Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of U.S. Curriculum: Communities of Color and Official Knowledge in Education

by Wayne Au, Anthony L. Brown, Dolores Calderón

Overview

Within curriculum studies, a “master narrative” has developed into a canon that is predominantly White, male, and associated with institutions of higher education. This canon has systematically neglected communities of color, all of which were engaged in their own critical conversations about the type of education that would best benefit their children. Building upon earlier work that reviewed curriculum texts, this book serves as a much-needed correction to the glaring gaps in U.S. curriculum history. Chapters focus on the curriculum discourses of African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos during what has been construed as the “founding” period of curriculum studies, reclaiming their historical legacy and recovering the multicultural history of educational foundations in the United States.

Book Features:

• Challenges the historical foundations of curriculum studies in the United States during the turn of and early decades of the 20th century.
  
• Illuminates the curriculum conversations, struggles, and contentions of communities of color.
  
• Highlights curriculum historically as a site at the intersection of colonization, White supremacy, and Americanization in the United States.
  
• Brings marginalized voices from the community into the conversation around curriculum, typically dominated by university voices.

“Fascinating, innovative, and rigorously researched, this groundbreaking book will change how we think of the field of curriculum”
—Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, Language, Literacy, and Culture, University of Massachusetts

“This is such a timely and necessary volume. Discourses around ‘multicultural education’ often fail to engage the long and significant curriculum history and hard fought efforts that made the feel viable, necessary, and intellectually powerful. This book should be on the shelf of every curriculum scholar.”
—Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner Family Distinguished Chair of Urban Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“I urge you to read and ponder this exemplary book and to build on its sense of direction.”
—William H. Schubert, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago received the 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award in Curriculum Studies from the American Educational Research Association.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807773932
Publisher:	Teachers College Press
Publication date:	08/22/2016
Series:	Multicultural Education Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	349,053
File size:	939 KB

About the Author

Wayne Au is an associate professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell and an editor for Rethinking Schools. Anthony L. Brown is an associate professor of curriculum and instruction in social studies education at the University of Texas at Austin. Dolores Calderón is an associate professor of youth, society, and justice at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword James A. Banks ix

1 The Peculiar Sensation of Curriculum History: Challenging the Canon of Curriculum Studies 1

Understanding the Context of Curricular Silence 3

The Master Narrative at the Foundation of Curriculum Studies 4

Digging in the Crates: A Guiding Metaphor to Critical Revisionist Curricular History 11

Theoretical Lenses 13

The Chapters 15

2 Education for Colonization or Education for Self-Determination? Early Struggles over Native American Curricular Sovereignty 18

Indigenous Curriculum for All of Time 19

The Advent of "Indian Education" Under the Federal Indian Policies of the United States 20

Curricular Genocide and Curricular Self-Determination: The Challenges of Native Curricular Discourse 23

Curricular Discourse During Colonial Times 25

Curricular Self-Determination in the Context of Colonization 26

Federal Off-Reservation Boarding Schools 29

Curricular Genocide and the Assault on Indian Identity 31

Rebelling Against Curricular Genocide 37

Reappropriation, Survival, and National Resistance Through Schooling 38

Indian Education and the Progressive Era of Curriculum Reform 40

Conclusion 43

3 Cultural Maintenance or "Americanization"? Transnational Curriculum and the "Problem" of Chinese American and Japanese American Education in the Early 20th Century 46

Asian America and the Focus of this Chapter 48

Historical Context for Chinese and Japanese American Curricular Discourse 49

Early Chinese American Transnational Curricular Discourse 51

Early Japanese American Transnational Curricular Discourse 65

Conclusion 77

4 Colonial Legacies: Shaping the Early Mexican American Discourse in Texas and New Mexico 80

Mexican Americans and the Focus of This Chapter 83

Colonial Origins of Mexican American Curricular Discourse 84

The Context of New Mexico 85

The Context of Texas 89

Mexican American Racial Ambiguity and the Impact on Schooling 92

From Colonization to Segregation in Schools: Two Sides of the Same Coin 96

Eugenics, IQ Testing, and the Segregation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans 102

Challenging and Resisting Segregated Schooling 103

Early Life and Educational Trajectory of George I. Sánchez 104

The Many Influences on the Work and Life of George I. Sánchez 106

Conclusion 112

5 African American Curriculum History: A Revisionist Racial Project 114

The Context of African American Curricular Revision 115

The Nadir: Theology, Science, and Curriculum 116

African American Image Making and the U.S. Curriculum 120

Children's Literature and the Curriculum of Race Making 121

Textbooks and Race Making 124

Reconstructing the "Negro": A Revisionist OntoSogical Project 128

Journal of Negro Education as Countercurricular Space 129

The Critical Appraisals of the Journal of Negro Education 129

Against Anti-Black Curriculum: Textbooks, Encyclopedias, and Children's Literature 140

Concluding Thoughts on African American Curricular History 144

6 Conclusion 146

Afterword: What We Must Know Michael Dumas 151

Notes 153

References 155

Index 169

About the Authors 180

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This is such a timely and necessary volume. Discourses around 'multicultural education' often fail to engage the long and significant curriculum history and hard fought efforts that made the field viable, necessary, and intellectually powerful. This book should be on the shelf of every curriculum scholar."
—Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner Family Distinguished Chair of Urban Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison

"In this groundbreaking book, Au, Brown, and Calderón set the record straight—or, more properly, they excavate the record from extinction—concerning the role of communities of color in resisting and co-opting White supremacist notions of curriculum while at the same time creating life-giving curricular options for their people. Fascinating, innovative, and rigorously researched, Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of U.S. Curriculum will change how we think of the field of curriculum."
—Sonia Nieto, professor emerita, Language, Literacy, and Culture College of Education, University of Massachusetts

“As detailed by the authors of this book, it becomes deeply important to make sense of how our different peoples have produced and disseminated knowledges in strikingly different material and cultural-ideological contexts and with decidedly and differently imposed relationships to land, to the nation-state, to White people, to our own bodies.”
—From the afterword by Michael J. Dumas, University of California, Berkeley

"The need for diverse multicultural understandings of curriculum is perceptively illuminated by authors who courageously reveal ignored, suppressed, marginalized, and neglected insights from people of color. This exemplary book provides a turning point, it is sure to be a landmark contribution to curriculum studies for years ahead."
—William H. Schubert, professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago

Editorial Reviews

(The authors) challenge the whitewashed master narrative of curriculum history with a text that foregrounds communities of color—namely Indigenous, Chinese American, Japanese American, Mexican American, and African American—as essential to the production of curriculum in U.S. education.”

—Democracy and Education

From the Publisher