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Educational Environment

• Advocating for Hispanic High School Students: Research-Based Educational Practices
  High schools can have a positive effect on Hispanic students' academic success by cultivating an advocacy-oriented school environment that implements effective practices in four areas: dropout prevention, effective instruction, psychoeducational assessment, and understanding and easing the acculturation process. Contains 47 references.
• Appalachian College Students & a Multicultural Curriculum
  A study explored the multicultural predispositions of Appalachian college students. Surveys addressing 23 variables related to demography, ideology, race perceptions, and university were returned by 437 students in 12 majors at Moorehead State University (Kentucky).
• Between the World and the Village: The Role of Education in Sustaining and Developing an Eritrean Cultural Identity
  The role of education in the development of an Eritrean cultural identity is explored against the background of a review of relevant educational provisions in pluralist societies. Multicultural education in Eritrea offers access to a common culture and also to a variety of specific cultures.
• Comer Schools: Are They Recognizable Through Direct Observation?
  "The Comer School Development Program is a school reform model that, in full implementation, creates positive school climate. The research has confirmed that this can be observed.
• Comer Schools: Are They Recognizable Through Direct Observation?
  "The Comer School Development Program is a school reform model that, in full implementation, creates positive school climate. The research has confirmed that this can be observed.
• Communicating Diversity: A Study of the Multicultural Climate in a Summer Academic Program
  A study examined multiculturalism and diversity through accommodations for minority and international students in LEAP (Learning Edge Academic Program), a six-week summer program for freshmen at a major Eastern university. Subjects included administrators, mentors, instructors, and students, who were interviewed regarding their perceptions on the issues.
• Community Colleges as Cultural Texts: Qualitative Explorations of Organizational and Student Culture. SUNY Series, Frontiers in Education
  This book, part of the Frontiers in Education series from the State University of New York, depicts community colleges as "cultural texts," addressing the question of whether, and how, community colleges confront the challenges of diversity and provide equal opportunities for upward mobility.
• Contributions of International Students and Programs to Campus Diversity
  The authors describe the contributions of international students in helping create a diverse and multicultural campus. They argue that these students are one of the most important resources for internationalizing college and university campuses as well as the profession of student affairs.
• Creating a Campus Climate in Which Diversity Is Truly Valued
  Highlights the development and implementation of a multifaceted program at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts. The program, which includes curriculum changes, new student organizations, international student fellowships, and orientation activities, was designed to create a more inclusive campus environment.
• Creating a Culturally Responsive Learning Environment for African American Students
  Explores how African American and white college students and faculty can develop strong identities and healthy interpersonal relationships. Encourages faculty to engage students in dialogue about multicultural issues and adapt teaching practices to create a culturally responsive learning environment for students and faculty.
• Creating a Multicultural School Climate for Deaf Children and Their Families
  Offers guidelines to help educators of children with deafness build a multicultural learning environment for students and their families. Strategies are provided for developing cultural competence and tips are given for creating inclusive curricula and instructional approaches, choosing culturally diverse materials, and recruiting diverse staff.
• Creating Multicultural School Climate for Deaf Children and Their Families. Sharing Ideas
  This monograph offers a variety of suggestions for creating a supportive multicultural climate for deaf children and their families. A section on responding to changing needs notes the special needs of deaf children from diverse backgrounds and suggests 7 strategies for developing cultural competence and 11 suggestions for improving outreach services.
• Critical Issue Bibliography (CRIB) Sheet: Multiculturalism and Faculty Development.
  One of the key areas in the creation of a multicultural environment on college campuses is faculty development. This CRitical Issue Bibliography (CRIB) Sheet focuses on faculty development as a key component of the multicultural campus environment.
• Cultivating the Natural Linguist. Spotlight: Montessori--Multilingual, Multicultural
  Describes Montessori's vision of young children as natural linguists and how home and school can support children's natural abilities in one or more languages. Presents five basic principles of second-language acquisition--related to educational environment, the acquisition process, components of proficiency, and cultural context and time--and describes how they can be successfully met in a Montessori environment.
• Defining Culture in a Multicultural Environment: An Ethnography of Heritage High School
  Examines how multicultural education can alter the learning environment of a school and thereby influence student relations, attitudes, and behaviors. The author discusses study findings that show the need for educational theory and practice to pay more attention to minority group interrelationships rather than the interaction between the traditionally dominant and subordinate groups.
• Diversity Within Unity: Essential Principles for Teaching and Learning in a Multicultural Society
  Discusses 12 essential principles to help schools teach democratic values in a multicultural society. Derived from findings of the Multicultural Education Consensus Panel to review and synthesize research on diversity, principles are organized into five categories: Teacher learning; student learning; intergroup relations; school governance, organization, and equity; and assessment.
• Dream of Peace, To Dare To Stay the Violence, To Do the Work of the Peacemaker
  This essay focuses on teachers as peacemakers. Peace education is discussed as multifaceted and cross-disciplinary, emphasizing the teaching of peace, nonviolence, conflict resolution, social justice, economic well-being, political participation, and environmental concern.
• Education in Black and White: How Kids Learn Racism--And How Schools Can Help Them Unlearn It
  Before educators can help children unlearn racial prejudice, they should realize that children develop societal stereotypes and biases by age 3 or 4. A Seattle multiculturalism expert suggests that schools create an overall cooperative atmosphere, sponsor cross-school events that bring kids from different backgrounds together, and ensure equal status for students of all races.
• Enacting Diverse Learning Environments: Improving the Climate for Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Higher Education. ERIC Digest
  This digest examines ways in which learning and educational objectives can be maximized to achieve diversity while improving social and learning environments for students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds. The digest examines the literature on campus climate for racial/ethnic diversity, looks at the impact on student diversity of the campus climate, and examines institutional changes necessary to improve the racial/ethnic diversity and enhance the learning environment.
• Enacting Diverse Learning Environments: Improving the Climate for Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Higher Education. ERIC Digest
  This digest examines ways in which learning and educational objectives can be maximized to achieve diversity while improving social and learning environments for students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds. The digest examines the literature on campus climate for racial/ethnic diversity, looks at the impact on student diversity of the campus climate, and examines institutional changes necessary to improve the racial/ethnic diversity and enhance the learning environment.
• Fostering Community through the Use of Technology in a Distributed Learning Environment
  With the technology revolution, the importance of creating a sense of community in the learning environment is as significant as ever. This article shares the lessons learned in developing and teaching a multicultural counseling course via distance and distributed education.
• Homicide Crisis Intervention in a Multicultural School Setting
  This paper summarizes information concerning homicide crisis intervention in a multicultural school that would be useful for school psychologists. School psychologists are encouraged to be introspective about their own beliefs about death, grief, and multiculturalism.
• Hope for urban education: A study of nine high-performing, high-poverty, urban elementary schools.
  This report tells the stories of nine urban elementary schools that served children of color in poor communities and achieved impressive academic results. All of the schools used federal Title I dollars to create Title I school wide programs.
• Hope for urban education: A study of nine high-performing, high-poverty, urban elementary schools.
  This report tells the stories of nine urban elementary schools that served children of color in poor communities and achieved impressive academic results. All of the schools used federal Title I dollars to create Title I school wide programs.
• Immigrant Children in Our Classrooms: Beyond ESL
  Strategies for supporting immigrant students include providing opportunities for self-expression, ensuring that all students see themselves reflected in the curriculum, providing translation for key events and documents, having teachers and staff that reflect student cultures, maintaining first-language skills, making special efforts to communicate with parents, and training students to support new peers. (TD).
• Incorporating Mexican American History and Culture into the Social Studies Classroom
  Although Mexican Americans are the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, their history and literature are seldom taught in American classrooms. A study of over 3,000 high school sophomores in the Southwest revealed that neither Anglos nor Hispanics were aware of the contributions of Mexican Americans.
• Increasing Cultural Understanding between Mexican-Americans and Whites in a Multiethnic School
  A program was developed to create a positive school climate in a multiethnic school to reduce conflict among students. The targeted population consisted of students in kindergarten through grade six in a school in a low socioeconomic environment in a rural community in northern Illinois.
• Influence of Culture and Home Environment on Science Learning
  This paper has the potential for identifying and codifying the home learning environment and parental factors in a unique multicultural setting within Australian schools, and for the establishment of research-based initiatives for more effective collaboration between schools and parents.
• Institutional Support for Diversity in Preservice Teacher Education
  Examines how institutions can provide support for diversity in preservice teacher education, focusing on the institutional context in which teacher educators work as they craft multicultural teacher preparation programs. Support includes strong institutional leadership and a campuswide vision for change, recruitment and retention of diverse students and faculty, and curriculum transformation.
• L'enseignement de la diversite culturelle, c'est une responsabilite collective (The Teaching of Cultural Pluralism, a Collective Responsibility)
  Following September 11, some students in a computer-assisted journalism lab in Canada made disgraceful comments based on ignorance and misinformation regarding the school's Arabic-speaking members. However, a few articles and two news reports helped change the atmosphere as students began to recognize the individuals within stereotyped groups.
• Learning Multiculturalism from the Experience of International Students: The Experience of International Students in a Teacher Training Program
  This study explored the aspect of international student culture. To understand how international students perceived their experience as foreign students and how they make efforts to break down language and culture boundaries while they are studying abroad, five international graduate students in the college of education in a large mid-Atlantic University were interviewed.
• Linking Diversity and Educational Purpose: How Diversity Affects the Classroom Environment and Student Development
  This study examined the impact of diversity on students' self-perceived improvement in the abilities necessary to contribute positively to a pluralistic democracy. It noted how such diversity-related campus activities as exposure to multicultural curricula and opportunities to study and interact with diverse peers affected student development.
• Multicultural Connections: Exploring Strategies and Issues. Diversity in the Classroom Series, Number Two
  This document, the second in a series on diversity in the classroom, explores relationships, addresses issues, and provides a framework for examining multicultural education. It also offers practical ideas for bringing multicultural education to the classroom and school, touching on underlying assumptions and beliefs about cultural diversity, learning, language, and schools.
• Multiculturalism and Schools: The Struggle toward Open-Mindedness
  To counter the backlash against multiculturalism, educators must create a social environment for learning that encompasses respect, civility, integrity, and care. They should take into account the increasingly complex understanding of what common culture is and how it evolved.
• Organizational Structures to Promote Teacher Engagement in Urban Schools
  This monograph considers the prospects for improving teacher engagement in urban schools through professional and organizational reform.
• Perceptions of Multiculturalism, Academic Achievement, and Intent To Stay in School among Mexican American Students
  Examined the relationship between perceived multiculturalism of schools, ease of learning, academic achievement, and intent to stay in school among eighth and eleventh graders. Surveys of Mexican-American and European-American students indicated that Mexican-American students who considered their environment multicultural also perceived that school was easier, that they received good grades, and that they would stay in school.
• Politically Correct on Campus.
  This digest reviews materials which discuss political correctness and its manifestations on college campuses. First presenting opposing definitions of the term (liberal and conservative), the digest then reports on the topic as seen in the research, and offers several suggestions about incorporating the conflicts themselves into the curriculum.
• Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers: The Field Experience. Teacher Education Yearbook IV
  This yearbook provides educators with current research and practical guidelines for improving the education of teacher candidates and beginning teachers. The book has four sections, each on a particular topic and containing an overview and a response (reflections and implications).
• Promoting Additive Acculturation in Schools
  A study focusing on 113 ninth graders of Mexican descent indicates that most students and their parents adhere to a strategy of additive acculturation (incorporating skills of the new culture and language), but that the school curriculum and general school climate devalue Mexican culture. (SLD).
• Racism. IDRA Focus.
  This theme issue includes four articles on racism in colleges and public schools and on strategies to build ethnic and racial tolerance.
• Racism. IDRA Focus.
  This theme issue includes four articles on racism in colleges and public schools and on strategies to build ethnic and racial tolerance. "Affirmative Action: Not a Thing of the Past" (Linda Cantu) reviews the history of affirmative action and its positive effects on Hispanic and Black enrollment in higher education, discusses current efforts to dismantle affirmative action, and counters claims of reverse discrimination against White males.
• Reducing Racism in Schools: Moving beyond Rhetoric
  Addresses the problems of racism in schools and reviews the historical and contemporary context of the policies and programs to reduce it. Discusses obstacles and challenges to implementing effective antiracist policies and programs.
• Review of research on ways to attain goal six: Creating safe, disciplined, and drug-free schools.
  Making every school in America free of drugs and violence and fostering a disciplined environment conducive to learning by the year 2000 is the aim of the sixth National Education Goal. Schools are far from this goal as violence, drugs, and discipline problems continue to disrupt learning.
• Sharing the Wisdom of Practice: Schools That Optimize Literacy Learning for All Students
  The No Child Left Behind Act leaves no doubt about the importance of effective reading instruction, setting a national goal for every child to become a proficient reader by the third grade. With 70% of fourth graders from low income families currently unable to read at even a basic level, teachers face a daunting challenge.
• Student Acceptance of a Multicultural Education: Exploring the Role of a Social Work Curriculum, Demographics, and Symbolic Racism
  A study examined multicultural attitudes of social work students. Surveys of 437 undergraduates at a rural Kentucky university indicated that student acceptance of multiculturalism was influenced by gender and their own stances on White privilege and institutional racism.
• Student Equity Plan, 1996-1998.
  Presenting an update to the first Student Equity Plan (SEP) prepared by California's College of the Canyons in December 1993, this plan reviews research on the participation of underrepresented groups at the college and presents goals and activities for the period from 1996-98. Following an introduction, research conducted on student characteristics and outcomes from 1991 to 1995 is reviewed, indicating that in 1995, 69.4% of the college's students were White, while 18.5% were Latino, 7.4% were Asian, and 2.6% were Black.
• Student Equity Plan, 1996-1998.
  Presenting an update to the first Student Equity Plan (SEP) prepared by California's College of the Canyons in December 1993, this plan reviews research on the participation of underrepresented groups at the college and presents goals and activities for the period from 1996-98.
• Surveying the Landscape: Perceptions of Multicultural Support Services and Racial Climate at a Predominantly White University
  Examined how white and minority students at a predominantly white college perceived racial climate, student support services, multicultural courses, and attitudes toward cultural diversity on campus. Surveys indicated that white and minority students' perceptions varied, and campus support services were inadequate for creating an environment where minority students could have as positive an experience as white students.
• The Academic Achievement of Minority Students: Perspectives, Practices, and Prescriptions
  This book presents a collection of papers by educators and researchers who discuss various methods of improving minority student achievement.
• The Experiences of Adult Undergraduate Students--What Shapes Their Learning?
  The Model of College Outcomes for Adults explains why adults might do as well as traditional students, despite limited participation and involvement in traditional residential learning experiences. The model's six components are prior experience and personal biographies; psychosocial and value orientation; adult cognition; life-world environment; college outcomes; and the connecting classroom.
• The Multicultural Middle College High School: An Attempt at Creating an Innovative Bilingual High School
  Research on bilingual education has suggested three areas as critical for quality bilingual education: (1) school climate and organization; (2) curriculum content and delivery; and (3) instructional strategies. These three areas form a framework that was used to evaluate the Multicultural Middle College High School (MMCHS), an alternative bilingual high school created by a group of teachers from the Boston (Massachusetts) public schools.
• The National Conversation on Youth Development in the 21st Century. Final Report.
  To commemorate 2002 as the centennial year of America's 4-H Movement, the National 4-H Council held a national conversation to identify ways of improving youth development programs. The conversation process included the following activities: 1,577 local conversations that yielded more than 10,000 specific action items; a review of those items at 63 state conversations; and a national conversation at which 1,200 youths and adults representing 600 organizations developed specific national strategies and action steps based on the findings of the local and state conversations.
• The Political Correctness Controversy Revisited
  Maintains that the inclusion of diverse views to enhance understanding is one of the central tenets of education. Briefly summarizes the arguments for and against multicultural education and calls for a more tolerant and open dialog between conservative and liberal factions.
• Through Students' Eyes. Combating Racism in United States Schools
  Racism has not been eradicated in U.S. schools, even though many educators do not view it as a major deterrent to the learning of minority students.
• Waking the Sleeping Giant: Engaging and Capitalizing on the Sociocultural Strengths of the Latino Community
  A family literacy program for Salvadoran refugees and other Latinos in Arlington (Virginia) is analyzed from a sociocultural perspective as exemplifying an educational project designed and implemented by grassroots organizations in an increasingly diverse, multicultural/multilingual community. The program addresses the educational needs of poor illiterate families while drawing on parents' culture and extensive life experiences.
• What the Russian School Ought to Be Like
  Asserts that Russian society and Russian schools are going through a profound crisis. Maintains that the best approach to solving social and educational problems is to restore and develop national principles and group cohesion.