As I’ve noted before, I grew up an all-white farm town in Illinois, where the closest thing we had to a minority was the family that owed the Chinese restaurant. My school was so far from teaching multiculturalism in the curriculum, that the educators most likely never even heard of the word ‘multicultural.’ I guess they thought what doesn’t apply to the students (at that moment) doesn’t need to be taught. What they weren’t doing was preparing their students' minds for the future. A future that consists of many different cultures.
Getting out of that small uni-cultural town was probably the best thing for me. Living and working here in Nashville has made me feel more like a person of the world. As an educator in a diverse school, I realize how every single student brings something unique to the classroom community.
Hirsh’s article opened my eyes to the two different definitions of multiculturalism (cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism). Cosmopolitanism focuses on the various traits that make up an individual’s person while ethnocentrism identifies ethnicity as the essence of the person (Hirsh, 1992)
The author begins with the assumption that all people are in agreement that children should be taught from an early age to respect all people and should be taught the basic foundations of diverse people and cultures and classroom learning cannot go forward effectively unless all students in the class share some common points of reference. Because I experienced elementary school with a lack of any diversity as well as instruction on the material, I feel like I completely missed out on this.
He goes on to discuss the difficulty teachers have in dealing with the difficulty of “bridging the vagueness about what children need to learn in each grade
causes the learning gap to widen between haves and have nots” (Hirsh, 1992) Because of these gaps the idea of having a core curriculum, particularly in the early grades of school, seems to be a somewhat logical solution to this problem. Hirsh points out that the core curriculum would mostly pertain to the literature and history portions of the curriculum (which would give all children the same common foundations and points of reference) This curriculum would also only take up fifty percent of the total curriculum, leaving teachers the other half of their time to individualize their instruction for local variation, including integration with a more ethnically-centered curricula.
Exhibited in Hirsh’s curriculum, the Core Knowledge Sequence, are these three characteristics: 1) It encourages knowledge of and sympathy towards the diverse cultures of the world. 2) It fosters respect for every child's home culture as well as for the cosmopolitan school- based culture. 3) It gives all children competence in the current system of language and allusion that is dominant in the nation's economic and intellectual discourse.
Hirsh ends his article by stating the cosmopolitanism is the “only valid multiculturalism for the modern era. Only a cosmopolitan, centrist core curriculum can enable all children to be well educated” (1992)
I was so intrigued by the idea of cosmopolitanism that I conducted some research of my own on the subject.
Martha Nussbaum writes in her essay, Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism, "Our nation is appallingly ignorant of the rest of the world" (Scott, 2006).
Nussbaum believes that a cosmopolitan education, in which students are taught, that they are, above all, "citizens of the world," will help produce the kind of adults that will see the commonality in other human beings.
By examining the rest of the world, American students can learn more about their own
As I was reading about cosmopolitan education, I thought about what kind of impact it would have on the social structure within the classroom. Will it help create an open environment where students will respect and find commonality among each other as fellow human beings? In my opinion, I think it would. I think if teachers reinforce that idea that every student comes from a different background, but also creating the idea that in the grand scheme of things, we’re all human. Here. In the classroom. Learning Together.
As Hirsh states, children learn to cooperate and sustain one another only if the school-based culture they gain makes them feel that they truly belong to the larger society.
As an educator, I believe that it is my responsibility to teach all children to respect one another and to be tolerant of individual differences. My hope that that through my example as well as the tone I set for the classroom environment, my students will develop a multicultural mindset which will stay with them wherever they might go.
References:
Hirsch, E. D. (1993). Toward a Centrist Curriculum: Two Kinds of Multiculturalism in Elementary. Core Knowledge Foundation, 1. Retrieved June 20, 2010, from http://www.coreknowledge.org/mimik
Rosenthal, J. (n.d.). Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism. Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Retrieved June 20, 2010, from http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts
Scott, C. (2006). Education and Cosmopolitanism: A Counterargument of Martha Nussbaum's Assertion that U.S. Students Need an Education Based in Cosmopolitan Ideology., Page 3 of 4 - Associated Content - associatedcontent.com. Associated Content - associatedcontent.com. Retrieved June 20, 2010, from http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/36322/education_and_cosmopolitanism_a_counterargument_pg3.html?cat=9
Waxler, A. (2007). Multiculturalism in School Curriculum . ESL Teacher's Board. Retrieved June 20, 2010, from https://elearn.mtsu.edu/d2l/lms/content/viewer/main_frame.d2l?ou=1439730&tId=14284097
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