Goals of Multicultural Education

What are the goals of multicultural education? This question has stimulated much discussion in the past two decades, yielding a large body of response literature, and generating much theoretical and practical advice for multicultural educators. It seems to us that the various formulations proposed by advocates of multicultural education do not conflict so much as they map the topic differently. In order to assess whether and how well our Humanities 299 project met goals of multicultural education, we have synthesized and adopted formulations that seem most relevant to the developmental learning and teaching stages of students and professors at Central Oregon Community College (COCC).

Central Oregon students are geographically isolated and relatively homogeneous in culture and ethnicity, have had no or very limited cross-cultural experiences, and (by most student reports) have had no or little pre-college education in U.S. multicultural and/or non-Western cultural topics. In addition, many COCC professors in the Humanities Department worked their way to doctorates in English in the 1970's and 1980's in graduate programs that did not emphasize multicultural and non-Western literatures and cultures. We took up these studies afterwards, on our own and together, over the last decade, we have launched several new courses and sequences in American Multiculturalism, Non-European Cultures and Literatures, and Women's and Gender Studies--as well as strengthened the multicultural and international content of existing sequences in American Literature, British Literature, and Western World Literature--at Central Oregon Community College. These changes were stimulated and successfully implemented by drawing upon the rapidly accumulating and persuasive body of literature advocating multicultural education (see Mapping Theories of Multicultural Education). We were encouraged and emboldened to proceed by articles such as Reed Way Dasenbrock's "Teaching Multicultural Literature" (1992), which conceives the multicultural classroom as an arena of learning and change; and Geneva Gay's "Bridging Multicultural Theory and Practice" (1995), which presents a developmental model of multicultural education, arguing that the participation of teachers and students at each developmental stage should be valued.

To guide our conduct in such studies, we have used the formulation advocated by Jacqueline Jones Royster in "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own" (College Composition and Communication Feb. 1996). In this article, Royster calls for a new paradigm of "voice"--self-reflective, responsible, and responsive to the "converging of dialectical perspectives"--at any site of "cross-boundary discourse." Differences in "subject position"--e.g., of cultural identities and contexts, ways of knowing, language abilities, experiences and perspectives--need to be carefully considered among all participants in such dialogues, as do the social and professional consequences of our cross-boundary discourses. Royster articulates a code of behavior--respectful, responsible, and reciprocal--for such discourse that will enable us to talk with culturally different others--not "for, about, or around" them--a vision of genuine dialogue that makes open, respectful listening as important as talking and talking back. Cora Agatucci has summarized Royster's article to isolate six major recommendations that constitute Royster's "Code of Conduct for 'Cross-Boundary Discourse.'"

Royster's formulation has heavily influenced our conduct and strategies for teaching and learning in various multicultural and world literature courses that we now offer at Central Oregon Community College (see defined course Competencies for sequences in American Multiculturalism, Non-European Cultures and Literatures, and Introduction to Studies in Women and Gender). As we conceived Humanities 299, this multicultural web-writing class would provide our students with a particular set of skills and new technological tools for engaging in "cross-boundary" multicultural discourse on the very public World Wide Web, enabled by Dasenbrock's conception of the multicultural classroom as an arena of learning and change; appropriate to developmental learning and teaching stages in multicultural/international culture studies; and conducted, as Royster recommends, with respect, responsiveness, and reciprocity.