Banks, J. (1993). The Canon Debate, Knowledge Construction, and Multicultural Education. Educational Researcher, 22(5), pp. 4-14.

• Dominating groups
  • Western traditionalists
  • Multiculturalists
  • Afrocentrism
• Polarized debate, primarily in popular press, no productive interactions
• Positionality – started with feminist movement
  • “Positionality reveals the importance of identifying the positions and frames of reference from which scholars and writers present their data, interpretations, analyses, and instruction (Anzaldúa, 1990; Ellsworth, 1989).”, (Banks, 1993, p. 5)
• Five types of knowledge
  • Personal/cultural knowledge
  • Popular knowledge
  • Mainstream academic knowledge
  • School knowledge
• The rules of power
  • “Delpit (1988) has stated that African American students are often unfamiliar with school cultural knowledge regarding power relationships. They consequently experience academic and behavioral problems because of their failure to conform to established norms, rules, and expectations. She recommends that teachers help African American students learn the rules of power in the school culture by explicitly teaching them to the students.” (Banks, 1993, p.7)
• From academia to the classroom – takes time
  • “Consequently, school knowledge is influenced most heavily by mainstream academic knowledge and popular knowledge. Transformative academic knowledge usually has little direct influence on school knowledge. It usually affects school knowledge in a significant way only after it has become a part of mainstream and popular knowledge.” (Banks, 1993, p.11)

Sleeter, C. (1996). Multicultural Education as Social Activism. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. pp. 91- 115.

• Multiculturalism as a form of dialogue and acceptance of several points of view
• Curricula often attempt to include/induce minorities into the dominant’s culture
• “Oppressors” say that all the differences have been ‘resolved’ in order to maintain status quo
• Move away from trying to integrate towards discussing and understanding the different

Eisner, E. W. (1993). Forms of understanding and the future of educational research. Educational researcher, 22(7), pp. 5-11.

• Representations of meaning
  • “Representation, as I use the term, is not the mental representation discussed in cognitive science (Shepard, 1982,1990)but, rather,the process of transforming the contents of consciousness into a public form so that they can be stabilized, inspected, edited, and shared with others.” (Eisner, 1993, p.6)
• New forms for new understandings – but how to assess these multiple forms that go beyond text and numbers?
• Must explore
  • “Working at the edge of incompetence takes courage.” (Eisner, 1993, p.10)

Gardner, H. (1999). The Disciplined Mind. New York: Penguin Books. pp. 186-201, 208-213.

• Enhance understanding by:
  • Providing powerful points of entry
    • Narrative entry points
    • Numerical entry points
    • Logical entry points
    • Existential/foundational entry points
    • Aesthetic entry points
    • “Hands-on” points of entry
    • Interpersonal points of entry
  • Offering apt analogies
    • Powerful analogies and metaphors
  • Providing multiple representations of the central or core ideas of the topic
• Issues
  • How does one orchestrate the three approaches to important ideas?
  • How does one spread this orientation to the rest of the curriculum – and with might the limitations be?
  • How does one assess the success of such an approach?
  • How might this approach be misunderstood?
  • In the end, what is the status of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and of their possible interconnections?
• Possibilites and limits
  • Mensures of success
  • Possible misunderstandings of the approach
  • Once more: the true, the beautiful, and the good