that will benefit students from diverse cultures (Carlyle, 2008). According to Nieto (as cited in Carlyle, 2008), music teachers’ expectations are usually based on students’ gender, race, and socioeconomic background. Teachers with biased views about different ethnic groups are usually unfamiliar with the traditions of the diverse cultures (Carlyle, 2008). According to Cole (2008), an educator with high expectations believe that their students have the ability to succeed in “demanding activities” (p. 49). Teachers with high expectations ask open-ended questions, expect students to conduct research, and allow students to state their opinions during class periods (Cole, 2008). Therefore, teachers will need to become aware of cultures that will be present in their classrooms, especially in the United States because of the increasingly diverse school population. There is approximately 49 million children in the Unites States’ public schools that are foreign born or have at least one parent that is from a different country (Nieto, 2010). Because of the growing population of diverse students in public schools, teachers will need to find a music curriculum that will meet the needs of children from diverse cultures and to challenge their beliefs.
Challenging Teacher Beliefs Teachers will need to challenge their beliefs in order to create a learning environment where students from diverse cultures can succeed. According to Braud (2007), researchers and professional educators have developed university coursework that will help to challenge teachers’ beliefs about cultural diversity and to explore their identities. In this manner, teachers in the United States are able to understand the various privileges that they have because of their membership in the dominant group of society and what negative beliefs they have toward diverse cultures. Santoro and Allard (as cited in Braud, 2007) conducted a research that examined the teachers’ identity and their work with students from diverse cultures. Through the data that was collected from journals, field notes, and interviews, researchers found that some of the teachers recognized the lack of culturally diverse content in the curriculum, but they were unable to change their curriculum to meet the needs of diverse students; however, other teachers during the research were able to modify their curriculum to include various resources for diverse students because of their field experiences (Braud, 2007). By placing teachers in the community, rather than the classroom setting, researchers found that
ala breve
teachers had a better understanding of their students’ cultures (Braud, 2007). Horm (as cited in Braud, 2007) stated that field experiences can increase teachers’ awareness about various cultures that are unlike their own. By interviewing, researching information, and participating in multicultural community activities, music teachers can gain knowledge about the cultural values of students from diverse cultures.
Impact of Multicultural Education on Students’ Attitudes Researchers found that teaching from a multicultural standpoint has a “positive impact on students’ attitudes, and knowledge about, other cultures” (Volk, 1998, p. 92). According to Harmon and Jones (2005), multicultural education is a curriculum for understanding the diverse cultures of the United States. Furthermore, it is concerned with “exclusions based on race, gender, socioeconomic status, religion, primary language other than English, ability, and sexual orientation” (p. 145). Additionally, multicultural education is an approach that music teachers can utilize in their classrooms to address the needs of students from diverse cultures. However, the main goal of multicultural education is to provide “educational equity for all students” (p. 145). In this manner, students from diverse cultures will have the same educational opportunities as their peers who are members of the dominant group. For generations, individuals who are not part of the dominant group of society are seen as “culturally deficient, deprived, or disadvantaged” (p. 145). When teachers believe that the dominant culture has more value than other groups of society, they are creating a negative environment for their students, which can cause them to acquire negative beliefs about diverse cultures. According to Gonzalez (2009), the importance of utilizing children’s diverse cultures in the music curriculum is to accelerate their “social adaptation” to an unfamiliar classroom setting (p. 22). Furthermore, diverse students are more enthusiastic about learning within a classroom setting where they can interact with students who are positive about their cultural backgrounds. As an educator, utilizing musical repertoire that is familiar to diverse students’ homeland creates a positive learning environment where students are willing to participate in classroom activities and have positive attitudes about attending school in the United States.
Multicultural education
requires teachers to have knowledge about diverse cultures, positive attitudes toward
ethnic groups, and have an understanding about students’ “learning and cognitive preferences” that may be affected by educational factors such as the exclusion or absence of diverse materials in music curricula (Sinagatullin, 2003, p. 240).
Sleeter (1996) suggested that multicultural education can be utilized by music teachers to eliminate negative attitudes that can affect students’ learning experiences. Teaching from a multicultural approach to education helps students to develop a diverse perspective that will prepare them to interact with different cultures within a global environment. However, to effectively utilize a multicultural approach to education, music teachers must first identify their own biases and eliminate any negative attitudes that they discover (Martin and Loomis, 2007). For example, as a music educator, there have been situations where colleagues would tell students that they could not speak in their native language. As in this case and others, teachers mistakenly view students’ linguistic versatility as disrespectful because the teacher has no clue of what the child is saying. Teachers’ attitudes toward diversity can affect the way that a lesson is perceived by their students and possible interactions with students from diverse cultures (Martin and Loomis, 2007). There are many teachers that have no training in multicultural education, therefore, it is difficult for them to transition from a mainstream to a diverse teaching perspective. Teachers’ who are not aware of their negative attitudes toward diverse students can be trained to become positive multicultural teachers through newly developed university coursework.
Criticizing Views of Multicultural Education Teaching from a multicultural approach to education can possibly be a problem for students from diverse cultures if the teacher does not address various social problems that children of diverse cultures face on a daily basis. According to Erikson (as cited in Ullucci, 2009), multicultural education has the potential to serve the “interests of those people already privileged in society” (p. 776). This “hegemonic” assumption exists when policy makers and professional educators try to block or “undermine the legitimacy of alternative perceptions and explanations from historically subordinated groups” (Vavrus, 2002, p. 17). That is, when teachers do not talk about racism and biased viewpoints, students can understand the “silence as a form of
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