’s Projects-Topic-Module Three

Some Takes on Multicultural Pedagogy

Analysis of Inclusion and Teaching Writing Reading—Review your book then choose three
selections to focus on carefully from your first self-selected text. First, define your author’s
overall project. Next, choose key ideas and major concepts to focus on defining. Finally,
explore key ideas and concepts in terms of practical ideas for the classroom.

1. Author’s Overall project and key concepts

To ensure everyone receives equal recognition on the institutional, cultural, societal, and
individual levels tracing the origins of oppression, and the consequences of racist ideologies are
the first steps that the authors of Teaching Diversity and Social Justice took. In a compilation of
chapters on the historical background and innovative pedagogical principles, Maurianne Adams,
Lee Anne Bell, Diane J. Goodman, and Khyati Joshi provide an “interdisciplinary conceptual
framework to analyzing forms of oppression with a set of interactive experiential pedagogical
principles” envisioning a social justice education on individual and societal levels. By taking a
multidimensional, multifunctional, multimodal approach to designing their book, the authors aim
to describe the principles of a social justice education in and out of American society. The
“isms” are described, henceforth, from a historical, political, and cultural perspective along with
practical activities.
Racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism are interwoven throughout the chapters to
account for the complexity of oppression in contemporary life and its effects on individuals and
institutions. The initial chapters choreograph the kaleidoscopic nature of social justice education,
the remaining chapters treat each ism, and end with activities for instructors. Social justice,
diversity, religious oppression, Christian hegemony are among the concepts elaborated in the
book.  My selection of the three intersecting isms racism and white privilege, religious
oppression, and critical self-knowledge is due to their relative importance to institutional, social,
and individual levels of social justice education.
Rooted in the static nature of ‘injustice’ and stratified by the multiplicity of ethnicities, the
American society witnessed points of interactions, contact zones on different levels. Starting
from Lee Anne Bell’s theoretical elaboration on the concept of social justice, equity, and the
constraints that oppression and racism impinge in the realization of the former, the pedagogical
principles of each ism in the other parts of the book are explained. According to Bell, “Social
justice refers to reconstructing society in accordance with principles of equity, recognition, and
inclusion. It requires confronting the ideological frameworks, historical legacies, and
institutional patterns and practices that structure social relations unequally so that some groups
are advantaged at the expense of other groups that are marginalized” (4). Unlike diversity which
describes the natural intrinsic qualities of cultural and societal difference, social justice is a
broader term which accounts for a universal interest in co-existence, co-operation,
understanding, appreciation, and equal material distribution.
Though realizing social justice seems less feasible in a highly pluralistic society, raising-
awareness of the history of oppression, Christian hegemony, white racism is an integral part of
taking action toward ourselves and our society (1). Instead of taking the literal dictionary
definition of oppression, Bell investigates the multifaceted nature of the concept, for her,
oppression is defined through its covert and overt features which characterize it as restrictive,
pervasive, and cumulative; socially-constructed, categorizing, and group-based; hierarchical,
normalized, and hegemonic; intersectional and internalized, and durable and mutable” (6). It is
through appropriate and thorough understanding of oppression that social justice education can
be feasibly-enacted.
In this socio-cultural take on oppression and its consequences on individuals and institutions,
many intersecting factors interact to create socially-constructed hierarchies and categories of
classification. Each group status labels individual actions according to their function in the
society. Among the advantages of belonging to the dominant group is “the luxury to see oneself
as simply an individual” (9). On the other hand, “people who are oppressed are not seen as
individuals but as representatives or members of social groups” (Bell et.al 9). Submission to the
oppressive categorization is defined as hegemony. Gramsci clarifies the complex hegemonic
system in societies where the oppressed “accepts” and participates through “voluntary consent”
(10). Grasping the framework for a socially-just community as described by Bell is utopic given
the changing and inevitable forms of oppression in our world, I believe. Though her call for
change in behaviors, attitudes, aptitudes, and actions toward each other is clearly delineated
through her model, the reality is strikingly contradictory.

2. Practical Ideas for the classroom

I cannot do justice to the host of concepts in the book as they espouse, but I tried to integrate the
most relevant to my research interests. Social justice education course design and facilitation
strategies are carefully chosen. Similar to any curriculum design, the starting questions that
should be asked are the following: Who we are? Who we teach? What we teach? However,
social justice education (SJE) courses are not content-based but their main purpose is to “engage
participants in examining social identities, power, privilege, and structural inequalities in the
society and in their lives” (55). Bell et.al distinguish between design and facilitation as two
interrelated mechanisms to their practical social justice education. To them, design is the sum
total of planning, assessment, and evaluation activities that facilitators implement before, while,
and post intervention with participants (55).

We have learned that expert teachers act as mediators, give more in less time, and contribute to
the betterment of society by making their students effective citizens. We have also designed
syllabi according to our institutions’ curriculum. We designed activities according to learning
needs and the goals/objectives decided in the curriculum. Our evaluation criteria are guided by
rubrics designed according to OUR designated curriculum standards. Reading this book
challenged my preconception about equality. The how’s and what’s of instruction and the
learning-teaching environment are given justice, too. Each element of design and facilitation is
fully-prescribed for educators. Curriculum, students, teaching methods, instructors, and
classroom climate and group dynamics are essential components to insure successful facilitation
of the social justice approach to education.
The journey starts with educators’ self-awareness vis-à-vis their socio-cultural persona,
professional profile, “personalities, and biases” (57). The second component of this utopic
teaching-learning journey is the student. Facilitators should consider the various factors that
affect the learners, “their multiple social identities, interests, expectations, needs, prior
experiences, lived realities, and learning preferences” (57). Choosing appropriate contents and
pedagogical perspectives in SJE is geared to “increasing personal awareness, expanding
knowledge, and encouraging action” (60). Instructors should skillfully attune learning outcomes
to students’ needs, perceptions, and aspirations, and particularly avoid content which presents
stereotypical views on particular groups. Pegadogy-wise, Bloom and Krathwohl’s teaching
model appropriately addresses the learning stages that every learner goes through, Bell et.al
claim.
It follows from the above-stated pre-requisites, practices, and selections of activities that SJE
takes a systems’ approach to education; a whole-world view inside the learning environment.
Assessment and classroom dynamics are equally important to the success of this approach. A
universal instructional design is adopted to fit all types of learners “with or without disabilities”
(67). Both formative and summative assessments are taken, but the aim is “a neutral grading
schema, based on work completed and knowledge demonstrated, rather than views or opinions”
(68). Instructors’ self-assessment is another facet of the dynamism that the systems approach to
education encourages. Aware of the needs to readjust, or change learning objectives and
assessment protocols in the learning process, facilitators should use Student Evaluations of
Teaching and students’ reflections as part of their teaching and assessment strategies.
How do these ideas translate to my future classroom practice? I chose to explore another
dimension that the authors described, as I demonstrate in the remainder of this paper, for my
seminar project. How can teachers’ help students navigate their identities via exposure to various
texts on various religious beliefs? What are the steps teachers should take to design multicultural
lessons? As part of ethnic content, incorporating religion into a multicultural curriculum should
be presupposed by a needs analysis of the learners’ interests. ESL/EFL curricular are already
built on needs analysis. Four levels of ethnic content integration Banks proposes, “the
contributions approach”, “the additive approach”, “the transformative approach”, and “the social
approach”. In the first level, teachers should focus on “heroes, holidays, and discrete cultural
elements”. In the second level, teachers can add “content, concepts, themes, and perspectives to
the curriculum without changing its structure”. If teachers aspire to transform the curriculum,
they should change the curriculum “to enable students to view concepts, issues, events, and
themes from the perspectives of diverse ethnic and cultural groups”. In the fourth level, “the
students make decisions on important social issues and take actions to help solve them” (qt in
Lim Na 12).

The SJE approach tackles the last two levels, which require a transformation of the whole
curriculum. In each chapter, the authors offer four quadrants of activities with detailed learning
objectives for teachers to consider, but the challenge for composition and literature teachers is
what texts should be chosen. As I mentioned in the second post, the Iserian reading stages
unequally benefit ESL learners who demonstrate different levels of information processing and
connections between text and world. I would plan the first lesson as a model of think out aloud
strategy through comprehension, analysis, and synthesis questions about two texts akin to adding
the religious dimension to the curriculum. The two tentative texts for my project are The
Giver by Lois Lowry, and Love, Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed. What resources
should we choose to provide 'repertoire' information for students? Which resources fit all
learners? What visuals, multimedia should we incorporate that would be 'openly' accepted by
learners from other cultures? It is a tedious task yet very rewarding.

3. My personal experience
As an authentic example of an educated immigrant who came to observe, and test prior
assumptions about pluralism, and above all to be part of this society, forms of oppression, white
supremacy, and religious stereotypes that are elaborated in the book answered and obscured
some of my preconceptions. It is true that my head covering was stereotyped overtly by a
teenager, and another person appreciated and questioned my ‘good pronunciation’, but it all
depends on my perceptions of acceptance to be part of the society and to take action to live
peacefully together. White race supremacy and religious oppression are explained in the book to
account for cases like the ones I have experienced.
Racism is, as most of us know, the most noticeable kind of oppression, segregation, alienation,
and hyphenation that individual feelings of superiority act against ‘others’. The denotations of
the term have expanded through the ages to include all types of non-white race, religion,
ethnicity, and education. The authors define racism as “a pervasive system of advantage and
disadvantage based on the socially-constructed category of race…. It is enacted on multiple
levels: institutional, cultural, interpersonal, and individual” (134). Racism is also classified into
covert and overt acts towards others. It can be directly exerted by verbal and physical
discrimination and violence, or implicitly such as “cultural and religious marginalization, color-
blind racism, and tokenism” (136).
White supremacy, which is engraved in all domains, is sustained by a lack of historical
knowledge of the origins of racism. The authors provide thorough historical and recent
investigations of white racism in the US vis-à-vis the original inhabitants of the ‘New World’,
people of color, Europeans, Asians, and Arabs, among others. Their approach to making changes
on individual and socio-political levels is three-fold, “understanding the different ways that
racism operates on diverse communities of color, understanding the cumulative and systemic
nature of white privilege, and discussing central themes in US history that undergird the racism
that continues to operate today” (139). Among the limitations of this approach to social justice
education is its application to the ‘uneducated’ population. Indeed, taking action is a way of sane
socialization practices that all people are required to do; but how can we make sure that all
people understand it, especially the elderly, it is hard to change their fossilized conception of
supremacy and inferiority. Another impediment is the lack of training that instructors have in this
field and ‘foreign’ students’ conceptions of the ‘American white-supremacy’ that they developed
in their homelands due to globalization and the media.
The third dimension that I chose to explore is religious oppression. The example that I mentioned
above about being called ‘ISIS’ because of my hijab (head-cover) is an example of individual
religious prejudice. Adams and Joshi see religious oppression as a “systematic subordination of
non-Christian minority religious groups, and those who are atheists, agnostics, or freethinkers….
It occurs at all levels of society through individual actions, institutional policies, and cultural and
societal norms and values associated with Christianity” (255). Considerations of the interrelated
relationship between religion and other forms of oppression led to the extension of stereotyping
following the dramatic historical events in US history. Ideological judgments of ‘otherness’
intensified interfaith tension in institutional academic settings. Educators are developing courses
that foster religious plurality to reduce bias and enforce cooperation. To this end, the authors of
this chapter aim at building a genuinely pluralistic society that is inclusive of all religions as well
as those who do not belong to any (280).
What? So what? Now what? Answers to this set of questions are the sequencing of activities and
learning objectives when designing a SJE course. The cooperative work in this thoroughly-
designed book strengthened the symbolic character of the American pluralistic society, and
clarified, among others, the basic tenets of strong social justice education and the pedagogical
principles which underlie it. Science proved that we all are equal homosapiens, world religions
confirm that we are all equal under some strong power, common sense tells us that we should
give love to others, but limited education and psychological issues bring about racism,
oppression, and hatred. For a successful social justice education to succeed, the change should
start from us as individuals who raise generations by educating them on the importance of
equality and the drastic effects of prejudice and oppression.

Works Cited

Adams, Maurianne & Bell, Lee Anne et.al. Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice. New York,
Taylor & Francis, 2016.
Lim Na, Yoo. Multicultural Curriculum: Models and Methods in Elementary Art Education.
2015. Georgia State University, MA thesis. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1202&context=art_design_theses accessed 14 February, 2020.

Appendix a

Six internal activities structuring models proposed for instructors and curriculum-developers to
follow:
1. Identify Key Concepts and Establish Learning Objectives Criteria
2. Establish How Learners will Demonstrate Progress
3. Select or Design Learning Activities and Allot Time for Each Activity
4. Organize directions and procedures for each activity and Gather Equipment and Material
needed
5. Develop Processing Format and questions for each activity
6. Sequence learning activities. (63)