"Making New Connections": Transformational Multiculturalism in the Classroom

Like an individual, America can be whole only by going back to its roots—all of them. My premise is this: the Native American story—and the holistic mode of thought it embodies—springs from the original root in our homeland. The story is designed to move among the strands of life's web both within the individual and within the community, to restore balance and harmony. Its ancient ways offer a helpful pattern in making new connections among our different people and academic disciplines.

—Marilou Awiakta (1993: 155)

One day this past November as I was driving my six-year-old to school, she leaned toward me, stared at my ears, and stated, "Those are war earrings, Mama." I was startled. Given the proximity to Thanksgiving I had a strong hunch that she was associating my arrow-shaped earrings with "Indians"—defined simplistically as "warriors." We were late for school and I couldn't address my concern until later, but subsequent conversations confirmed my suspicions: six years of home training (children's books by Simon Ortiz, Luci Tapahonso, Joy Harjo, and others; age-appropriate critiques of Disney's Pocahontas, Columbus Day, and so forth) had apparently been wiped out by a single teaching unit in her first-grade classroom: "Indians" had become a monolithic stereotype relegated fully to the past, a past that has nothing to do with "us" here today. I was reminded, once again, of the power—not always positive—of formal education, and why I am committed to transformational multicultural teaching that can explode such stereotypes and expose the "white" supremacist narrative from which they emerge and on which they rely.

The phrase transformational multicultural teaching embodies both my view of multiculturalism and my focus in this essay. I begin with three premises. First, radical, liberatory change—on both individual and collective levels—is urgently needed and in fact possible, although not necessarily easy to achieve. These changes are context-specific and open to negotiation. Second, in the classroom, students and teachers can be changed through our exploration of multicultural issues and themes. Third, although multiculturalism has this potential to bring about change, it cannot do so unless scholars incorporate a more sustained analysis of the underlying dominant-cultural framework and connect our theorizing more closely to our teaching practices. We must go beyond the current emphasis on curricular debates—ones that, perhaps inadvertently, often reinforce the status quo—and develop new pedagogical tactics. As Robert Dale Parker (1993: 105) asserts, "Arguments for an anticanonical multiculturalism have become so canonical a genre unto themselves that the theorizing of how to teach multiculturalism has remained underdeveloped and often even unrecognized as a need." ¹ Laurie Grobman (2001: 225)makes a similar point: "Over the last two decades, coincident with the broadening of the literary canon, multicultural scholars have produced a vast amount of critical and pedagogical literature. Despite these advances, though, and despite a broad consensus about the moral and political goals of our work in and out of the classroom . . . we lack a coherent pedagogy."

Classrooms are, potentially, places of change, and we need multicultural theories that move into and out of our classrooms. We need theories developed and tested in specific teaching situations and then modified based on student reactions and concerns. Don't get me wrong: I know that (abstract) theory can be important. I enjoy reading it, writing it, and discussing it; but I especially appreciate theory when I can make it useful by applying it to my teaching and, more generally, to my life. And so in this essay I do not simply argue that multiculturalism can or should be transformational. I also draw on my own teaching experiences to offer concrete suggestions for ways to enact transformational multiculturalism in the classroom. While I do not propose an overarching "coherent pedagogy," I suggest one component of transformational multiculturalism that I find highly effective: relational teaching tactics that begin with commonalities.

Because "multiculturalism" has become...