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Student Attitudes

• "Back Home, Nobody'd Do That": Immigrant Students and Cultural Models of Schooling
  Asks what teachers must know about ethnic backgrounds to facilitate instruction for immigrant students, how cultural values in the United States and values of specific ethnic groups diverge, and how teachers can improve their understanding of other cultures. Answers through firsthand accounts from research interviews with students who are recent immigrants.
• "Challenge Us; I Think We're Ready": Establishing a Multicultural Course of Study
  Discusses how students can relate to Mark Mathabane's autobiographical novel "Kaffir Boy"--his questioning why he must attend school, his open defiance of his father, and his struggle to resist peer pressure. Examines where an all-white high-school faculty started in terms of developing a multicultural literature program, where they have been, and where they see the program in the near future.
• "Reverse Racism": Students' Response to Equity Programs
  With reference to class discussions of racism and equity, this article explores how white college and university students conceptualize racism and perceive equity programs as affecting their career opportunities. It concludes that through class discussions, educators can help students understand equity programs as a benefit to all students.
• "Would I Use This Book?" White, Female Education Students Examine Their Beliefs About Teaching
  Examines the interplay of two added components to a reading/language arts methods course: professional readings informed by diverse viewpoints; and participation in a multicultural literature discussion group. Explores how this methods course extended students' understanding and beliefs about teaching the history and lives of the varied groups of people who make up the United States.
• A Diversity Curriculum: Integrating Attitudes, Issues, and Applications
  Describes a graduate-level public administration course on valuing diversity, which provided opportunities to examine in detail the ethical dilemmas, public attitudes and values, and social consequences of compelling diversity issues. Reports on a content analysis of students' final papers, identifying common themes in students' development of competencies related to valuing diversity.
• A Multicultural Study of University Students' Knowledge of and Attitudes Toward Homosexuality
  This study investigated whether or not a relationship exists between university students' knowledge of and attitudes toward homosexuality. Reports significant results and discusses the implications of findings for educational and counseling practice.
• A Path to Social Change: Examining Students' Responsibility, Opportunity, and Emotion toward Social Justice
  Investigated college students' beliefs about privileged and oppressed adults' responsibility for the onset/offset of social inequities, emotions linked with their responsibility, and behaviors that should result from responsibility for social equity. Overall, preconceived notions of privilege and oppression can offer an explanation for students' resistance to multicultural discourse.
• A Preliminary Analysis of Counseling Students' Attitudes toward Counseling Women and Women of Color: Implication for Cultural Competency Training
  Counseling students (N=56) responded to peer-generated presentations on counseling women and counseling women of color. Qualitative methodology was used to identify students' racial, ethnic, and gender attitudes in counseling contexts.
• Accent Discrimination: Implications for the Multicultural Educational Institution of the 21st Century
  Based on litigation patterns, discrimination because of accent occurs most frequently in colleges and universities, particularly in the classroom. Accent discrimination cases are unlike other employment discrimination cases because successful claims generally do not depend on qualifications, but on accent's effect on job performance.
• America Reads Challenge: Tutors to Teachers
  Investigated how the America Reads Challenge might help recruit tutors to the teaching profession. Focus groups and surveys of college tutors in urban settings indicated that they enjoyed the experience and believed it increased and confirmed their desire to teach.
• Anchored in Our Literature: Students Responding to African American Literature
  Tells the story of three African American children's responses to literature by and about African Americans, showing the importance of connecting literature to the lives and interests of children. (SR).
• Anti-Bias Teaching To Address Cultural Diversity
  Multiculturalism must be integrated into classrooms and the curriculum, and it must be all-encompassing, taught through formal lessons and modeled and demonstrated at all times. Describes how teachers can create an anti-bias curriculum and promote a multicultural or anti-bias classroom.
• 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).
• Asian Americans' and African Americans' Initial Perceptions of Hispanic Counselors
  Study examines the effects of Hispanic counselors' race and speech accent on Asian American and African American students' initial perceptions. Results show that students' gender, race, and level of "universal-diverse" orientation, along with counselors' speech accent, predicted students' initial perceptions of the counselors and of the counseling relationship.
• Asian Students and Humanities Subjects: Report to the Equity and Social Justice Branch, Victoria University
  Australia is a multicultural society and, in recent years, Asian immigration has increased tremendously. In terms of the educational participation of Asian-Australian students, students from non-English-speaking backgrounds are not highly represented in humanities, arts, and education courses.
• Assessing Student Opinion toward a Multicultural Student Union
  Describes the process by which one university considered the development of a multicultural student union and the research project that was undertaken to gain information from all campus constituencies concerning the interest in such a union. Reports on student responses gathered in telephone interviews and discusses implications for other universities.
• Assessing Students' Attitudes and Achievements in a Multicultural and Multilingual Science Classroom
  Takes a qualitative and quantitative look at the curriculum and teaching of a two-way immersion eighth-grade solar energy science classroom and examines its implications for education policy and reform. Results for a class of 25 students indicate that the approach increases the retention rate of Hispanic students.
• Assessing the Attitudes of Student Teachers toward Issues of Diversity: A Dilemma for Teacher Educators
  Explores attitudes and perceptions of 120 student teachers with regard to their ability to implement multicultural education in the student teaching classroom. Results suggest that confusion and ambiguity are present throughout the student teacher education experience.
• Assessing the Issues of Multiracial Students on College Campuses
  This preliminary study focuses on multiracial college students' attitudes regarding the challenges they experience on campus. Results highlight counseling issues that affect multiracial college students and how college counselors' perceptions of diversity need to be broadened to accommodate the rapidly growing multiracial and multiethnic student population.
• Becoming Multicultural: Focusing on the Process
  Focuses on the importance of helping students develop intercultural competence and suggests ways to integrate activities for this purpose into instruction. Activities are presented to promote effective student strategies for intercultural competence.
• Between the Lines: School Stories
  Reviews five stories that can introduce students to youthful narrators whose dreams and thoughts may be quite similar to their own, but whose cultural backgrounds may be very different. Using stories about school experience generates discussion about prejudice and discrimination.
• Big Win for Ethnic Studies at Berkeley
  University of California, Berkeley students and faculty from the ethnic-studies program protested budget cuts and faculty losses. The resulting agreement includes creation of a new ethnic-studies research center, establishment of a multicultural student center, and creation of eight faculty positions, five of them tenure-track.
• Bookwise and Culture Smart
  A study examined whether multicultural literature used within the classroom increases respect for differences among kindergarten children. Subjects for the study were 12 students ranging in age from 5-6 years old from two classrooms.
• Brief Counseling with Hispanic American College Students
  Hispanic-American college students (N=16) met with a Puerto-Rican counselor for two brief counseling sessions. Brief counseling was a viable and effective approach in helping the students reach their goals.
• Children's Literature as a Springboard for Music
  Maintains that children's literature is a treasure waiting to be discovered by music educators. Describes how children's literature can enhance student motivation, creativity, and foster multicultural education.
• Class of 2000: The Prejudice Puzzle[SM]. A Teachers' Guide. A Presentation of National Public Radio[R] Specials Project
  This teachers' guide accompanies a series of reports from National Public Radio's "Class of 2000: The Prejudice Puzzle," which was broadcast on September 9-15, 1990. The series explores the impact of prejudice on the lives of young people through several interviews from a diverse student population.
• Collaboration in the Science Classroom To Tackle Racism and Sexism
  Describes techniques used in a British secondary school classroom to encourage collaborative learning to promote science while addressing sexism and racism in the classroom. Group work practices were extended to include students monitoring of themselves and their interactions, with feedback and discussion of the social processes.
• Comparison of the Perceptions of Classroom Participation among Asian and Non-Asian Design Students
  Compared and contrasted the perceptions and expectations of instructors and Asian students studying design and compared the perceptions of Asian and non-Asian students in 2 design classes with 22 undergraduates. Asian students had more passive attitudes toward class participation than did non-Asian students.
• Conditions, Concessions, and the Many Tender Mercies of Learning through Multicultural Literature
  Explores how students constructed their own texts and meanings when they were required to read, interpret, and critique unfamiliar text written about underrepresented people. Presents the concepts "conditions," "concessions," and many "tender mercies" of learning through multicultural literature when presented as new literature to a heterogeneous mix of students.
• Conflict in Multiculturalism Classes: Too Much Heat or Too Little?
  The issues that arise in a college course on multiculturalism can touch students very personally and may be a first opportunity for many students to talk face-to-face about important social issues. Anticipating when students may become defensive, angry, hurt, or when conflict might erupt will help faculty know when to lower or raise the temperature in the classroom.
• Confronting White Privilege and the "Color Blind" Paradigm in a Teacher Education Program
  Reports on an effort developed in 1997 to expose elementary education majors to issues of social inequality through immersion in a 2-day symposium. Responses of 527 participants suggest that the impact of the symposium on student attitudes was significant.
• Constructing Conceptions of Multicultural Teaching: Preservice Teachers' Life Experiences and Teacher Education
  Addresses the need for greater understanding of the complex, contradictory nature of preservice teachers' life experiences as they interact with a multicultural, social reconstructionist teacher education course. The paper describes a study of the course and portrays two students' prior experiences that influenced their motivations to teach multiculturally.
• Constructing the Other through Community Service Learning
  This is an exploratory study of the reactions that 65 European American preservice teachers had to the community service learning (CSL) component of a multicultural education course. The CSL project was intended to facilitate the development of intercultural competence and to foster the idea of teachers as agents of social justice.
• Constructing the Other through Community Service Learning
  This is an exploratory study of the reactions that 65 European American preservice teachers had to the community service learning (CSL) component of a multicultural education course. The CSL project was intended to facilitate the development of intercultural competence and to foster the idea of teachers as agents of social justice.
• Cortes' Multicultural Empowerment Model and Generative Teaching and Learning in Science
  Adapts Cortes' Multicultural Empowerment Model to science teaching and to Wittrock's Model of Generative Learning and Teaching in Science. Encourages all children to learn science and learn about science.
• Creating Safety To Address Controversial Issues: Strategies for the Classroom
  Presents seven elements of a safe classroom in controversy-driven courses, where students can exchange ideas rather than emotions as they learn and discuss. The elements are: collegiality, empowerment, role modeling, preparation, shared purpose, reflection, and commitment.
• Critical Multiculturalism and Racism in Children's Literature
  Multicultural literature can help elementary students learn about cultural differences and racial bias and examine their prejudices and stereotypes. Critiques five children's books that emphasize the African American experience.
• Cultural Diversity and Conflict Resolution: An Interdisciplinary Unit for the California Fourth-Grade Classroom
  Proposes an interdisciplinary, fourth-grade conflict resolution curriculum that integrates content area activities that take into consideration the cognitive and moral development of fourth graders. The curriculum focuses on conflict resolution skills, diversity and conflict, and mediation.
• Cultures in Conflict
  The implementation of a multicultural program for African-American and Hispanic students in an urban high school is presented. Increased intergroup tensions relating them to the students' concepts of culture and race are discussed.
• Curricular Approaches To Developing Positive Interethnic Relations
  Examines how curricular approaches have helped build positive interethnic relations in a large, ethnically diverse high school, documenting four curricular approaches teacher leaders used to address issues of race and ethnicity and exploring the impact of those approaches on student learning. Illuminates how teacher leaders and administrators created the conditions for these curricular reforms to be sustainable.
• Curriculum, Identity, and Experience in Multicultural Teacher Education
  Reports on the initial stages of an ongoing action-research project in multicultural teacher education. Viewing curriculum as the creation of culturally significant domains for conversation, the project inquired into how a secondary English-methods course centered on issues of cultural diversity and emerging professional identities was taken up by predominantly white, middle-class students.
• Development of a Psychology Department Diversity Newsletter
  Describes a newsletter written by and disseminated directly to psychology students at James Madison University that focuses on multicultural issues, such as student research on diverse topics, political updates regarding minority issues, and summaries of multicultural activities in psychology classes. Explains that student reactions to the various newsletters were positive.
• Distinctive Members: The Effects of Solo Arrangements on Evaluations of Solos and Similar Others
  Investigates the effect of group composition on judgments of African Americans. White male and female college students (N=84) responded to photographic slides of female work groups containing altered racial compositions.
• Diverse Learners, Diverse Texts: Exploring Identity and Difference through Literary Encounters
  Examines two urban 10th-grade English classes of ethnically diverse students in which the teachers diversified literature selections for newly designed ethnic literature curricula. Reports the texts students found most memorable and meaningful, and analyzes the values students found in their encounters with these literary works.
• Diversity Initiatives in Higher Education
  Describes university intergroup dialogue programs, which bring together diverse students to discuss issues related to their diversity and develop comfort with and skills for discourse on difficult topics. Examines their basic tenets, themes, and variations.
• Diversity Initiatives in Higher Education: Intergroup Dialogue Program Student Outcomes and Implications for Campus Radical Climate. A Case Study
  Explored the cognitive and affective outcomes of participating in the University of Maryland's Intergroup Dialogue Program to promote social justice among diverse students. Post-program interviews indicated that many students had changed perceptions of self and society after the program.
• Dramatized Experience, Civil Discourse, Sensitive Issues
  Describes the author's experience when the director and teacher-trainers of a writing program persuaded him that the oral interpretation he wished them to perform was too troubling and explosive to use. Outlines his questions and anguish about the incident, and the urgency of dealing with the dilemmas of multiculturalism, racial intolerance, and the teaching of writing.
• Dumping Ground or Effective Alternative: Dropout-Prevention Programs in Urban Schools
  Focusing on students’ perspectives, this article examines whether an urban dropout-prevention program offers students effective alternatives to regular classes or if, instead, the program is simply a dumping ground for unwanted students. Findings generated from interviews and observations suggest both.
• Educating for Social Competence: A Conceptual Approach to Social Studies Teaching
  Maintains that the broad arenas of the social sciences bind multiple areas of study together, giving added breadth and depth to each. Identifies the basic tenets of multicultural, global, and civic education.
• 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.
• Effective Communication in Multicultural Classrooms
  This research tries to determine effective intercultural classroom communication in the American higher education setting. Theories on classroom communication and intercultural communication (Uncertainty Reduction and Communication Accommodation) are used to build the framework.
• Encouraging and Recruiting Students of Color To Teach
  Examined the impact of the Teaching as a Career Workshop, which stressed the need for minority teachers, on high school students' perceptions about teaching. Participants considered it important for people of color to become teachers and believed the workshop influenced them to select teaching careers.
• Ethnicity and Comparative Youth Disaffection in Multicultural Contexts: Some Multiracial Experiences of Education in Thanet and Lille
  Explored youth disaffection, focusing on K-12 schools in England and France. Data from student interviews, staff interviews, and classroom observations indicated that educational inclusion in the two countries was not meeting the educational needs of disaffected youth.
• Evaluation of an Intervention To Change Attitudes Toward Date Rape
  Describes the design and evaluates effectiveness of a program at a private college to change freshman (n=615) attitudes about date rape and sexual assault. Intervention for the experimental group involved viewing a play performed by students; the control group viewed an alternative play addressing multicultural issues.
• Evaluation of GALAXY Classroom Science for Grades 3-5. Final Report. Executive Summary
  The GALAXY Classroom is a package of integrated curricular and instructional approaches, supported by the first U.S. interactive satellite communications network designed to facilitate the introduction of innovative curricula to improve student learning in elementary schools.
• Experiences and Beliefs as Predictors of Ethnic Identity and Intergroup Relations
  Factors affecting ethnic identity and other group orientation were assessed in 115 college students from 5 ethnic groups. Ethnic group self-identification, negative and positive interracial experiences, perceptions of racial bias, social support, just-world beliefs, and psychological distress were each associated with various components of ethnic identity and are discussed within a counseling perspective.
• Experiential Exercises for Increasing Self-Awareness and an Appreciation of Racially and Ethnically Diverse Populations
  Describes experiential exercises used by the author to facilitate both self-awareness and an appreciation of the impact of race and culture in the United States in a group of students consisting mainly of undergraduate social work majors. These exercises generate deep reflection and personal insights on race and ethnicity.
• Exploring Culture, Language and the Perception of the Nature of Science
  Explores the views some First Nations (Cree) and Euro-Canadian grade 7-level students in Manitoba have about the nature of science. Uses both qualitative and quantitative instruments to explore student views.
• Hong Kong Students' Attitudes Towards Cantonese, Putonghua, and English After the Change of Sovereignty
  Examined the attitudes of Hong Kong secondary school students toward English, Cantonese, and Putonghua. Compared the language attitudes of two main groups of Hong Kong students, middle class elite and working class low achievers.
• Ideals for Citizenship Education
  Discusses the importance of citizenship education in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe, explaining that citizenship education in schools provides an opportunity for young people to see justice as everyone's business and to learn how to ask questions, think critically, and see that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. (SM).
• Improving Upper Grade Math Achievement via the Integration of a Culturally Responsive Curriculum
  This report describes an intervention program for increasing mathematical achievement of African American students. Within the targeted population, it was evident that the disparity in math achievement between African American and White students was increasing each year.
• Infusion of Multicultural Issues in Curricula: A Student Perspective
  Current or graduated students (n=132) at Colorado State University identified classroom incidents that had strengthened their understanding of multiculturalism. The 155 incidents were sorted into 18 categories of pedagogical techniques and classroom composition or dynamics that promoted multicultural awareness.
• Interethnic Relations on Campus: Can't We All Get Along?
  Examines ethnic climate and relationships among ethnic groups at five colleges. Data indicate that White and Latino students were the most comfortable interacting with other ethnic groups, whereas Asian students were the least comfortable.
• Keeping It Real: Teaching and Learning about Culture, Literacy, and Respect
  Describes one teacher education program designed to broaden students' thinking about the influences of culture in society, and teaching and learning about literacy. Offers an "unromanticized glimpse" into the lives of teacher education students as they struggle to come to terms with their transformation as literacy educators preparing to teach literacy in multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual classrooms of the 21st century.
• 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 To Be a Citizen in the Global Age
  Discusses how to teach students to be citizens in today's diverse world, examining current key issues and explaining the varying forms of citizenship and variables associated with access to them. Stresses the need to integrate education for the diverse range of citizen learning models in order to abolish social discrimination forever.
• Looking at the Evidence More Carefully: Achieving the Ideal?
  Schools could make a major contribution toward a racist-free society by stressing more emphatically the need for teachers and students to critically examine all the evidence before making judgements or taking action. By instilling into children a basic set of rules enabling them to make appropriate judgements, teachers can help people rationally defend their beliefs, opinions, and behaviors.
• Multi-Tasking in Science: Meeting the Challenge of Change
  Explains the multitasking approach to instruction and how it fits to a diverse student population. Focuses on one such program for high school science students in North Carolina.
• Multicultural Citizenship
  Great Britain's citizenship education helps prepare students for informed and responsible citizenship in a multicultural society. Social science teachers and researchers should consider factors that epitomize multiethnic Britain today as they teach.
• Multicultural Education. Theory to Practice
  Teachers from two urban elementary schools completed surveys about their multicultural education practices. The surveys examined demographics, content integration, instructional and grouping practices, and parent-community involvement practices.
• Multicultural Picture Books: Perspectives from Canada
  Conveys that multicultural children's literature can support and encourage tolerance and understanding among children. Presents information about multiculturalism in Canada and gives criteria to help teachers select multicultural literature.
• Multicultural Training for Undergraduates: Developing Knowledge and Awareness
  Determined whether training undergraduates (N=58) in multicultural issues improves awareness of their own cultural assumptions, values, and biases, along with their knowledge of other world views and cultural assumptions. Results indicate that undergraduates who completed a multicultural course reported increased multicultural awareness.
• Multiculturalism, Diversity, and African American College Students: Receptive, Yet Skeptical?
  Hypothesized that African American college students with higher racial self-esteem would be more open to diversity and multiculturalism than students with lower racial self-esteem. Surveys indicated that most students valued diversity-oriented courses, though most also believed that diversity courses were biased against African Americans.
• Multiculturalism, Diversity, and the Impact Parents and Schools Have on Societal Race Relations
  Multicultural research shows that students' attitudes and friendships within a multiracial/ethnic context involve complicated sets of behavioral and attitudinal dimensions. Parents' and teachers' influence can cause children to develop positive and/or negative attitudes about an entire group.
• Multiple Cultures, Multiple Literacies
  Describes the author's work in his fifth-grade class as he helps his students understand the importance that culture plays in their representations of meaning. Shows how opportunities to transcend language by using other sign systems allow multiculturalism to flourish.
• Multiple Literacies and Critical Pedagogy in a Multicultural Society
  Multiple literacies are needed to meet the challenges of today's new technologies and multicultural society. Media literacy is necessary because media culture strongly influences people's world view.
• Multiple Views: Valuing Diversity
  Maintains that in an increasingly multicultural and globally interdependent world, learning to value diversity will become a curriculum imperative. Outlines two activities designed to facilitate this goal.
• Negative Outcomes of Diversity Training: What Can We Do?
  For a number of years, Division 17 of the American Psychological Association has delivered a strong message to all accredited sites as to the importance of attending to diversity in the training of Counseling Psychologists. Although many training sites have responded to this mandate, scholars and researchers have, in increasing numbers, added clarity to describing multicultural counseling competence and identifying appropriate and acceptable attitudes.
• Obstaculos al aprendizaje--obstaculos a la ensenanza en contextos (Barriers to Learning--Barriers to Teaching in Multicultural Contexts). Papers on Teacher Training and Multicultural/Intercultural Education 25
  This study focused on identifying learning difficulties with a view to incorporating both understanding of those difficulties and methods for minimizing or neutralizing them in multicultural classroom settings. Discussion gives guidelines for teachers to use in analyzing student concepts and approaches to learning, particularly in the question-and-answer format.
• Ourselves as Students: Multicultural Voices in the Classroom
  Fifty-eight college students from widely diverse backgrounds at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, discuss the impact of gender, race, social class, religion, nationality, age, sexual orientation, or disability on their educational experience.
• 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.
• Perceptions versus Preferences: Adult International Students' Teaching-Learning Experiences in an American University
  International students' perceptions of and preferences for the teaching-learning process in a U.S. university was assessed.
• Pharmacy Students' Perceptions About the Need for Multicultural Education
  A study assessed pharmacy students' perceptions about the importance of learning about health beliefs and behaviors of ethnic minority groups, views on the mechanisms by which such cultural information should be conveyed, and differences in perceptions related to student demography. Students believed this information was important but did not make the connection between having knowledge and impacting patient outcomes.
• Preparing Teachers for Diversity in Rural America
  A survey of 532 preservice teachers from six state colleges and University of Nebraska campuses examined the extent and perceived adequacy of multicultural education training in Nebraska teacher-preparation programs. About 39% of respondents felt that their overall multicultural preparation was inadequate.
• 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).
• 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.
• Reflecting, Reconceptualizing, and Revising: The Evolution of a Portfolio Assignment in a Multicultural Teacher Education Course
  Describes the use of portfolios in teacher education programs and the development and evolution of a portfolio assignment in a course on multicultural issues in special education. Qualitative data that describe students' (n=156) learning is presented, and implications for future practice and research is provided.
• Reflections on Multicultural Education: A Teacher's Experience
  Describes a high school-level multicultural course designed to challenge the predominantly white students to reflect upon system power inequities that benefitted many of them directly. Students engaged in social action projects, working with people unlike themselves in organizations that had social justice orientations.
• Reflections on the Challenges, Possibilities, and Perplexities of Preparing Preservice Teachers for Culturally Diverse Classrooms
  Describes one professor's personal struggle and growth in facing the challenges and perplexities of planning and developing strategies to initiate the critical process of teaching multicultural concepts to teacher education students early in their education by providing them field experiences in urban schools. Student attitudes and attitude changes are discussed.
• Research, Writing, and Racial Identity: Cross-Disciplinary Connections for Multicultural Education
  Examined how white students in an undergraduate multicultural education course experienced difficult, emotional content about racism. Analysis of samples of students' reflective writing indicated that the coursework influenced students' racial identities.
• Revisiting Intercultural Education: Goals, Methods, and Obstacles
  Discusses multicultural education, explaining that it was developed in response to concerns about Americans' anxiety over mass immigration into the country during the early 1900s. Describes five goals of multicultural education, notes methods of and obstacles to multicultural education over the years, and presents implications for contemporary efforts in multicultural education.
• Secondary English Students' Engagement in Reading and Writing about a Multicultural Novel
  Explored 9th-grade urban and rural English students' reading engagement and interpretation of a multicultural novel involving bi-ethnic identity. Students read and responded to the novel via journal writing and a research paper.
• Shifting Identities in Private Education: Reconstructing Race at/in the Cultural Center
  Examines social constructs of white racial identity among adolescent girls attending a largely white, elite, private, single-sex high school. Students' voices illustrate how liberal discourses position youth and how white youth actively remake themselves in relation to prevailing meanings and practices institutionalized in private schools.
• Show Us How: A School-Wide Programme for Reluctant Readers
  Westerns Springs College in Auckland, New Zealand is an inner city coeducational secondary school of 670 multicultural and diverse students. Achievement test results in reading comprehension and vocabulary grouped students at the top and bottom of the scale.
• Student Self-Empowerment: A Dimension of Multicultural Education
  Examined ways in which 27 urban ninth graders from diverse backgrounds displayed empowering behaviors and attitudes. Students clearly voiced that they were in control of their actions.
• Students' Perceptions of Racial and Ethnic Tensions in Pacific Region Schools
  High school students from several Pacific region countries (including Canada and the Pacific United States) were asked to comment on racial and ethnic tensions in their schools. Student responses to the open-ended prompts give insights into the effects of racial tensions on their lives.
• Talking about Racism in the Primary School
  Examines what effects teaching explicitly about racism for one term to a multiethnic, elementary school class has on the students' attitudes, beliefs, and actions regarding racism. Responses from 23 six graders reveal a need for primary schools to provide more effective and explicit education against racism.
• Telling Their Side of the Story: African-American Students' Perceptions of Culturally Relevant Teaching
  Examined African American elementary school students' interpretations of culturally relevant teachers within urban contexts. Student responses indicated that culturally relevant teaching strategies had a positive effect on student effort and engagement in class content.
• 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 Academic Language Gap
  Discusses reasons for the deep resistance students feel about assuming the role of self-conscious intellectualizer and contentious argument-maker that is demanded by academic courses. Argues that educators will miss the point if, in their dwelling on texts, canons, and political philosophies, they ignore or romanticize this resistance.
• The Acceptance of a Multicultural Education among Appalachian College Students
  Explored the multicultural predispositions of 437 students in a Central Appalachian university, discovering which sort of multicultural programs garner weaker and stronger support. Tested explanatory models incorporating a mix of 21 independent variables, some drawn from sociological, psychological, and political science studies of reactions to other multicultural programs.
• The Attitudes of Bilingual Children to Their Languages
  Examined bilingual Australian elementary students' attitudes toward their first and second languages, noting attitudes they attributed to significant others in various contexts and investigating the impact of demographic and educational factors. Interviews indicated that children held significantly different attitudes toward first and second languages which differed across contexts.
• The Chula/Fish Creek Connection
  Describes a social studies cultural exchange program between a public school and a Canadian native school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Outlines how the students became mutual inquirers into one another's cultures.
• The Color of Teachers, the Color of Students: The Multicultural Classroom Experience
  Examines the experiences of students taking a one-semester race and ethnic relations course taught in three sections, each with a different instructor, one African American, one Mexican American, and one white. Finds that approximately 25 to 40 percent of students expected instructor's race/ethnicity to influence everything but grading.
• 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 Impact of a Standards Guided Equity and Problem Solving Institute on Participating Science Teachers and Their Students
  This study examined the effect of a teacher enhancement project combining training on the National Science Education Standards, problem solving and equity education on middle school science teachers' attitudes and practices and, in turn, the attitudes of their students.
• The Impact of an International Cultural Experience on Previously Held Stereotypes by American Student Nurses
  Examined stereotypes held by U.S. student nurses before and after participating in an educational experience in Russia.
• The Impact of Undergraduate Diversity Course Requirement on Students' Racial Views and Attitudes
  Describes a study that found that students who were about to complete their undergraduate diversity requirement exhibited significantly less prejudice and made more favorable judgments about African Americans, compared with students who were just beginning this requirement. Emphasizes the educational value of diversity-related curricular initiatives.
• The International Baccalaureate: International Education and Cultural Preservation
  Examines how well the International Baccalaureate (IB) achieves its aims of inculcating international attitudes while maintaining students' cultural identities. Finds that international attitudes may be more affected by the social environment of IB programs than by the curriculum; success at cultural maintenance varies by culture, with Western cultures being better supported.
• The One-Minute Paper: Enhancing Discussion in a Multicultural Seminar
  The teacher of a college seminar on education in contemporary American society, addressing sensitive personal and political concepts, used one-minute essays to "take the pulse" of the class daily. Daily summaries of essay content provided students with evidence of the teacher's commitment to monitoring the process, added a level of discourse, and provided feedback about individual and collective direction.
• The Outcomes of Teaching Tolerance: A Research Report Submitted to the Graduate Social Science Education Program
  This study attempted to record possible changes in individual students involved in a "teaching tolerance" program. Approximately 70 high school students enrolled in a "Participation in Government" class were analyzed qualitatively to determine whether individuals experience a change in attitudes toward those different from themselves.
• The Process of Culture Learning within a Foreign Language Program at a Selected Suburban Middle School Site: A Case Study
  This paper examines the effect of foreign language instruction on middle school students' attitudes toward "the other." The primary purpose of this case study is to describe the process of culture learning as it takes place within a middle school foreign language program.
• The Use of Culturally Relevant Videos To Draw Attention to Cultural Diversity: A Preliminary Study
  Videos celebrating Hispanic Heritage and Black History month were presented at two regionally and ethnically distinct college campuses. Students (N=62) were interviewed regarding what attracted them to the video.
• Those People: You Know Who They Are
  Describes the ways in which a group of graduate students in a theory of multilingual education class learned to identify groups they had been taught to regard as "those people," others to be distrusted or disliked. Dialogue about who represented "those people" for each student led to considerations of race, class, gender, and religion.
• Through the Eyes of Preservice Teachers: Implications for the Multicultural Journey from Teacher Education
  Investigated definitions and perceptions of multicultural education among 103 preservice early childhood education students. Found that students' definitions illustrated minimal understanding of multicultural education, limited to race and ethnicity.
• Understanding the Context of the "Other" Education: Black and White Students Talk about Their Experiences at Lone Star University, a Predominantly White Institution of Higher Education in the South
  This study examined students perceptions of campus racial climate and the effects it has on their growth and development while attending a predominantly white research university (Research 1 classification) where black students are less than 3% of the student body. The study sought to illuminate the perceptions of campus climate and development as experienced by black and white students.
• Universal-Diverse Orientation and General Expectations about Counseling: Their Relation to College Students' Multicultural Counseling Expectations
  Examines universal-diverse orientation, general counseling expectations, and multicultural counseling expectations in a sample of 186 culturally diverse college students. Findings reveal that college students' universal-diverse orientation and general counseling expectations were positively related to their multicultural counseling expectations.
• Using All the Crayons. Educator Patricia Ramsey Says the Lessons of Tolerance Begin in Early Childhood
  Interviews a professor of psychology and education who discusses the implicit messages about differences and power relationships that children receive from the adults around them. Teachers should assess their own biases and work to ensure that multicultural education is more than superficial window dressing.
• Using Media To Create Experiential Learning in Multicultural and Diversity Issues
  Presents a framework for using media to create experiential learning in multicultural and diversity issues based on cognitive-experiential self-theory. Offers several lessons and a media resource list aimed at training counseling students in multicultural and diversity issues.
• Violence in Schools: Multiple Realities
  The topic of school violence is becoming an increasingly contentious issue. Claims are made by parents and the media that educators are intentionally downplaying the true nature and extent of the problem.
• Violence in Schools: Multiple Realities
  The topic of school violence is becoming an increasingly contentious issue. Claims are made by parents and the media that educators are intentionally downplaying the true nature and extent of the problem.
• Voices from the Trenches: Students' Insights Regarding Multicultural Teaching/Learning
  Describes a conference presentation on "Multicultural Ways of Thinking: Removing the Blinders," in which a teaching strategy called "anonymous sharing" was modeled. The strategy allows participants to share ideas in a nonthreatening way by reading comments made anonymously by others.
• Voices of Students in Multicultural Service-Learning Settings
  Journals of 30 college students of child development engaged in community-based service learning in multicultural settings revealed three themes.
• Voices of Students in Multicultural Service-Learning Settings
  Journals of 30 college students of child development engaged in community-based service learning in multicultural settings revealed three themes. Students: (1) articulated their own approaches or philosophies regarding racial issues; (2) expressed concerns about specific multicultural or race-related incidents; and (3) discussed the resources they relied on to put their experiences into a larger perspective.
• What's a (White) Teacher To Do about Black English?
  Argues that it is important for Black students and for all students to understand that Black English is indeed a language with rules, beauty, and power so that they come to respect it, respect its history, and respect their own bilingualism. (SR).
• White Americans' Attitudes Toward Asian Americans in Social Situations: An Empirical Examination of Potential Stereotypes, Bias, and Prejudice
  Investigates the stereotypical attitudes of college students toward a variety of social situations involving Asian Americans. Examines the effects of differential labeling of Asian Americans regarding the attitudes held toward them.
• White Students' Resistance to Multicultural Literature: Breaking the Sullen Silence
  Describes a writing assignment in which students study and imitate the language of a minority author. Discusses how the assignment helps negotiate conflicts when students resist multicultural literature, as their creative responses mediate between themselves and works they might otherwise find foreign and antagonistic.