Multicultural and anti-racist curricula work partly by portraying and discussing individuals of diverse racial or ethnic background in ways that counteract stereotypes. Students read stories, watch videos, and talk about respected citizens doctors, political leaders, celebrities, and the like who happen to be African- American, Hispanic, or of some other non-Caucasian origin. In some cases, especially at the early childhood level, students' interests and concerns are used to guide the selection and integration of diversity-related activities (Derman-Sparks, 1994).
One way of thinking about such a curriculum is that it tries to make students into “experts," even at relatively young ages, about racial and ethnic differences. Instead of thinking about diversity in superficial terms as based merely on skin color, for example students learn to see diversity as complex and multifaceted. An African-American child and a White child do not simply differ in color, for example; they are both similar and different in many ways. Hopefully the greater subtlety of their expert knowledge also reduces negative biases felt about race.
To test these possibilities, Donna Perkins and Carolyn Mebert interviewed 79 children at six preschool and after-school child care centers (2005). Some of the centers emphasized multicultural education, some emphasized multicultural education as well as an emergent curriculum, and some emphasized neither. Perkins and Mebert assessed children's knowledge and attitudes about race in several ways. For example, they displayed pictures of other children over various races on a felt board, and asked the participating children to arrange the pictures so that children were closer together if more similar and farther apart if more different. They also asked participating children to evaluate simple stories or anecdotes about three pictures, one of a white child, one of an African-American child, and one of an Asian-American child. In one of the anecdotes, for example, the researcher asked, “Some children are naughty because they draw with crayons on the walls. Which of these children (in the pictures) might do that?_ The participating child could then choose any or all of the pictured children or choose none at all.
What did Perkins and Mebert find from this study? Four ideas stood out especially clearly:
- Children indeed showed more “expertise” about race if they attended a child care center that emphasized multicultural education but only if they center also emphasized emergent curriculum. To be effective, in other words, information about human diversity had to grow out of children's personal concerns and interests. It was not enough simply to tell them about human diversity.
- Although a multicultural/emergent program was effective in sensitizing children to differences between races, it was not especially effective for sensitizing them to differences within races. When it came to differences among African-Americans, for example, the multicultural/emergent children were no more subtle or “expert” in their judgments than any other children.
- Children in the multicultural programs tended to view all children, regardless of race, in a relatively more positive light, and this tendency increased as they got older (i.e. from age 4 to 6).
- Most important of all, the program orientation did affect the children's knowledge and attitudes, even at (or perhaps because of) their young age.
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