Challenge to Equality: "We Made It, Why Can't You?", The

Multicultural Education, Spring 2007 by Bhavnagri, Navaz Peshotan, Pr�speri, Jorge Dante Hernandez

The slaves' self-determination to have an education demonstrates resistance to oppression. Anderson (1988) documents that thousands of slaves had learned to read and write, despite the potential penalty of their forefinger being cut from their right hand. By 1860, about 5% of slaves had chosen to be literate, a truly triumphant resistance to undemocratic laws prohibiting learning.

After emancipation, many ex-slaves had already started self-reliant projects of organizing educational collectives and associations, staffed entirely by Black teachers, long before the White Yankee missionaries from the north arrived to educate them. Ex-slaves were in the vanguard for universal state-supported public education for which they organized, campaigned, and developed political coalitions, despite the Southern planters actively obstructing their efforts. Additionally, African Americans expressed resistance vocally and through actions when White liberal friends were hiring White faculty and were reluctant to give full control to Southern freemen and ex-slaves to run their Black universities (McPherson, 1970).

Native Americans: They, like the slaves, developed similar resilient strategies, such as: (a) spirituality (e.g., uplifting stories, spiritual visions and dancing, especially Ghost Dance) (Wilson, 2003; Cross, 1995), (b) escaping to Canada for freedom from corralled reservations (Fremon, 1994; Nardo, 2002), and (c) selectively accommodating to the ways of the White population to survive starvation (Nardo, 2002). Additionally, Native Americans continuously resisted the U.S. government's and White immigrant settlers' fervent efforts to forcefully take their land and relocate and exterminate them by fighting wars to protect their ancestral land, by refusing to sign treaties, and by violating existing unfair treaties (Utley, 1984).

Thus, multigenerational trauma on one hand, resiliency and resistance on the other hand, coexist in the lives of African Americans and Native Americans. Here is a strong word of caution. Do not misunderstand our intent. Our message to teacher educators is not to heap pity on their African Americans and Native Americans pre-service students and guilt on White pre-service students. Instead, we seek to empower teacher educators with the thus far discussed information and with our pedagogy as envisioned below.

Pedagogy of Hopewithin Multicultural Education: Goals and Strategies

Ours is the pedagogy of hope, because despite all the oppressions on African Americans and Native Americans, and the guilt of White Americans, teacher educators can assist all pre-service teachers to reach out to each other. The goals and strategies of our pedagogy have underpinnings of social reconstructivist theory, which is one of many critical theories (Apple, 1995; Freire, 1993, 1998; Giroux, 1988; McLaren, 1998; Shor, 1992; Wink, 2000).

According to Sleeter and Grant (1999), social reconstructivists believe that dominant groups will always: (1) operate social institutions to solidify, extend, and legitimize their control over others, and (2) control access to limited and unequally distributed resources to their own advantage. Social reconstructivists therefore advocate that: (1) all should work towards the elimination of oppression of one group on another; (2) oppressed people should not just sit back and take it, but instead oppose it mentally and behaviorally; (3) privileged groups need to recognize their complicity in oppression which destroys their own humanity, and they need to fight injustice in all its forms; and finally (4) individuals need to organize and form coalitions across class, gender, and race relations to bring social change.