Critical multicultural education: Theory and practice

In the Introduction, Sleeter locates her Authored by Christine E. Sleeter positionality within the field of critical multicultural education using what she identifies as “pivot points” (p. 1). These “pivot points” are memories of events throughout her life that lead to racial and racialized awareness, and serve to offer a unique perspective on what brings Sleeter into critical multicultural education discourse and analysis as she wrestles with her place in the field as a White woman. Though locating positionality can often be performative or superficial, here it functions as reflexive awareness. This introduction to the text sets the tone for the rest of the book which is subsequently broken into three parts: (1) defining multicultural education; (2) critical multicultural education and school reform; and (3) personalizing critical multicultural education. In the first segment, Sleeter provides a political and historical backdrop as she briefly traces the westernized popularization of liberal multicultural education during the 1990s. While noting that the public had a brief dalliance with multicultural education, Sleeter suggests its subsequent erosion is attributable to a number of factors including increased neoliberalism, federal educational policies that reinforced standardization, and anti-Islamic sentiment that promoted integration and assimilation into hegemonic culture instead of accepting differences. In defining multicultural education, Sleeter also takes time to trace the schools of thought that contributed to the development and emergence of critical multicultural education such as critical race theory, critical pedagogy, and anti-racist education from thinkers like Henry Giroux (1992), Karl Marx (1868), W.E.B DuBois (1903), Patricia Hill Collins (1994), and Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman (2000). Sleeter writes that multicultural education ultimately has been divorced from its radical roots of protest and social movements of the 1960s and been reimagined and adapted as diluted liberal multiculturalism in the form of performative holiday celebrations that laud diversity without addressing inequitable power dynamics and relations.