Learning about the "other": Building a case for intercultural understanding among minority children

Childhood Education, Summer 2003 by Pattnaik, Jyotsna

Building a Case for Intercultural Understanding Among Minority Children

"My three-year-old boy imitates his father's verbal rejection (bla-bla-bla) of Spanish language whenever I try to talk to him in Spanish."

An African American student (also a fluent Spanish speaker) in one of my graduate level courses once shared her frustration over her thwarted efforts to teach Spanish to her son. She confided that her African American husband was biased against the Latino culture. As an infant, their son began learning some words in Spanish, but over time he picked up on his father's negative attitude. He started refusing to speak, or to be talked to, in Spanish. Other students in this education class shared similar stories from their own classrooms about minority children who display biased attitudes against other minority groups.

The stories shared by these students are not isolated or unique. Racial/ ethnic division among various minority groups in the United States is manifested in a wide variety of contexts. Clearly, ignorance and stereotypical views about cultures other than one's own extends across all racial/ethnic groups. Consequently, violence among minority groups has erupted throughout the United States: the 1992 Los Angels riots that involved, in part, African Americans and Korean Americans; the 1991 Crown Heights riots in New York between blacks and Jews; the July 4, 1993, violence in Washington, D.C., between blacks and Hispanics; and violence against Arab Americans in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Despite these events, efforts to facilitate intergroup understanding and harmony among minority children from different groups have received insufficient support from teachers, administrators, and parents. Even "The Condition of Education, 2002," published by the National Center for Education Statistics (2002), did not include children's intercultural attitude, knowledge, and skill as an important part of "learner outcomes." Brawarsky (1997) laments that "in general, the number of research studies in the area of intergroup relations has declined considerably since the 1970s, yet the need for such study is probably greater than ever" (p. 7).

While proponents of multicultural education hold gut hope for its potential to alleviate conflict among all racial/ethnic groups, many people, including minority teachers, do not understand the true scope of multicultural education. One of my students (a kindergarten teacher in a predominantly Latino school) once remarked, "We do multicultural education in our class all the time. My classroom library is full of books from the Latino culture, including bilingual [Spanish-- English] books." My student's efforts to expose her Latino children to literature from their own cultures is certainly laudable. However, she made no mention of how her Latino students were learning about cultures other than their own. This particular example reflects how multicultural teaching can become monocultural teaching in predominantly minority schools, perpetuating the very ideology that multicultural education struggles to overcome.

It is important that schools and college campuses reflect the diversity of society so that students are "living diversity" rather than just "doing diversity" (see Michele Foster's comments at the Carnegie Corporation's "Youth Intergroup Relations Initiatives" meeting, as cited in Brawarsky, 1997). However, the mere existence of racial/ethnic diversity in school and college campuses, or even the absence of overt conflict, does not guarantee intercultural understanding and harmony among students from various minority groups. As Parker, Archer, and Scott (1992) rightly point out, "We must make the transition from numerical diversity to interactive pluralism" (p. 2).

I am not arguing for an intercultural learning program for minority children that is separate from the school's multicultural program. Rather, this article highlights some common misunderstandings of multicultural education that impede understanding among minority children, provides justifications for intercultural understanding among minority children, and offers suggestions for an ideal intercultural program. For the purposes of this article, the term "minority" is limited to aspects of race and ethnicity.

MYTHS OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

Ideally, one of the imperatives of multicultural education is to facilitate intercultural understanding among children of all races and ethnic groups so that communication and harmony are maintained in a diverse society. However, multicultural education often fails to fulfill its mission because of the following unexamined beliefs held by teachers, parents, and administrators.

* Multicultural education is primarily for white children, because they lack exposure to other perspectives. Adherents of this view tend to overlook the fact that minority children also grow up in predominantly homogeneous environments. If intergroup contact is essential to reduce prejudice among groups (as suggested by Allport, 1954), then it is possible that minority children who lack exposure to and sustained interaction with children from other minority groups may harbor an ethnocentric world-view and stereotypical attitudes toward minority groups other than their own.