The minds behind TUSD’s Multicultural classes

Editor’s update: The AZDI has come into possession of the curricula currently under review, check back tomorrow for highlights.

On June 7, 2013 TUSD’s new Multicultural curricula will be available for public viewing. Until then, the District is holding it tightly under wraps, releasing only academic basis of the curriculum developed by the district’s Multicultural director Augie Romero.

Despite the fact that the Critical Race curricula has not yet been seen by the public, or approved by the Board, a memo went out to district employees advising them of the new course which have been “approved.” On the district’s website, Romero cites Sleeter, Gay, Banks, Stovall, Cammarota and others as the inspiration of his soon to be revealed multicultural masterpiece.

While we have only seen a glimpse (view here) of what TUSD K-12 students can expect in their classrooms, a look at the great minds behind the method is instructive. Christine Sleeter and Peter McLaren are at the core of much of Romero’s past work. Their book, Multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and the politics of difference, highlights the work of many of Romero’s muses.

Gay’s chapter in Sleeter and McLaren’s book is entitled, ‘Mirror Images on Common Issues Parallels between Multicultural Education and Critical Pedagogy.” She writes, “That is what teaching is at its best – living the revolutionary life. This helps us understand Freire. And for me this helps to explain Che, Marx, Cabral, Fannon, Memmi, Malcolm, Sandino, Horton, subcommadante Marcos, Emma Goldman and Fridha Kahlo are such great teachers. Their praxis is in their bloodstream. Their hearts are reflected in their work. They put their everyday life at risk by risking their everyday lives in the struggle against capitalist exploitation, against petrified ideologies, against hatred, against racism, against dehumanization, against all vocations of the colonizer.

Geneva Gay:

According to Gay, “multicultural education shares many of the concerns, intentions, and processes of other educational innovations designed to reform schooling among these simulations are intergroup education, progressive education, humanistic education, child centered education, citizenship education, a more recent development in Critical Pedagogy.”

Gay says that “the foundational principles and analytical techniques of Critical Pedagogy and multicultural education emphasize economic, political, and ethical analysis of how schools routinely perpetuate inequities and cultural groups and ignore or violate their rights, cultures, and experiences. Inherent in these is a concerted effort to link schooling with domination and liberation. Critical pedagogues see schools as “agencies of social and cultural reproduction, exercising power through the underlying interest embodied in the overt and hidden curricula, while at the same time offering limited possibilities for teaching and student empowerment” (Aronowitz and Giroux 1985, p.1430. Bhikhu Parekh (1986), a British multiculturalist, expresses similar sentiments, He explains that education is neither culturally nor politically neutral.”

Julio Cammorata:

Associate Professor Julio Cammarota from the University of Arizona’s completed a doctoral program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education in May of 2001. According to the University’s website, “Cammarota has also co-authored a seminal article on applying a social justice approach to youth development practices.” Currently, he is the director of the Social Justice Education Project in Tucson, Arizona,” (TUSD/UOFA) and the Anthropology and Education Program at the UA.

Cammarota, who was on hand during the student takeover of the TUSD Governing Board meeting in the Spring of 2011, co-authored numerous articles with Romero. In their piece entitled, “A Critically Compassionate Intellectualism for Latina/o Students: Raising Voices Above the Silencing in Our Schools,” the duo praise the work of Freire and write that teachers “who follow critically compassionate intellectualism implement the educational trilogy of Critical Pedagogy, authentic caring, and social justice centered curriculum.”

They claim that for “students of color critical pedagogy affords them the opportunity to be critical agents of social and structural transformation.” They praise Freire for his work on “banking education some 30 years ago” and say the banking practice is “so prevalent in our schools today. The primary assumption holds true. Teachers possess all the knowledge and their job is to fill the students’ supposedly blank minds with the state’s official perception and understanding of the world.”

The duo writes of their “opportunity to implement and develop an alternative social justice pedagogy at a high school located in Tucson Arizona. The school principal allowed us to work with a cohort of 20 Latino students during their junior and senior years teaching the social studies requirements by adjusting the content and pedagogy in ways that facilitated the students’ critical consciousness around racial inequities.”

(According to Romero and Cammarota the students received credits for all high school graduation requirements in US History and US Government. It was in these classes Romero bragged about at a civil rights conference in Phoenix telling the audience that he would bring burritos to the hungry students to “win them over.” His use of food to entice students became a sticking point for traditional educators who believe that you should feed a student because they are hungry and not as an enticement.)

According to the duo, their “goal was to help students raise their own voices above the silencing of traditional schooling. In addition we hoped that they would become active citizens armed with a critical consciousness that could lead them towards the transformation of educational and social structures presently failing to meet their needs.”

Christine Sleeter:

Sleeter received her PhD. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. According to her website she is currently Immediate Past President of the National Association for Multicultural Education.

Sleeter has won the Social Justice in Education Award from Bill Ayer’s Social Justice Committee of the American Educational Research Association. Sleeter has also won Chapman University’s Paulo Freire Education Project Social Justice Award, the American Educational Research Association Division K Legacy Award, and the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group on Multicultural and Multiethnic Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sleeter is the creator of Critical Family History. Sleeter writes that the “theoretical basis for Critical Family History, and what can it reveal when used to interpret specific family histories? After listing themes that emerged from an analysis of my own family history, I discuss how critical family history draws on the various critical theoretical traditions.

Insights into US history from a critical analysis of my own family history:

Many of our ancestors were given privileges by elite powers as of a politics of “divide and conquer.”
Many European immigrants and their descendants built wealth on a playing field the U.S. government established for whites only.

Some European immigrant groups, especially but not exclusively the Germans, built and maintained bilingual and bicultural communities.

European immigrants learned to become white and take on white privileges.”

In a blog post for Education Week, dated February 2012, Sleeter forwards two myths created to generate outrage and admiration among most educators; 1) books were banned, and 2) MAS students achieved greater academic success than those students who did not take the classes.

David Stovall:

David Stovall has been a regular presenter at Romero’s Transformative Education Institute conferences for years. In his article, Forging community in race and class: critical race theory and the quest for social justice in education, Stovall writes, “the occupation of the socially conscious scholar is to participate in the activities that challenge hegemony at both the grassroots and intellectual levels. From this we can engage CRT in education with a concerted effort to change our present realities.”

In his article entitled, A challenge to traditional theory: Critical race theory, African-American community organizers, and education, Stovall hold that “the work of community organizers in schools highlights the necessity of viable relationships between schools and communities in the execution of viable approaches to critically analyze the world of young people while developing practical approaches to address their realities. In an attempt to challenge hegemony in public education the author offers critical race theory as a feasible construct in praxis development.”

Related article:

TUSD MAS 12th grade Government class up for review