Defining And Designing Multiculturalism

Just outside a major urban center on the east coast of the United States an activist group struggled to create a system-wide multicultural education program. Through a seven-year qualitative study, Pepi Leistyna documents and interprets—via a critical pedagogical lens—this group's work with professional development, curriculum and instruction, faculty and staff, and community outreach. Through engaging examples, stories, and participant voices, Leistyna offers a comprehensive, accessible ethnography with implications for others who might attempt similar sorts of systemic change.

Higher education is facing a perfect storm as it contends with changing demographics, shrinking budgets and concerns about access and cost, while underrepresented groups – both in faculty ranks and students – are voicing dissatisfaction with campus climate and demanding changes to structural inequities.This book argues that, to address the inexorable changes ahead, colleges and universities need both to centralize the value of diversity and inclusion and employ a set of strategies that are enacted at all levels of their institutions. It argues that individual and institutional change efforts can only be achieved by implementing “diversity as a value” – that is embracing social change efforts as central and additive rather than episodic and required – and provides the research and theoretical frameworks to support this approach, as well as tools and examples of practice that accomplish change.The contributors to this book identify the elements that drive successful multicultural initiatives and that strengthen the effectiveness of campus efforts to dismantle systemic oppression, as well as the individual and organization skills needed to manage difference effectively. Among these is developing the capacity of administrators, faculty and student affairs professionals as conscious scholar practitioners to sensitively manage conflicts on campus, deconstruct challenging structures and reconstruct the environment intentionally to include in respectful ways experiences of historically marginalized groups and non-dominant ways of being in the world. The books’ focus on developing capacities for multicultural competence aligns with higher education’s increasing emphasis on civic engagement and institutional goals promote skills to interact in meaningful and responsible ways around difference, whether of people, ideas or identities.Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives provides guiding principles and practical strategies to successfully transform higher education to become fully inclusive and advance the success of all constituents and stakeholders.

This volume presents innovative and contemporary methodologies and intervention protocols for the enhancement of positive psychological attributes in multicultural professional and organizational contexts. Most methods, models and approaches that underpin positive psychological interventions are confined to clinical samples, closed systems or monocultural contexts, which restrict their applicability to particular contexts. Extensive practical intervention protocols, designs and methods which usually accompany first draft intervention papers are condensed into brief paragraphs in final manuscripts or removed in their entirety. This, in turn, reduces their potential for replicability or adoption by consumers, practitioners, or industry. This volume develops guidelines for enhancing positive psychological attributes, such as positive moods (e.g. positive affect; life satisfaction), strengths (e.g. gratitude; humour), cognitions (e.g. hope; optimism) and behaviours (e.g. emotional regulation; positive relationship building) within various multicultural contexts. Thereby, it shows how positive psychology interventions can be replicated to a wide-range of contexts beyond those in which they were developed.

Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue (CTD) is a publication of the American Association of Teaching and Curriculum (AATC), a national learned society for the scholarly fields of teaching and curriculum. The fields includes those working on the theory, design and evaluation of educational programs at large. University faculty members identified with this field are typically affiliated with the departments of curriculum and instruction, teacher education, educational foundations, elementary education, secondary education, and higher education. CTD promotes all analytical and interpretive approaches that are appropriate for the scholarly study of teaching and curriculum. In fulfillment of this mission, CTD addresses a range of issues across the broad fields of educational research and policy for all grade levels and types of educational programs.

Through White Noise is structured around poetry and personal stories about living in liminal space that requires and encourages cultural sensitivity, awareness, and commitment for a just society. A prominent theme in this book is the challenge of reconciling the ideal of Canadian multiculturalism with experiences of marginalization and stereotyping. Before her arrival, Khalida imagined her new homeland as a multicultural rainbow arched over a diversity of races, beliefs and practices. Entering Winnipeg in the middle of winter, she was greeted with a white world: white people, white, snow-covered ground, white trees and a pale blue sky. Jon is a Caucasian professor from England who has a privileged position as an academic citizen. He felt responsible for enhancing his students? awareness of their perceptions, and the role they have in their teaching practices. Reena is a South Asian professor living in Quebec whose voice is combined with other educators as they address different racisms. The book inspires readers to embrace teaching and learning relationships that respect the dynamic spaces we live in locally and globally. Photo collage by Ray Dirks - Director Mennonite Heritage Centre Gallery, Winnipeg.

This book elucidates the complexities, contradictions, and confusion surrounding adolescence in American culture and education.

The presence of women of color within the practical applications of social science research findings is severely limited, since spaces where and when women of color enter the arenas of research methodology, research question and intervention design and knowledge generation is often that of the other. Benefitting by Design addresses this limitation. It does so by locating the experience and knowledge of women of color as its central theme, with sections of the text referring to emerging trends that attend to the need for greater representation of women of color in research and academic settings. A key theme is the dislodging of currently accepted positions for the experience of women of color as marginalized, and subsumed under normative modes of examination to central positions in areas of social science research and clinical practice. This is in response to the typical assumption of the need to ‘fix’ women of color be it based on their immigration status, sexual orientation, race, culture, class or spiritual practice. Benefitting By Design attends to the salient contexts of the lives of women of color from an emic perspective, by providing models for addressing the limitations that result from exclusion, and strategies for centering the experiential knowledge of women of color in social science research and practice that is designed for their benefit.

This important study introduces the key theories of national identity, and relates them to the broad fields of product, graphic and fashion design. Javier Gimeno-Martinez approaches the inter-relationship between national identity and cultural production from two perspectives: the distinctive characteristics of a nation's output, and the consumption of design products within a country as a means of generating a national design landscape. Using case studies ranging from stamps in nineteenth century Russian-occupied Finland, to Coca-Cola as an 'American' drink in modern Trinidad and Tobago, he addresses concepts of essentialism, constructivism, geography and multiculturality, and considers the works of key theorists, including Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm and Doreen Massey. This illuminating book offers the first comprehensive account of how national identity and cultural policy have shaped design, while suggesting that traditional formations of the 'national' are increasingly unsustainable in an age of globalisation, migration and cultural diversity. Javier Gimeno-Martinez is Lecturer in Design Cultures at the VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands.