A Personal Experience of a Course of Multicultural Education

Every experience we encounter presents us with a chance to grow, to overcome difficulties, and expand our minds. We are the result of our life experiences, which are the foundations of personal growth and development. Any one experience will have its own effect and lasting impact on our identities, but it is the culturally diverse experiences, like those I have and will continue to encounter at Washington Technology Magnet School that will remain a part of me and my future as a multicultural educator in the years to come.

Remarkably, extraordinary experiences such as the opportunity to tutor culturally diverse children in an environment that is equally diversified, are often the experiences from which we gain the most. This growth, I believe, is the result of being forced from the restrictive comfort zones in which people reside. With this in mind, it is reasonable to say that the multicultural experiences students are exposed to in school are essential to their socialization and personal development in becoming well-informed multicultural people. At this age, students’ perspectives can still be supplemented with multicultural knowledge, their understanding and acceptance of such knowledge, still malleable. Teachers and respective parents must take this time as an opportunity to give their students the best chance of future success, by teaching them about the culturally diverse world they live in through such contexts. As advocated of multicultural education, schools must become facilitators for their students’ augmentation of an ethnically diverse understanding of the surrounding world.

Primarily, the manner in which a school conducts itself with regards to demonstrating multicultural awareness, is through the environment it establishes. Washington Tech. adequately supports an all-inclusive and diversely representative environment for their students. In other words, the school is alive with expressions of multicultural representation; around every corner is revealed another feature, another resource for the students to use. The school’s media resource center is, without a doubt, the best example of the school’s commitment to multicultural education. Within the center are authentic historical artifacts of various ethnic cultures. The purpose of providing this resource for their students is to give them additional and accurate resources for school projects, by allowing the students to check the items out for research, or to use as visual aids. I consider this resource to be a genuine approach to multicultural education on the grounds that the students are being given an opportunity to make accurate connections based on their research of the artifact. They share their conclusions of their research with their fellow classmates, thus facilitating their own multidimensional understanding of diverse cultures, as well as their classmates’.

Notwithstanding the phenomenal job Washington Tech. is doing on the part of providing their students with an abundance of quality resources for their multicultural education, there are some areas of the curricula that boarder on the side of superficial. The very first day of our tutoring lab, we were informed that parents of African American students would be giving presentations about their lives to their student’s classmates as a way of celebrating Black History Month. While I admire the school’s good intentions, I cannot help but see this as a superficial aspect of its approach to multicultural education. My reason for this conclusion being that this approach does not go past a surface level understanding of the everyday lives of African Americans, neither is it capable of achieving the eye-opening realization for which multicultural education strives. In justifying this belief, I will point out the fact that the parents are likely instructed by the school to maintain a placid discussion, especially on topics such as racism. True multicultural education does not hold back, nor does it tip-toe around the obvious issues that the United States has with discrimination, however, I see the purpose of finding balance between students participating in heated or heavily involved discussions and learning about diverse cultural characteristics.

From this class and the off-campus tutoring lab, thus far, I have learned a great deal about multicultural education and teaching in a diverse educational environment. I feel that my awareness has significantly improved, therefore heightening my intrinsic drive to dig deeper to understand the concept of culture, and my role as a multicultural educator. Above all, this experience will prove to be a great asset in my own multicultural education. Moving forward, my goal is to continue to learn from this experience, to then apply that knowledge to class assignments and my pedagogy as a future multicultural educator. In order to work towards this goal, I will completely immerse myself in the lessons presented, as well as fully submit to the process of becoming a culturally responsive educator through self-reflection and analysis. My dedication to the process of becoming a culturally responsive educator will ultimately prepare me to educate my future students. In the hopes that they will use that knowledge to effect change and be able to live successfully in this ever-changing, multifarious world.