Content area
Full Text
If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, course and sing, in all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here. We would make our language conform to the truth of our many selves and we would make our language lead us into the quality of power that a democratic state must represent. (Jordan, 1987, p. 24)
June Jordan's words bring forth a utopian vision of a future in which issues of language, voice, truth, power, and democracy all come together in the creation of a culturally diverse democratic world. She speaks in the language of a critical multiculturalism, one in which words such as representation, many selves, power, and democracy are integral. In this article, I develop a broad understanding of the basic epistemological positions underlying the discourse of multicultural education and, in particular, multiculturalism in children's literature. Multicultural education draws on the call for cultural pluralism in the early twentieth century (Banks, 1994, p. 21). The Intergroup Education movement of post-World War II America is also part of this history. This was "a curriculum movement related to cultural and ethnic diversity that became known as intercultural education or intergroup education. Its main goals were the reduction of racial and ethnic prejudice through the introduction of factual knowledge and pedagogical techniques" (Banks, 1994, p. 24). More recent influences on today's multicultural education movement may be traced to the development of ethnic studies during the politically active late 1960s and early 1970s. Ethnic studies programs focus specifically on one ethnic group, and have been criticized for their lack of emphasis on the complexities of social life; that is, they do not go beyond the simplistic nationalisms and single-focus studies to look more closely at the complexities of social existence that include class, race, gender, ability, age, regionalism, and so forth (Banks, 1994, p. 33). Changing demographics, economics, social pressures, and the rising consciousness of women and of people with disabilities have contributed to what is now commonly known as multicultural education (Banks, 1994). However, it is important to remember that "multicultural approaches do not represent a single cohesive theory of education. Rather,
they
suggest a continuum of theories and practices that are significantly modified by their...