Understanding Youth Culture
The target audiences for this article are teachers and counselors in the k-12 educational system, especially those working with younger children.
This is a really basic article that introduces the idea that multicultural education fails to recognize biracial and multicultural students. I had never thought about this myself, but the arguments that the author introduces are interesting. Wardel asserts that the idea of multicultural education is to teach students about different cultures and to emphasizes having pride in ones (monoracial/monoethnic) culture. What he believes is the problem is the assumption that teachers and counselors make that children will have only one culture to be proud of. As a result students of mixed heritages become invisible within the context of multicultural education. The article calls for educational administrators to change teacher training and curriculum to incorporate more training about issues unique to this emerging population.
While the focus of this article is on the k-12 educational environment, I think there are some things that higher education can take away from it as well. I think that as higher ed. administrators, teachers, and counselors, we all need to look at our own assumptions and see if we too are delivering a multicultural education that emphasizes monoracial or monoethnic ideals to the exclusion of different combinations of race and ethnic heritage and experience.
Full Article: Understanding Youth Culture - Journal of Educational Leadership, Dec 1999 - Jan 2000, V 57, No 4, Pg 68-72
Posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 in the following categories: 2000, Journal Article, Students/Family Resources, Wardel
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