Culturally Relevant V.S. Multicultural Education

In class one of the question that was asked in an assignment was "What is culturally relevant teaching and how it was different from multicultural education?"  This question got me thinking a lot because when I continued to research the two, they seemed very similar.



Culturally relevant teaching is a pedagogy where the teachers display cultural competence; skill at teaching in a cross-cultural or multicultural setting.  It also maintains cultural integrity. McCormick (n.d.) also mentions it is an "approach to education that puts culture, language, and background of the student at the forefront instead of the unrecognized background of the classroom.  It is an approach that necessitates inclusion and authenticity"  It was made popular my Gloria Ladson-Billings in the 1990s to empower students to maintain cultural integrity while academically succeeding.  

Multicultural education is a set of strategies and materials that were developed to assist teachers to respond to the many issues created by rapidly changing demographics of their students.  Keengwe (2010) mentions in his article that the goals of multicultural education is centered around raising personal awareness about different categories of individual differences and how these differences enhance or hinder the ways students and teachers interact with one another.  Souto-Manning (2013) mentions that there are many definitions for what is multicultural education, but defines it as "a field of study designed to increase educational equity for all students."

"A distinction must be made between culturally responsive pedagogy and multicultural education. Education that is multicultural can be delivered to a classroom containing students from the same culture; the content presented is represen- tative of various cultural pers- pectives. Culturally responsive pedagogy, on the other hand, must respond to the cultures actually present in the classroom. "

The main difference between multicultural education and culturally responsive pedagogy is that a classroom that has multicultural education is able to teach the children about different cultures even if it is not present in their class.  Culturally responsive will use the different cultures that are present in the classroom to teach the children - the children will be able to teach one another and at the same time learn in-depth other cultures in the process.



References:

Keengwe, J. (2010). Fostering Cross Cultural Competence in Preservice Teachers Through Multicultural Education Experiences. Early Childhood Education Journal, 38(3), 197-204. doi:10.1007/s10643-010-0401-5

McCormick, E. (n.d.). Culturally Relevant Teaching in Application [Multicultural Education PDF].

Rychly, L., & Graves, E. (2012). Teacher Characteristics for Culturally Responsive Pedagogy.Multicultural Perspectives, 14(1), 44-49. doi:10.1080/15210960.2012.646853

Souto-Manning, M. (2013). Multicultural Tools and Strategies for Teaching Young Children. In Multicultural Teaching in the Early Childhood Classroom: Approaches, Strategies, and Tools, Preschool-2nd Grade (pp. 15-24). New York, NY: Teacher College Press.