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4 Strategies (Banks, 1988)

1. The Contributions Approach: introducing students to accounts of heroic figures who were a part of ethnic communities other than the norm that is taught in the general U.S. curriculum.

2. The Ethnic Additive Approach: creates space for ethnically diverse perspectives to be taught as stand-alone, and not altered to fit the mold of the generally taught perspective.

3. The Transformative Approach: students are given a complete understanding of all possible perspectives regarding a topic, thus altering the structure of the general curriculum.

4. The Decision-Making and Social Action Approach: students take what they have learned and apply it to their real-world surroundings--the multicultural nature of their school, or the lack thereof.

*all 4 of these strategies are cumulative, and build on each other, because integration cannot be instantaneous because of the restructuring process that it required...

Examples (Banks, 1988)

Heroes and Holidays: Educators take time to recognize the holidays of multiple cultures, and integrate them into their lesson plans on those days.

Implementing the Decision-Making and Social Action Approach, teachers may give a research project to students that pertains to analyzing the demographics of their school, reporting on a significant cultural issue or miscommunication within, and problem-solve a remediation to the issue.

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4 Strategies (Davis, 2012)

1. Instruction Addresses Literacy Skills: Deficiencies in reading, writing, speaking, and listening need to be remediated progressively.

2. Develop Student Vocabulary: Introduce students to new words, and break parts of the words down in order to emphasize a full understanding.

3. Motivation with Choice: Giving students a choices in the classroom, whether in regards to different ways to solve a problem, present the information they have learned, or decide the next individual step that they should take in their process of learning.

4. Build Background Knowledge: Previewing texts, as a class, before reading them independently, overcomes barriers met by sentence structures, content-specific language, or the author's perspective/tone.

*English language learners will introduce a multicultural perspective into any classroom, because languages communicate an entirely different culture (ex. American English v. British English offers as much of a cultural difference as English v Spanish does).

Examples

"Are you going to study for the test with flash-cards or by teaching the concepts to your seat partner?" -- this question assumes that the student is going to study, and gives them a choice between study methods that will cater to their learning style.

"Show me, on your fingers, how well you understand this concept, 1-5!" -- I got this engagement strategy from my mentor teacher, Mrs. M. It allows the teacher to gauge the understanding of her students, and can help when introducing new, or more complex concepts, to students, especially ELs.

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Fostering a Multicultural Classroom Environment

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Fostering a Multicultural Classroom Environment

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4 Strategies (Hill, J. D, & Miller, K. B., 2006)

1. Specific, not Restrictive: lesson objectives need to have a goal, but the methods or how that goal is reached is not limited, so as to allow all students to process information differently

2. Communicate Objectives to Students and Parents: Students need to know what they are being expected to learn on a daily basis. Further, parents should be given the opportunity to know what skills their students will grow in once they reach the objectives.

3. Thinking Language Matrix: guiding students through how to construct or continue their own learning when reading through a given text or word problem.

4. Timely Feedback: Students turn assignments in, on-time, then teachers can be expected to grade assignments in a reasonable amount of time. Grading also involves evaluating a student's current understanding, and then offers feedback that will positively influence his future understanding and application of concepts.

Examples

Experiment with different ways of processing information to reach the most students. Instead of lecturing math lessons, every day for 45 minutes, try an active response, such as, a whiteboard review.

"What do you think happens next in the story?" OR "what do you think is the next step in completing the problem?"

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4 Strategies (Housel, 2020)

1. Professional Development: making sure that all faculty members are aware of the different perspectives and voices that are present within the school walls on a daily basis. This does not only mean recognizing the demographic statistics, but collecting and presenting accurate and intentional testimonies (this would be more of an administrative responsibility...).

2. Community-Service Groups: giving families opportunities to practice communication and collaboration with school faculty and administrators, and vice versa...

3. Community Fairs: not requiring anything but attendance of families with multicultural backgrounds; cultivating community awareness of resources accessible through the school.

4. Intergenerational Bilingual Classes: a way to increase parental involvement at school, in-person, if schools were to provide literacy supports periodically, for their communities of ELs.

Examples

A school schedules a food-packing event at their local Food for the Hungry for parents, students, teachers, and admin to participate--create and schedule and monthly, school-wide activity that includes everyone

A school hosts an exhibition to inform families about the scholarships and dual enrollment programs that are available to their students at local universities

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Banks, J. A. (1988). Approaches to multicultural curriculum reform. Multicultural Leader, 1(2), 37-38

Davis, B. M. (2012). How to teach students who don't look like you: Culturally responsive teaching strategies (2nd ed.). Corwin.

Hill, J. D, & Miller, K. B. (2006). Classroom instruction that works with English language learners (2nd ed.). Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.

Housel, D. A. (2020). Supporting the engagement and participation of multicultural, multilingual immigrant families in public education in the United States: Some practical strategies. School Community Journal, 30(2), 185-209