Multicultural Education Observation Paper

I still don’t entirely understand my teacher’s reaction, but I do understand that like the science teacher that Saint-Hilaire worked with my teacher had an ethnocentric view of the subject she was trying to teach. Instead of looking at the assignment (which was worded in a way that didn’t take multiculturalism into account) from the perspective of her students who were not born in the U.S. she branded those students wrong and belittled an element of their culture. If my teacher had talked to the whole class and asked for them to give examples of what each student had planned on bringing then she would have known where some of her student’s minds went when reading the assignment, or she could have taken the opportunity of the unfamiliar foods to encourage cultural exchange.
I feel that educators in primary education should take a cue from upper level university classes. Through most of my junior and senior college classes …show more content…
She identifies herself as “culturally anemic” because she and her family are from the Caribbean and when they settled in the U.S. they settled in an area where there was a large population of people from the same culture. While teaching multicultural classrooms, she realized that most of her experience was with the culture she was born in and the U.S. culture, she had little to no experience with many of the cultures her students identified with. Oddly, because she is black the schools considered her multicultural and equipped to teach all of these students, while she didn’t feel capable at all. Her feelings are understandable because there is this strange tendency in the U.S. to equate culture and race – something, that because of my education in Anthropology makes my teeth grind – this is disrespectful of the culture and does a disservice when employed in an educational setting (Saint-Hilaire, 2014; Chapman,