NCCRESt

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Stereotypes

• "A Teacher Wrote This Movie": Challenging the Myths of "One Eight Seven" [movie review]
  Reviews "One Eight Seven," a film about a teacher working with at-risk students. The film is an indictment of U.S.
• "The Light in Her Eyes." An Interview with Sonia Nieto
  Presents an interview with educators' educator Sonia Nieto--an author of two important books ("The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities," and "Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education"). Discusses her books, avoiding stereotypes, current issues in multicultural education, how and what is taught, exploring unconscious attitudes, and linguistic diversities.
• A Critical Review of Ann Rinaldi's "My Heart Is on the Ground": The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl
  This collaborative review finds much to criticize in this fictional portrayal of the experiences of a young girl at the Carlisle Indian School, including a lack of clarity about the fictional nature of the story. Stereotyping and historical inaccuracies make this book add to the great body of misinformation about Native-American life in the United States and Canada.
• A Lingering Miseducation: Confronting the Legacy of "Little Tree."
  The popular book, "The Education of Little Tree," written by a Ku Klux Klansman, perpetuates popular stereotypes about American Indians and advances the author's ideology about segregation and staunch individualism. This type of fraud is especially damaging to children, both White and Indian, who internalize such stereotypes as more authentic than the realities of living American Indians.
• An Alien among Us: A Diversity Game
  The game described in this booklet is designed to broaden the players' perspectives on human diversity and to help them appreciate and value people of different backgrounds. In the game, players are asked to select the best candidates for an interplanetary mission on the basis of certain characteristics.
• Counselling Immigrants: School Contexts and Emerging Strategies
  Investigates strategies employed by Israeli secondary school counselors working with immigrant students from the former Soviet Union. Findings highlight the importance counselors attribute to the school context and its organizational culture when working with immigrants.
• Country Roads, Hollers, Coal Towns, and Much More: A Teacher's Guide To Teaching about Appalachia
  Describes the geographic and economic aspects of Appalachia. Asserts that Appalachia is an appropriate topic within multicultural education.
• Cultural Stereotypes and Preservice Education: Moving Beyond Our Biases
  Examines one teacher's attempt to bring positive changes in students' perceptions about people from cultures other than their own. Highlights an education course that helped students change their stereotyped perceptions of an Asian instructor and her culture and their superficial understanding of multicultural education.
• Designing Your Intercultural Communication Course
  This paper presents suggestions for a 60-hour course in intercultural communication that develops cognition skills needed to understand life in foreign countries. The initial part of the course is intended to heighten the participant's awareness of his or her own "home-culture"; the latter part concentrates on assumptions, values, and behaviors of the "target-culture.".
• 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.
• Evaluating American Indian Textbooks & Other Materials for the Classroom
  This guide contains information and suggestions to help teachers review and evaluate textbooks and other materials for stereotypes, inaccuracies, omissions, and bias about American Indians and other Native Americans. Guidelines are presented to raise the awareness of educators and publishers about Native heritage, culture, and contemporary issues.
• Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom: Possibilities and Pitfalls
  Picture books that depict the variety of ethnic, racial, and cultural groups within U.S. society (known generally as multicultural picture books) allow young children opportunities to develop their understanding of others, while affirming children of diverse backgrounds.
• From La Belle Sauvage to the Noble Savage: The Deculturalization of Indian Mascots in American Culture
  Discusses the exploitation of Indian (Native-American) mascots as an issue of educational equity, outlining for the United States educator the ways in which the use of mascots is racist and ways in which education can be a tool for liberation. The use of Indian mascots teaches that racism is acceptable.
• Home Was a Horse Stall
  This story of the internment of a Japanese American family during World War II is 1 of 14 stories of intolerance in America in "Us and Them," the text component of a "Teaching Tolerance" curriculum kit, "The Shadow of Hate." The kit includes a video, teacher's guide, and lesson plans. (SLD).
• Images of Black Females in Children's/Adolescent Contemporary Realistic Fiction
  Examines the messages transmitted to black girls through books for children and adolescents commonly introduced in school. Concludes that children's and adolescents' books do reflect a trickle-down effect of images of black females and poor white females that appear in adult books and films.
• Images of the Third World: Teaching a Geography of the Third World
  Profiles an undergraduate college class that critically examines newspaper, map, and poster representations of the developing nations. Beginning exercises reveal how a person's gender, race, and background influence his or her construction and interpretation of cultural images.
• Including Appalachian Stereotypes in Multicultural Education: An Analysis of Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods."
  Analyzes stereotypes of the South and Appalachia in a recent nonfiction bestseller, demonstrating that prejudice against southerners and Appalachians is so entrenched that it goes unquestioned. Discusses how such stereotypical books can be used in multicultural education classes in Appalachian colleges.
• Lessons from Turtle Island: Native Curriculum in Early Childhood Classrooms
  Responding to the current level of bias with regard to Native peoples in preschool education and providing opportunities for preschool children to better understand issues of cultural diversity, this curriculum guide explores Native American issues.
• Moving from an Obsolete Lingo to a Vocabulary of Respect
  In the postcolonial era, vocabulary must be developed that communicates a belief in equality through word choices that promote respect. Citizens of the global community have the right to name themselves, define their histories, and live according to their cultures.
• Multicultural Illiteracy
  Schools' treatment of diversity categorizes students and applies ineffectual learning methods to resulting stereotypes. The author's study of basal readers showed that today's multiculturalism suppresses most white immigrant groups' stories, omits references to first discoveries and inventions, and substitutes foreign expressions for literate English vocabulary.
• Multicultural Science Education
  Describes multicultural education and lists its basic premises. Explains the importance of science teachers' attitudes in learning.
• Native Americans Today: Resources and Activities for Educators, Grades 4-8
  This activity guide seeks to dispel misrepresentations of Native Americans and build understanding among cultures by offering a hands-on approach to dissecting the whys and hows of institutionalized racism and by painting a realistic and diverse picture of modern American Indians.
• Preschool Children's Classification Skills and a Multicultural Education Intervention To Promote Acceptance of Ethnic Diversity
  Examined the impact of an 8-week intervention program designed to reduce racial/ethnic stereotyping among preschoolers varying in classification skill. Found that children in the experimental group had increased in classification skills at posttest and were less likely to sort photo cards by race/ethnicity and more likely to sort them by gender and age than were control group children.
• Reducing Education Students' Ethnocentrism: Difficulties and Possible Solutions
  Many universities promote cultural awareness by directly teaching sensitivity toward cultural diversity. Because students tend to be somewhat ethnocentric, which is not consonant with the display of culturally tolerant attitudes, multicultural education can help them acquire more tolerant attitudes.
• Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools. Multicultural Education Series
  More than 500 studies of intergroup relations are reviewed to develop recommendations to help educators choose effective programs to reduce racial prejudice and stereotyping in their schools.
• Reducing Stereotyping among 4th through 6th Grade Students by Strengthening Self-Esteem, Interpersonal Relationships, and Multicultural Appreciation
  This practicum study devised and evaluated a program designed to reduce overt incidents of stereotyping among diverse fourth through sixth graders in a large urban K-8 school.
• The Harvard Education Letter, 1996
  This document is comprised of volume 12 of the Harvard Education Letter, published bimonthly and addressing current issues in elementary-secondary education.
• The Pocahontas Paradox: A Cautionary Tale for Educators
  Contemporary media's racist, sexist representations of American Indians have devastating effects on Indian children and adolescents. Negative and self-serving stereotypes of the American Indian are deeply embedded in American life.
• Turning Sunshine into Noir and Fantasy into Reality: Los Angeles in the Classroom
  At the University of Delaware, an interdisciplinary college course called "LA.: City of the Angels" incorporated history, political theory, film studies, and literature. The course aimed to deepen student awareness of diversity by deconstructing Hollywood images of Los Angeles and examining the interconnections between regional stereotypes and cultural and racial prejudice.
• Using Our National Diversity as an Educational Resource
  Provides personal perspectives, both from a teacher and her students, on issues of multiculturalism and diversity. Recounts a number of incidents that illustrate some of the trickier aspects of multicultural education ("How do you feel about arranged marriages?").
• World Rhythms: Students Make Cultural Connections through Music and Dance
  Describes several programs in which music and dance are used to unlock doors that stereotypes of race, gender, language, religion, or ability have kept shut. Exposure to the music and dance of other cultures helps children's awareness of the diversity of the world and people's essential similarities.