A colleague, Mary, and I had just finished talking with a group of Korean students—a small population within a predominantly white Virginia high school—when we stepped into a meeting with the school's administrators. As usual, we were most astounded and troubled by the fact that they were so desperate to talk to somebody about their experiences at the school. Over and over we heard words like "alienated," "outcast," "invisible," and "unwelcome." As we shook hands with the top school officials and sat down to listen to their plan for multicultural education, I struggled to turn my attention from the students' needs (most notably, the need to be heard) to the administrators' rhetoric. Then the principal began, "Our philosophy is that we need to celebrate the joys of diversity." The problem was clear. The students were experiencing inequities—imbalances of power, voice, inclusion, and access. The administrators—those with the power—did not see or did not want to see the inequities, and instead chose to maintain their own comfort and the education status quo. A couple months later I received an invitation to a celebratory function at the school—a Korean culture festival. When I arrived, I found Korean students dressed in their traditional garb serving Korean food they had prepared to white students and their families, who all seemed fairly amused by the occasion, celebrating the joys of diversity while the Korean students celebrated the pain of tokenism and exclusion.
One of the great challenges facing multicultural education today is the widening gap between its conceptualization as a redistribution of power and privilege in all aspects of schools and schooling and the practice of well-meaning, left-leaning educators who implement it in ways that recycle, rather than overturn, systemic power imbalances. Christine Sleeter, who has addressed this gap in several articles and books including Empowerment through Multicultural Education (1999), Multicultural education as social activism (1996), and Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference (Sleeter and McLaren, 1995), attacks them in a with a new medium in Culture, Difference, & Power, a multimedia CD-Rom from Teachers College Press.
Long on the cutting edge for her progressive, transformational models for curricular and pedagogical multicultural reform, Sleeter has now established herself on the cutting edge of form and media. Just as a small group of scholars focusing on intersections between instructional technology and multicultural education, including the reviewer, loudly critiqued the field for its lack of attention to emerging learning technologies, Culture, Difference, & Power was released. Its form itself is revolutionary—interactive, multimedia, and case-based. In addition to 45 original articles by Sleeter (and more than 30 other texts), the CD-Rom includes 80 video clips featuring 5 classrooms, 7 teachers, 1 school leadership team, 5 noted theorists, and 2 artists. Sleeter also incorporated 8 interactive quizzes, 40 guides for investigating community, school, and classroom issues, 10 self-examination guides, hundreds of pictures, animated cartoons, an diagrams, and the ability to search through all of these resources with one search engine. The result is a product that actually models its pedagogical frameworks by catering to a variety of learning styles, learning paths, and learning paces.
The classroom scenes are particularly powerful, constructed into multi-level pedagogical cases illustrating the kinds of decisions, actions, and consequences tangled into everyday classroom experiences and how they can challenge, or contribute to, the systems of power and privilege that dominate today's schools and classrooms. A question commonly raised by participants of multicultural education and education equity classes and workshops is why multicultural education has to "make education so political." Sleeter reminds us that there is nothing about education that is not political. In fact, the education system is becoming one of the most important and unfortunate platforms for political debates that often have much relation to good pedagogy and almost ever include people with any understanding of the day-to day-workings of schools. But even individual educators make decisions every day that are political in nature—how or whether to cover a particular piece of content, how or whether to differentiate instruction, how or whether to incorporate instructional technology, how to organize the classroom, and, most importantly, how or whether share power by engaging student, parent, and community voices in making these and other decisions. Culture, Difference, & and Power raises these crucial issues from a sociopolitical perspective that recognizes and centers the relationships between culture, difference (and the meaning subscribed to difference), and power, ultimately relating these themes to pedagogy.
Equally important as Sleeter's content are the program's interactive capabilities, which enable users to respond immediately to critical questions embedded in various sections of the CD-Rom by typing and entering thoughts, perspectives, experiences, and understandings into text boxes built into its structure. The user is constantly reminded that, as a current or future educator, she or he is the root of multicultural education in her or his classroom. And it is as important to examine one's own assumptions, biases, constructions of culture and difference, and role in relation to students and other education stakeholders as it is to study progressive teaching and learning philosophies from a safe and external distance.
Sleeter organizes Culture, Difference, & Power into four major sections: "Culture," "Power," "Difference," and "Pedagogy." She draws on a variety of critical theoretical frameworks and perspectives within each of these sections. In almost every case, she uses at least two forms of media to help the user understand the various frameworks, their intersections, and how they relate to equity and social justice in schools.
For example, following the "Critical Literacy" strand of the "Pedagogy" section of Culture, Power, & Difference, the user is prompted to consider a classroom scenario in which a fifth grade student asks her math teacher why the U.S. is bombing Grenada. (If you rerun the scenario, "Grenada" is replaced by Libya, Iraq, Panama, Sudan, or Serbia—political commentary as only electronic media can facilitate.) Below the scenario are four hypertext links, each describing a different "direction" her teacher might take at that moment, depending on the amount of power he is willing to share with his students. The first three range from compassionately ignoring the question and moving forward with the math lesson to allowing the students to decide how they can both finish the math lesson and address the question on the table. A fourth link leads to a blank page and an invitation to reflect on how the user might handle a similar situation. Users can consider the power relationships evident in each "direction" the teacher may choose, but must also apply their understanding of the various directions to their own classroom practice and consider how they might respond. Again, this interactive nature disallows a user to remain detached from the dialogue.
Continuing along this strand of the "Pedagogy" section, the user comes to an essay, "Developing Critical Literacy," exploring power and decision-making in schools. Sleeter shares her own experience working in schools, where she often struggles to convince people in power that multicultural education is not a single curricular approach, but a "redefinition of decision-making power to include voices of the community, the students, the teachers, and scholars from marginalized groups to determine what is most worth knowing" (Sleeter, 2001, Pedagogy, Critical Literacy). Following the essay is an activity for which the user, reflecting on a school or classroom with which she or he is familiar, identifies who holds decision-making power in a variety of areas (including where to sit, classroom rules, curriculum, who is in which class, grading policies, and others). Moving seamlessly between the individual, the educational, and the institutional, the user steps through a graphical, animated representation of classroom power dynamics. During any phase of the lesson the user can click the "Activities" button and find strategies for engaging her- or himself, peers, or students in a dialogue about the topic. Periodic links provide pathways to additional information and resources related to concepts introduced throughout the lesson.
In usual Christine Sleeter fashion, Culture, Difference, & Power combines complex critical theory with examples from the field, woven into layers of personal and systemic challenge equally valuable to teacher preparation students and veterans of the multicultural education field. She covers every contemporary educational issue across a variety of dimensions of difference (including race, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, class, and language), from standards to school funding, in a style relevant to theorists and applicable to teachers. Through Culture, Difference, & Power, Sleeter accomplishes what few of her peers have show the flexibility to do. She has produced a multicultural education text that is critical, challenging, reflective, and conceptually complex, and is simultaneously accessible, applicable, empowering, and energizing to a broad and diverse audience. And (perhaps equally impressively) she does so in a form that is less than half the price of most leading multicultural education textbooks, despite the fact that it is more complete, interactive, and engaging than most texts in the field.
Culture, Difference, & Power can be both a virtual database of progressive multicultural education resources for theorists and teacher educators and a primary text for multicultural education, social justice education, sociology of education, anthropology of education, or social foundations of education courses. Its textual and graphical descriptions of various education equity concepts and search capabilities make it an invaluable resource for undergraduate and graduate students of education. The collection of wonderfully intense activities throughout each section of the CD-Rom alone renders it worth its price for teacher educators. In addition, all resources on the CD-Rom are printable as Adobe PDF files (necessary software is included).
My only concern about Culture, Difference, & Power, as with all electronic educational media, is that parts or all of it may be inaccessible to people without convenient access to a computer capable of running it. In this sense, this CD-Rom, along with similar contributions to multicultural education (including the reviewer's own Web site, the Multicultural Pavilion), may unintentionally contribute to the digital divide (gaps in access to digital technology across race, class, gender, education attainment, and other various social identities). It will be important for anyone considering this CD-Rom as a required text to ensure that you do so thoughtfully and equitably.
Overall, Culture, Difference, & Power is an invaluable resource, pushing its users and the field beyond the comfort of human relations to consider equity and social justice, the roots of multicultural education. It is among the most important, progressive, challenging, and accessible multicultural education texts ever written (and, in this case, programmed), and one of few to date that is not simply read, but experienced.
References
Sleeter, C. (1999). Empowerment through multicultural education: From reproduction to contestation of social inequality through schooling. New York: State University of New York Press.
Sleeter, C. (1996). Multicultural education as social activism. New York: State University of New York Press.
Sleeter, C. and McLaren, P. (1995). Multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and the politics of difference. New York: State University of New York Press.
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