Chapter 4

The author is this article is James A. Banks, he is widely renowned as the ‘Father of Multicultural Education’ in the US. I was interested in Bank’s work so I skimmed a few of his other articles and realized that I have been exposed to his other works in classrooms where Race and Ethnicity was discussed.  The article was a piece of a journal that was said to contain ‘important theoretical and empirical insights that can be used to improve intergroup relations in schools’. The article listed various forms of research that explored racial issues in schools and strategies that could be used to address these issues.  The article referred to research done by numerous people that all pointed to the same thing: promoting interracial/ intercultural education decreases negative racial attitudes and helps students develop positive intergroup attitudes. Interracial educational attempts included plays, social studies materials, ‘jigsaw’ groups that were comprised of children of different races, and even watching Sesame Street for long periods of time.

I found myself agreeing with almost everything in this article. This article mainly presents research topics, their findings, and how these findings relate to the everyday classroom. I found this extremely approachable. While Race/Ethnicity is a topic that can be discussed forever, this article made it easy to summarize main points and present them in a no-fuss fashion. The overall theme of this article seems to be that education and experience can help children and people to assume more positive racial attitudes. Of course I strongly agree with this, I have been in school in a variety of different settings and I have found that the classrooms where a community is established, students are less likely to resort to racial stereotypes and assumptions. Classrooms like this are extremely important as the classroom environment can largely impact a student just as much as any other factor.